Remember Fiona Raby saying something like “It’s not to change the world in our image, but to change ourselves in the world’s image” in her Protofarm 2050 presentation?

This morning, following the Dragonflies’ meeting under the tree, I opted for “A Dash of Irreverent Thought-play in Peeling the Climate Change Onion” presented by Toni Bold. As one of the audience members quipped, climate change is like an onion because it makes you cry.

First, Toni asked all of us to "take off our crowns". When you're full of info, and you think you know something, you put a pourous veil around yourself, she explained. Her approach sought to go beyond the “ists” – economist, scientist, environmentalist, socialist, activist, psychologist, denialist, spiritualist, conformist. And, instead of getting stuck on these different lenses and divulging into a relativist post-modernism, she asked us all to become aware of our own, personal, unmediated experience of climate change.

Whether one can say that there are more thunderstorms in Cape Town is an unmediated awareness is debatable – I mean, they’re WE(A)THER conversations. Nonetheless, I played along, accessing the strongest personal association I have of climate change – the melting North Pole, which I got from an experiential piece of investigative journalism in a recent issue of Intelligent Life. I mean, just pause... Imagine the North Pole melting, imagine there being open ocean across the axis of the earth – like in Pirates of the Caribbean when they travel over the edge of the earth to rescue Jack Sparrow from Davey’s Locker. The seawater, like tears washing up the coasts of so-called civilisation, bathing bikinis in flash floods. It’s simultaneously the most powerful image of absolute sadness that I can muster, while being utterly absurd and unimaginable.

So we all lay down in a circle with toes together like a daisy, each meditating off into our personal evocation. Chomped by ants, and aligned with the greater roundness of the earth. We all floated up like a rubber duck in the bath, slowly, bobbing, as the earth’s surface filled with water. There was a sense of infinite transformation, as though nothing is an end without the beginning of another.

I felt it. I guess that was what Peter Willis was saying – feel it, don’t think it. But I must admit, I’m struggling with that. It feels as though people here exist in a different dimension – what comes out of their mouths... Sometimes it puts me in awe, other times I wonder if they’re playing Exquisite Corpse with their sentences and other times I think they’re sniggering behind my back. They think philosophy is dreams, I think it’s analysis. They think infinite resources are a state of mind, I think it’s a manifestation of economic values to turn to zero when in abundance.

Giving me perspective, was Toni’s quote: “Don’t take a stance, be in the dance.”

But what keeps me in awe... This weird level of spongy consciousness that everyone else seems to have is “designing” the “self”. This is how you crop, kern, 3d-model, prototype and craft... The self. It is, as this morning’s second speaker, Kiki Theo said “alchemy”.

Kiki’s talk was entitled “Green Money: Planting the Seeds of Wealth”. I loved it initially, she completely sucked me in when she said “Money is regarded as this dark dirty thing that we secretly desire”. And was utterly motivational with her conviction that Step 1 is “Belief” (imagine six impossible things before breakfast everyday – thanks Alice) and Step 2 is  “Contain” (define the parameters in absolute specifics). But, she weakened her stance as she went along – initially it really was about attracting money, but soon wealth come to represent freedom, contentedness and a whole host of other things. Then it’s just another one of those conversations.

Nonetheless, she had a real clincher at the end from Ben Okri – “Accept no limitation; we have the power of solar systems in our minds”.