Weekly #5: Women Earning Less, a Ministry at the Bottom, and Us-or-the-Wolves
What We're Growing On This Week
Each week, something for your curiosity and something to inspire you to grow.
Some news
Over the summer, you’re going to get a “light Weekly”:
there will be three, instead of five, topics turned into reflection prompts; you can see this from today.
the Weekly newsletter will come out only every other week. I’ll continue to publish various pieces, either in Fiction or Creative Nonfiction, each week, as usual. You can adjust your subscription to add what emails you wish to get.
Here are this week’s highlights.
Keeping vigilent is mindful living
Equal pay for the same job is a respected principle in Germany. But the former mayor of a small village not far from here has hired a lawyer to claim amounts she would have received during her service, if only she had been employed in the same contractual conditions as the male mayors both before and after her term.
To make it clear: this is not some capitalist employer; it’s the German state, and its civil servant structures. Which, you’d expect, run by default in line with the German state policies. We often think state bureaucracy is a system that follows the same pattern automatically, without stopping to consider the individual case.
And yet, it seems that the female mayor in question was hired two salary tiers below her predecessor, and one below her successor (both males).
There’s a popular German saying: “Trusting is good, checking is better.”
Mayors’ remuneration, according to the German law, varies only according to the size of the community, or if extraordinary circumstances lead to significant variations in the size of the taxes raised. Neither of these two applies in this case.
As usual in Mentatrix, this is not about my opinion. It’s about reflection.
Principles are good, their enactment is even better. Laws, regulations, policies, public endorsement of a principle by the politics and the state structures are a great step ahead; but the individual is still to be vigilent. There’s a permanent trade-off between trust and alertness that individuals need to practice.
Mindful living, on a different level.
And you?
What are the concerns that your tribe / community / society have acknowledged and declared their will to make straight, but where you and any other individuals still need to be watching, and even take action?
Where can we draw the line between too many checks and toxic mistrust?
Mirroring and its restorative potential
A group of four enthusiastic teachers and educationalists have set up a structure that is already in action: The Education Ministry at the Bottom.
They want it to activate the swarm intelligence outside of the ministerial committees, mostly made up of academics turned policy-makers, they say on their website.
More specifically, The Ministry at the Bottom is keen to address the shortage of teachers, which is the reflection of systemic flaws; hashtag #educationreform.
Since 31st January, it’s gathered almost 1000 people and it’s had first consultations this spring. The hundreds of ideas and proposals collected have been structured in four clusters, among which teacher education reform, and teacher workload.
Their website is simple and clean: the most prominent message is the call to join.
I was drawn to this by the name: The Education Ministry at the Bottom. Here’s a mirror reflection of The Education Ministry at the Top.
Where The Ministry at the Top is feigning action, The Ministry at the Bottom is taking big strides.
The Ministry at the Top is paralysed in the face of the crisis? The Ministry at the Bottom is collecting solutions.
The Ministry at the Top is locked in its own bubble at the top? The Ministry at the Bottom has a running recruitment list at the grassroots.
The rationale of the Ministry at the Bottom is to connect: connect people into that swarm intelligence, so that it can eventually enable the Ministry at the Top to reconnect with reality.
Will the Ministry at the Top pick up its mirror reflection and reconnect?
I think problems are there to flag a connection that has been lost. We can hardly address any crisis without connecting to the reality behind it.
And you?
Is there a mirror you need to pick up to reconnect with your reflection?
A part of yourself you’re trying not to be?
A path you’re sticking with, that is not working for you?
A problem you’re trying to address by staying away from it?
Is there a bottom you need to hit, so you can surface back slowly?
From scarcity to abundance
I read the wolves are coming back to south-west Germany. A wild camera made it a certainty when it captured a pair in the forests a few weeks ago. They have settled here.
And now the tug of war begins. Farmers demanding the wolves be put down; environmentalists arguing for the animals’ right of life.
The body of a mauled deer was found in spring. It must have been the wolf!
Two months later, the DNA tests reveal it was a dog.
In a tug of war, each step that one team wins is one step that the others lose – there’s no other way, in a tug of war.
Team on the left: humans. Team on the right: nature. The more we claim for ourselves, the more damage we inflict. At least it looks like that, early twenty-first century.
A mindset of limitation and scarcity: if I give you that, I won’t have enough for myself.
Unless we’re missing something. Missing the endless abundance of chances to live and prosper, if we look carefully.
Farmers fencing their cattle in? Environmentalists finding ways to keep the wolves away from the farms?
If you’re playing tug of war, you might care to stop and think: does it really only go your way or the other’s? Maybe there’s enough for both of you?
Enough business, enough food, enough clothing, enough chances for fulfilment for both. For all of us.
My week in writing
A while ago I published a short story set in the Romania of the communist 80s. Writing and revising it got me to think again of those years. I realised what it was that harmed our societies most during those decades, beyond the terror and the oppression.
So I wrote a short piece (under 200 words) about this long-term trauma:
The Time We Came in Twos
I’m working on Mindfulness Myth #6, which will be about the dictum “listen to your heart” — what is the heart? is the heart only feelings, and the mind only cold intellect? and what is the true voice we’re always urged to follow?
That’s it for this week. Thanks for staying with me!