Upstream - Art of Hosting with Maria Scordialos

Episode Date: October 1, 2016

Maria Scordialos is a Greek activist, co-initiator of The Art of Hosting, and founder of the Living Wholeness Institute, which runs the Axladitsa retreat and workshop center. We spoke about the Greek debt crisis, her experience living in Athens before, during, and after the referendum, gentrification and inequality, and her experiences working with governments. This episode of Upstream was made possible with support from listeners like you. Upstream is a labor of love — we couldn't keep this project going without the generosity of our listeners and fans. Please consider chipping in a one-time or recurring donation at www.upstreampodcast.org/support If your organization wants to sponsor one of our upcoming documentaries, we have a number of sponsorship packages available. Find out more at upstreampodcast.org/sponsorship For more from Upstream, visit www.upstreampodcast.org and follow us on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, and Bluesky. You can also subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to your favorite podcasts.

You're listening to an Upstream interview from Athens, Greece, with Maria Skordialis, co-founder of the Living in Wholeness Institute and co-initiator of The Art of Hosting. Welcome. Hello. Thank you. Maria, let's just start with, can you describe yourself a little bit and your background? Sure. I am Greek. Both my parents were Greek, but I am what you call a Greek from the diaspora, in that both my parents were born in Egypt, in Ismailia, which is on the Suez Canal. And my grandfather was born in Asia Minor, which

of course is present day Turkey. So I have very deep Hellenic roots, but I have grown up all over the world because my father worked with the United Nations. So I was born in Congo and lived there, and then lived in Guinea, in Nepal, in India, New York City, and then 18 years in the United Kingdom. And I only came to live in Greece in 2007 when I bought this beautiful place called Akhleditsa of Atakia and co-stewarded it and began to create it as a living and learning center in nature. it as a living and learning center in nature. So my background, as I said, is my soul and my heart is very Greek and very Hellenic. But my American accent shows that I've had this international upbringing. So in Greek, we say, I am cosmopolitis. I am cosmopolitan. I am a citizen of the world. So you can put me anywhere in the world and I'll feel at

home. And it's been a very important part of my life because from a very young age, I was always in multicultural environments, which allowed me to open, I think, to a part of myself and to the other where one accepts everything that is there. And that allows you to come in deeper relationship with what is rather than what you think should be, or what you expect. So that's just a little bit about me. And you said you moved to Greece in 2007. So you've been here during a really interesting time. What has kind of your sense been of moving here and living here for the past, is that? 10 years. 10 years. Almost, nine years. Well, in 2007, when I arrived, we were still in what I call the bubble years. We were still in that period of unsustainable boom.

We had come into the Euro from 2000. And with the Euro, what arrived in Greece was a completely different financial system with the euro bank and the banks behind it that were giving very, very low interest loans, which created the bubble that we were affluent. And so I came in at the period right at the end of that, when people were getting mortgages, When people were getting mortgages, getting car loans, getting holiday loans, and there was this fake euphoria in the country, hyper-consumerism in what people were buying and what they were doing, I actually found the first couple of years that I was here difficult to relate to people because I felt there was an inauthenticity to the way they were relating to their lives, very much through money and very much through the notion of consuming, which is not in the depth of the roots of our culture. We're actually very, very sustainable people. So I found it quite difficult when I first came. And of course, there were banks that were trying

to seduce us to get loans and to develop Akhladitsa and to build hotels and to do and it's very full of nature at Akhladitsa. And thankfully, the seduction didn't work. And by 2009-10, it's when the crack started to happen, which of course happened with the international monetary organizations that tell a country whether they're actually credit worthy or whether they're in debt, which is what happened to Greece. Overnight, Moody, one of those companies, marked us down from being an A-credit country to being a D-debt country. And so the story began to unravel that we were actually in a country that was facing national bankruptcy, and that we were going to go under, basically.

