Trees of Paris
Author: Hank Kune Issue: 2023-11-01
Trees of Paris
Photos and text by Hank Kune
Last week I was in Paris to participate in the WFSF XXV World Conference “Exploring Liminalities - Creating Spaces for Unlimited Futures” [https://wfsf2023paris.org/].
At the Conference, I also helped create a reflective conversation about ‘living experiences of democracy in 2073’.
A thoughtful takeaway is that 50 year from now, there will be democracies (each suited to its time and place, and people). Not one size fits all. Maybe not like today at all.
According to Wikipedia [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liminality#cite_note-:0-2], “in anthropology liminality (from Latin līmen ‘a threshold’) is the quality of ambiguity or disorientation that occurs in the middle stage of a rite of passage, when participants no longer hold their pre-ritual status but have not yet begun the transition . . . During a rite’s liminal stage, participants ‘stand at the threshold’ between their previous way of structuring their identity, time, or community, and a new way.”
A lot like the world today.
At the Conference, we were invited to explore liminality as a ‘space between’ – between the known and the unknown, the inside and outside, that which has been and that which may be. Shared beliefs, possible paths, passages and impasses. Possible promising outcomes, and those less promising. A space between two eras, two ways of thinking, two purposes.
More than two, of course. Just like possible futures, emerging democracies.
Places for exploring opposites, apposites, and possibilities. Metaphors for reflection before moving forward, prepared or unprepared. As one of the introductory speakers told us, “You can’t feel unprepared for something that doesn’t exist yet”.
It was autumn in Paris, Paris in the rain.
Beyond the conference walls, we also looked for some of the liminal spaces of Paris.
And everywhere, we saw trees.
They set the frame for how we see.
We noticed how their branches interweave, like stories leaf to leaf.
We found them on shopping streets, and in parks and galleries. In the quiet passages, and the charming impasses.
A tree may lose its leaves, not knowing what the future brings. Or perhaps knowing in ways we don’t yet know. Perhaps they do learn again each autumn about the power of changing.
We can learn too:
from the falling leaves the importance of letting go, from the trees the lessons of perseverance and resolve, and learning through the seasons that life always begins again.*[Freely adopted from ‘Leben Lernen,’ by Ute Latendorf:** https://keb.global/leben-lernen-von-ute-latendorf/***
We understood there is beauty in the world, now at this threshold, in its impasse and its rites of passage. We found all this and more, among the trees of Paris.
[Image not included in the current archive. Images may be included in the future.]
[Image not included in the current archive. Images may be included in the future.]
[Image not included in the current archive. Images may be included in the future.]
[Image not included in the current archive. Images may be included in the future.]
Related:
- Hank Kune (author)
- 2023 (year)
- Topics: Events and Gatherings, Tools and Platforms, Metamodern and Integral Approaches