Combining

In 'Combining', Nora Bateson invites us into an ecology of communication where nothing stands alone, and every action sets off a chain of incalculable consequences. She challenges conventional fixes for our problems, highlighting the need to tackle issues at multiple levels, understand interdependence, and embrace ambiguity. Insisting on our collective responsibility to confront the looming threats to humanity's survival, she advocates change through interconnectedness and challenges us to rethink our perspectives on relationships, community, and the very essence of being human. A blend of intellectual inquiry, essays, emotional engagement, storytelling, poetry and graphic art, Combining is an invitation to nurture genuine connections and navigate a world brimming with "Warm Data" - the interrelationships that integrate elements of every complex system. The book calls on us to shed our linear thinking and embrace "Aphanipoiesis" - the unseen ways in which life comes together to foster vitality and propel evolution. In 'Combining', love, humor, curiosity, and vulnerability entwine amidst the trials of a world in flux. As we face the Polycrisis, Nora Bateson urges us to swerve from the traditional paths and to dismantle the illusions of fitting in. She beckons us to step into a world where learning, uncutness, and readiness converge, promising both revelation and revolution.

Table of Contents:
Acknowledgments Introduction Where Prose Stumbles To Live in Another Way The Moths Do Something Eggs Are Time Possibility Meet Not Match Hallway of Hallways Moving Edges Mama Now Juicy The Caramels of Autumn Un-Pick-Apart-Able Communing Uncut A Pineapple & Tarantulas Where Is the Edge of Me? One Thing Without Shields (The Voice of Change Is Changing) Finding a WayTone Traveling on a Paved Road Somehow Stretching Edges Self Portrait Every Hole Is a Story I Love You Without Going Blank Now What I Learned It's Fantastic Simultaneously Implicating Life Is Art Seasons Change Everything While Breaking Nothing Symmathesy Reunion I Fear A Fear Of Fear Contents Cracks and Fissures Just Sing Frost Tacit Wild What Is Submerging? Affection for Life Urgent Mud Untamed Aphanipoiesis It's a Gap Listening to the Listeners Noticing Kinky The Meadow-Verse Creature I Am a Crayon Time in Winter Is Underground Unsilent Marrow New Blank Document Yes Divided We Fall Together For You How Do You Pack? Sacred Communication An Ecology of Assholes The Cringe Rejection Two Bad Questions Something New Swerving A Letter To My Imagination Liminal Leadership Words to Be Careful With Ideas Are Their Stories Theory Is Beautiful The Reasons Salt and Iron The Zombie Caterpillar Bacteria Nocturnal Building an Arc Freak Out and Freak In The Rubric Lurking Monster What Is Sanity? Common Sense Is Sense-Making in the Commons (There Is No Script) Minutiae of the Day In the Fire Tearing and Mending Unbreakable Who-New? What Am I Not Able to Receive? Surreal Decontextualized Family Is Where We Live Meeting Double Binds in the Polycrisis Slow Truth I Want You to Want Me to Want You Silences Predatory Skills Harvest Integrity Ecology of Communication To Live It Something Has To Matter Home Cupped Hands References

About the Author :
Nora Bateson is an award-winning filmmaker, artist, international lecturer, research designer, author, as well as President of the International Bateson Institute. She is the founder and creator of Warm Data and the practices of the Warm Data Lab and People Need People Online. Nora wrote, directed, and produced the documentary, 'An Ecology of Mind', a portrait of her father, Gregory Bateson. Her work brings the fields of biology, cognition, art, anthropology, psychology, and information technology together into a study of the patterns in ecology of living systems. Her book, "Small Arcs of Larger Circles" published by Triarchy Press, UK, 2016 is a revolutionary personal approach to the study of systems and complexity. Nora and her husband, Mats Qvarfordt share a household of handicraft, music, art, and cooking.

Review :
"Nora Bateson writes like no other - her 'ecology of communication' is poetry, observation, wisdom and rage blended into a coherent narrative that sinks down deep and swirls. ... Nora takes risks to behave differently, in how she gives us pieces of herself; in how she speaks with clarity about the messiness of being on the edge of destruction, whilst embodying the prayers of our ancestors. In how she brings together that which systems of harm repetitively sever - logic and heart, ecology and psychology, trauma and oppression, science and art. Prepare to go to the places we are not supposed to go, in order to be in the spaces we are truly meant to be."; Taiwo Afuape, Clinical Psychologist and Systemic Psychotherapist, Author of Power, Resisitance and Liberation in Therapy with Survivors of Trauma; "Nora Bateson is doing with words what language has no capacity for. I fell in love with it right from the start."; Bayo Akomolafe, Author of These Wilds Beyond our Fences: Letters to My Daughter on Humanity's Search for Home, Global Senior Fellow of The Othering & Belonging Institute; "A masterwork. Please avail yourself of this heartfelt, brilliant, yet entirely accessible guide to the lived experience of complexity. Bateson shows how to engage with our personal and collective challenges less as problems to be solved than as systems calling for understanding, compassion, and harmonious engagement. Continuing the inquiries of Donna Haraway, Bruno Latour, and a couple of Batesons before her, Nora has defined a new and vital landscape in a book that will take its place alongside their best remembered works. There is still a way for us to flourish; here's how."; Douglas Rushkoff, Author of Team Human and Survival of the Richest; " ... The imagery in Nora's writing is an exquisite depiction of Living Systems. We all can grow from this brilliant work of art, poetry, stories and more woven together, magically."; Carol Sanford, Author and Podcaster, Executive Producer of The Regenerative Business Summit; "This compilation is full of delicious insights that call us to witness the awe-inspiring breadth of possibilities that emerge from our entanglement. When we loosen our grip, and dive into the web of relationships we will begin to understand the abundance of potential pathways we have before us..."; Vicki Saunders, Founder, Coralus (formerly SheEO); "Nora Bateson reminds us in this book - and in how she thinks, speaks, and inhabits this world - that our hope lives not in our cleverness, but in our vulnerability, in our wildness, in our feral creativity, and most of all among our relationships, in our animate communications with each other and all living beings. This book is an exercise in living ecologically." Rex Weyler, Co-Founder, Greenpeace International