And the story that is told in Europe, and by the Troika, as we called them, which is the International Monetary Fund, the IMF, the European Union, and the European Bank, the Central European Bank, which is what we call the Troika, because there's the three of them. The story that was told, and is still being told, is that Europe came to save Greece from bankruptcy. As a Greek citizen, I always felt that that story is a little bit fake. Of course, we were a country that was always on the brink of bankruptcy. We should never have gone into the euro, but they needed the quorum, a certain number of countries to be able to carry a unitary monetary fund. And so they included countries like Greece, like Spain,

like Portugal, which they never should have, according to mainstream economics, because we were always at a debt level that was beyond. But the books were cooked to make it look like we weren't. So you had to have a percentage of debt that was below 12. We were always at 16 or 17 or 18%. So there's a narrative that is not true. And so the narrative of Europe coming to save Greece with the bailout deals, as a Greek citizen, felt fake to me. And what we now have are studies that are coming out that are showing that something like 95% of the debt relief that is given to Greece by the partners, as they're now called,

goes into the banks. It doesn't go into the Greek state. So when you think of it from a different point of view, for me, it's a great way for the saving of the banking system to have happened, which was after the crash of 2008, which was not just isolated in the United States. It became worldwide. And Greece was a very, very good case in which to create that kind of debt. space in which to create that kind of debt. So Greece, we went into what is now known as the crisis. And we've been living in that since 2010. And what I found with coming at that period is that I actually saw an authenticity beginning to emerge in us, a humanity of starting to help one another, a neighborliness, starting to actually watch out what is happening, even going down for the peaceful protests, which were always turned into violent ones, primarily by our police, not by the citizens, became acts of solidarity and acts of connection or reconnection,

which we had lost with the bubble years of when I kind of entered here. So for me, these past five, six years, they're very difficult. People live in a lot of financial hardship, psychological hardship as well, lot of financial hardship, psychological hardship as well, primarily because there is very little opportunity to express oneself's creativity through work, because we're in full depression now. However, on the flip side of that, it's been a time of immense reemergence of our humanity. And that's what I have been living in Greece. I don't know if you know what the word crisis means in Greek. It means crisis in Greek. Crisis, when you do your PhD, you go for your viva. We call it a crisis, which it really means is you take a stand.

You decide where your stake is. You decide where your stand is or your position is. So actually, for me, that's the kind of crisis we're having here. As citizens, we have to decide where we stand. Do we stand with the old system that's dying? Or do we stand with a new system that we have to birth and be the midwives for? It's amazing to birth and be your own midwife. So it's actually a very sacred time in our country. So looking from the outside, from being in the US and the UK and reading the news, I haven't seen a lot of news about Greece more recently. There was a lot of news around the referendum in 2014, 2015, and now not so much. And I recently went into the Keramikos area and saw a lot of graffiti. There's a lot of graffiti in general. And the graffiti is

really showing a lot of frustration and anger, a lot of anarchist symbols, a lot of swastikas that are crossed off. One read, fire to the shops, love in the parks. Another said, stay in Europe, and then Europe was crossed off, and then slaves was written in, so it said stay as slaves. But I asked about it because there were also some events, some dates, and I was told they were of the past. They were not this year. So I'm wondering, you know, has there been kind of like a petering off or a resting of energy? What's kind of the sentiment? Because I know that there was a lot of kind of excitement around Syriza, and now it seems like hands are tied.

What's kind of your sense around what's going on now as opposed to the recent past? What's kind of your sense around what's going on now as opposed to the recent past? It's not easy to read the field at the moment because you don't really know if there's a game of deception being played. It's actually a strategy. It's a very strong strategy. Or if there's being a sellout. So what I think has happened is there certainly was an incredible sense of taking our lives in our hands when we voted in Syriza. And what that has to do is not so much about a left government or to the center government to the right. It has more to do with a feeling that we were voting in a party that had never been in power, because Greece has politics of these kind of dynasty families that are in

particular political parties. And so Syriza was a party that kind of came from the far left and then built up its momentum over the recent years. old Tsipras, was almost like a symbol of us wanting to move into a new era of breaking away from these elite families that had been kind of running our country. And so there was a symbol of hope that we were taking our lives in our own hands. of hope that we were taking our lives in our own hands. Of course, as 2015 progressed, you did see that initial negotiation process that Tsipras got into, and also our rather flamboyant finance minister, Varoufakis, who really caught the medias because, you know, he wore t-shirts and he rode his motorbike to parliament, and he was extremely outspoken. The guy was not a politician. He just spoke what was there.

