The Impossible Conversation
In The Impossible Conversation, Dean Walker recounts his transformational journey from his first contact with the shocking data and projections of Abrupt Climate Change – to the mind blowing awareness of the full scope of the global problems and predicaments we all must face.
As we engage in The Impossible Conversation we begin to grapple with questions that really matter: “How did we get ourselves and our planet-home into these predicaments?” and “What are the inner skills and capacities that are called for as we confront our global problems and predicaments?” and “How does my life change as I witness the collapse of our environmental and human systems?” and “How can we come together to regain our long lost sense of agency in life?” and “What are the qualities of presence and relationship I can bring to my family, community, workplace, local environment, as I stand with new purpose in the face of our predicaments.?”
The Impossible Conversation is not another feel-good guide to our quick return to a thriving economy and business as usual. It is a sober look at how our business as usual paradigm is, in fact, what has driven us to the brink. The Impossible Conversation is deeply committed to keeping it real as we explore together, how to contact the immense power of human beings who are willing to intentionally break open their hearts and profoundly reconnect with their deeper selves, the people around them, and the miraculous web of life on this glorious planet-home, Earth.
Carolyn Baker:
In The Impossible Conversation, Dean Walker takes the reader’s hand
and compassionately asks them to join him in exploring our global
crises. He leads us past the realm of climate deniers, cynical corporate
And government players and disempowered citizens – to a far more
sober, clear and empowered place where we might reclaim our agency,
regain access to truth in this Post-Truth world and stand for what
Truly matters.
Walker does this by reminding us how we got into these predicaments
In the first place. Yes, Walker includes the vetted facts and figures he calls
The Sober Data of our predicament, but the main thrust and strength of
The Impossible Conversation is that we carry those data and projections
into our hearts and discover how to keep our hearts open even when we
consider the most challenging aspects of our present and near future.
In The Impossible Conversation we are invited to intimately reconnect:
with our own inner wisdom, with the miracle that is every other human
and with our magnificent, magnanimous Earth. I urge you to take this book
into your heart and allow it to become part of your blood and bones.
Carolyn Baker. PhD., author of Collapsing Consciously: Transformative
Truths for Turbulent Times and Dark Gold: The Human Shadow and the
Global Crisis.
Craig K. Comstock, Huffington Post.
In Walker’s book, what a relief to see the situation defined not as a “problem” that can be “solved,” but as a “predicament” that we must live with. The kinds of “reconnection” described by Walker (reconnection with: deeper self, others, and Earth) would be attractive even if the situation were normal. Given our situation, they are necessary.
Some of the climate scientists quoted by Walker suggest it’s too late to prevent disaster. From now on, we can only grieve what we have inadvertently done: grieve, and live intensely; behave well as we witness the gathering storm. Very few people want to accept this and prefer to persist as if our way of life could continue. Besides, as someone always says just before the attempted conversation dribbles away, “what can one person do?”
Walker has some answers, which go less to preventing disaster, than to living with the knowledge of what’s happening. Walker praises reconnection with the deeper self, with other people, and with nature.
The (workshop and coaching) project announced by Walker and Carolyn Baker (in The Impossible Conversation) is based on the practice of psychotherapy, a knowledge of history, and experience in organizational consulting. For readers, their books offer some of the very best ideas for the enlargement of a community that can make the “conversation” more possible.