And most of the other European finance ministers thought he was a bozo because they couldn't really understand where he was coming from. So there was this initial negotiation period. And the stance of CEDESO was very much, we don't want another bailout. We don't want all these guys coming into our ministries and running our country. We want our sovereignty back. And of course, that initial first phase of negotiations led to the referendum because the European partners or the Eurogroup were in no way going to negotiate with the far left government. What I think the success of that period was,

is that it blew the lid on the neoliberalism that the European Union is run by. capitalism that the European Union is run by. And so I think the negotiation was pretty successful, not in us not getting a bailout, but revealing it so clearly. What then happened was that Tsipras was put in the corner and he called the referendum. I think the guy is a very, very clever politician. I really do. And that's why I'm saying I don't know if he's playing a game of deception with all of them, kind of going. You know, sometimes to shift a system, you have to go with the flow until you find the right moment that you can turn. So I don't know if that's what he's doing or whether he's just been bought out or sold. You know, he's sold us out. It's

very difficult to know. But with the referendum, there was this very loud 60% no. Referendum was not a clear-cut thing. You have to understand that. And your graffiti is very interesting because the referendum, the yes vote of the referendum was very much taken by those in our society that fear leaving Europe. Of course, the referendum was not about leaving Europe. The referendum was about do we say yes to a bailout or no to a bailout. But of course, there was in the Syriza party a crack. was in the Syriza party a crack. There were people, there was a faction in the Syriza party that actually wanted to take us out of Europe.

And Tsipras did not want that, right? So that was going behind the scenes. As citizens, we couldn't see that. But on the yes vote side, there was a very loud cry from a part of the society that were like, we don't want to leave Europe, we're European. And so there's a, and this is something that if you don't know, our modern day history, Greek modern day history, the, what you found is that it was created as a state by the superpowers of the time, England, France, Germany. And there's a part of us Greeks that have never really felt

independent. We're a pawn for these superpowers. And even what we're living now is we're just living the next chapter of that so what is happening now i feel is that there has been a huge disappointment in the ziriza government in that there's a feeling that we got a worse bailout after the referendum. Although there are rumors that Tsipras was really put under difficulty by the European partners. And he came back and he spoke that I had like two evils in front of me. One is that we leave Europe because basically that's what they were going to do. And we're not ready to leave Europe. We don't have a currency. We would have huge poverty, more than we realized. We'd have no meds. We'd have nothing. We would go, like, are we ready

to go into that level of poverty? And the second was accept this bailout. And I chose the bailout because I don't think I could have taken my country to that. How authentic he was, one never knows. But what I feel is that there's a massive disappointment. I think there's a huge anti-Sidiza campaign from the other parties that is very much supported externally as well. And I feel people are like in a depression. It's an individual and a societal depression. And I'm not just talking about an economic depression, where they're really trying to understand what the hell is going on. Because the measures that are being brought in, which is the demands for the debt,

are shifting a lot of the fundamentals of our system, our national insurance system, our tax system, the selling of most of our public commons. And I think people are trying to figure out, the ones that voted for Syriza, who are we? And the ones that didn't vote for Syriza, how the hell are we going to get back to economic growth? So I don't think that things aren't at a standstill, but people are disoriented. Things aren't at a standstill, but people are disoriented. And we're not so much in the news because we do have a government line now that is going with the European partners.

So there's no need for the media to create fear in other countries. Do you see what I mean? There's a feeling that Greece's government has come into line. My big question is Syriza and is Mr. Tsipras just playing a game of deception with the partners? That actually he's just playing along with them to give them what they need to create that sense of safety. But actually there's something else behind the scenes. Difficult to know. And you mentioned Yanis Varoufakis, and he left his position, and now he's written a

new book around creating a solidarity movement across Europe. So I'm wondering, could that be something behind the scene? Because that was a really interesting thing to watch from afar, that he was leaving. So what's your take on the work that he's doing now? Well, that was always his line. That was always Varoufakis' line. And that was why the negotiation at the first part of their term was so funny to watch. Because they were going in and they were talking about, can we talk about a new Europe?

Can we talk about a new way of relating to each other? And the European partners were like, how are you going to meet our measures? So they were like not talking the same language at all. So Vardofayki was always talking about a solidarity economy. He was also talking about solidarity across Europe. And he was always talking about a systemic shift. But, you know, turkeys don't vote for Christmas. So, of course, our European partners were not going to vote for that kind of a,

because they would lose so much or so much vested interest in keeping the current kind of neoliberalistic system that's quite well- well rooted now in place. I don't know. I mean, he's been very discredited here. I have to say that not amongst everybody, but unfortunately in Greece, and he left quite elegantly. I have to say the way he left the government, it was not like that he had fought with Tsipras or whatever. And yes, that could be part of what is being kind of looked at. Is there actually a period of transition where we will leave the euro and we will go to a new currency, but this was like the period of trying to set that up. Or is it that we're just coming

in line? It's really hard to know. I have no idea what relationship Vodafike has with our government now. Yeah. Just talking to people here in Athens, I've talked to a lot of people who, yeah, will share the kind of frustration, confusion, disorientation. And then when I ask, how can you get involved politically? Or what's your voice? They say, I don't have one. And, you know, we mentioned graffiti earlier, it feels like that's a way for people to have a voice. So I'm wondering, are people just having kind of conversations in homes? Or are there still protests? Or are there still public engagement? What's kind of the space for voice and participation these days? So this is a really big part of our society.

We've never had public engagement. I just want to say that. So I lived in the United Kingdom 18 years. I've been working in public engagement and participation for the past 20 years. It is so unknown here. I have not lived in a country where people don't have a voice as much as here. I have to say that. And the way people show their voice is to protest, is to get out on the streets. So you still have quite a unionized society that people kind of find their voice through their

unions and through their kind of coalitions, which is very trade-based. It's very based on the trade or your employment area. That is one way that they've always found their voice. And it's not, it's just a lot of individual sound. It's not a collective voice. It's interesting because the past six years, what I felt is that a new collectivism is coming through this. So we don't have public engagement. We now have a government that talks public engagement, but they don't know how to do it. So they're consulting in

a very old fashioned way. People think consultation is lobbying, which is ridiculous. But that's again, because they're unionized. And they think if I could have a voice to the government, but they're not talking like this, they're not talking horizontally with each other, they're still talking up and down. So it's a very, very hierarchical and a voiceless society. And one of the things you have to know about us is, is that our scale of collectivism is very small. It's the family or it's the village. It's not the national. It's a, it's a very, I don't know if that comes from our city States or what it comes from, but it's a very, very small scale. So I do think that the graffiti is a voice. It is a voice and it's

younger generations that are going out doing a lot of tagging. The tagging is a way that I feel people are just saying, I'm still here. You know, I don't know how else to show you that I'm here, but I'm here. The other way that I think people are, I think it's small conversations. It's low-key conversations that are happening. Recently, there have been protests again, and that's because of the new measures that are being voted in through our parliament, the changes of laws that are going on around our national insurance and the rest. But for me, and that's the work I'm kind of involved in in Greece at the moment, is how do we create more structured, by more structured I do not mean structuring the

outcome of the voice, but how do you create the structures for just enough order for people's many different voices to come through so that the collective intelligence can gather. And that's what I'm very preoccupied with. How do we create those? Because I do feel the current government would invite them, but you don't know what you don't know. So they don't know how to invite that.

know what you don't know. So they don't know how to invite that. And most of the population doesn't know how to participate in that way. So it's as citizens, we have to start doing it in small scale ways. So you mentioned two things there that the government doesn't know how to hold these spaces. And then also people don't know how to participate and engage. So what are some examples where this does work? Or what are some examples of the structures that could work? And then also, what are some of the things that people can do to start participating? Right. So I really began to work with participation in the United Kingdom.

I worked in local government from 1993 until 2001, directly in local government. And then after 2001, I set up my own company, and I did a lot of consulting work with local government. And I would say that I would really use what I witnessed and what I participated in in the United Kingdom as an example of how you could structure proper kind of public engagement. In 1997, Blair was voted in, and that was kind of like the Citi-Za moment. Here, there was a really new breath of fresh air in the United Kingdom after a very long period of the conservatives being in power.

And why it was such a huge breath of fresh air is that because the language changed. The conservatives used to talk about competitive compulsory tendering. The Blair government, New Labor, were talking about partnerships and strategic alliances. They started to talk about community planning. started to talk about community planning. They started to talk about local government acting as community leaders, working with those horizontal issues that no one organization can solve on its own. Things like crime, opportunities for young people, employment, etc. Those are cross-cutting issues. So for me, what New Labor did in its first term,

when there was really a promise, and then unfortunately the Iraq War came along, and that completely fell to bits. And we saw the Blair government take a shift into this other way. What they did was they shifted through a statutory change the role of local government. And they switched them from just being service providers. You know, we collect your bins. We keep your roads clean. We keep your roads safe, et cetera. They shifted their role to being the community leaders.

What that meant was you, local government, have to facilitate. You have to host. You have to bring public, private, and nonprofit organizations together to look at those wicked issues, they called them, the cross-cutting issues, that you guys need to work in partnership to start to come up with new innovative solutions. So for me, that was a wonderful structural change that was needed because it required us, as I was working in local government, to start to practice partnership working. So we had to develop strategic partnerships with the public, private, and nonprofit sectors. We also were told under that act that you have to go out and publicly engage your people to find out what's important for the quality of their lives.

So yes, previously in the United Kingdom, there was consultation, but it was the old fashion consultation of local government officers writing a report, sending it out with a questionnaire, and people, you know, like only those people that they were in contact with, the people that had not been reached, not having any voice. With community planning, which was the law that required us to go out and publicly engage, we were told, go out and experiment. Try out new ways of bringing the community together, which is exactly what we did. So we held large-scale events with different ages, different social strata, people coming

together around their neighborhoods or their villages or their towns, and talking not about the local council coming and saying, here's our strategy. What do you think? We actually went with open questions. And we would actually say, what are the big issues right now? What are some of the stories from the past that you don't want to throw away, that you appreciate, that you want to make sure are continued into the next generations? What's your vision for the next 15, 20 years for your town or your village? And what we found was that firstly, the first few events we had, I had the same feeling. People don't know how to participate

because all they did was complain. But slowly with working with people, people started to shift from complaining to feeling that sense of, oh, I can take part. They're really asking me to take part. So it's natural for humans to participate. It is a natural part of any ecology to participate in where you live. You just have to be given the opportunity. So I give that as an example because I believe in this country, we need to also create the kind of structures where the local authorities, because they're the closest to the citizens, are invited and offered ways in which to start really talking to their citizens. And that that is used for the way people start to engage and participate in how their towns, their neighborhoods, their villages are developed, not by others, but by themselves in partnership with their local governments. So that's an example where I've seen it really, really work. And I saw a huge shift in local authorities in the United Kingdom and the way they started to participate with the services that they were offering. They really opened up. They really changed

their practices. It took time. It took a five to six year period of time. But public engagement now is extremely rooted in the United Kingdom. It's very, very well rooted. It wasn't. In 93, when I got there, it didn't exist. So that to me is a legacy of that government that kind of continues. So it's really changing the how of how the government works. Absolutely. And the role of the government. So to give an example of Froome, which you actually have familiarity with, Froome is dealing with an issue of gentrification right now.

It has a population that traditionally in the past had been involved in industry. Those jobs are no longer there. And then you have people moving in from London, from Bath, from other places who've sold their homes, who can buy homes because properties are more affordable. And you have this divide is what some people have called it to me, between the have and the have nots. So I'm wondering, how would you recommend to start to engage people in these issues? Firstly, it's highly sensitive and it's highly personal to even speak in language of have and have not. And to me,

this is part of what has become and has been created from the 80s onwards with the neoliberalistic movement and the hyper capitalism that kind of emerged in our world, which is also connected to greater and greater deregulation of the financial system, is that this gentrification is a narrative or a myth, a modern day myth that we are creating for ourselves as an aspiration of what we should all become. And in my life, I have lived with very affluent people and I have lived and seen and witnessed and been part of severe poverty. And from a child living in India, being in the slums in India, I used to always find it, I mean, this is really young age,

seven years old, I could remember these thought forms going through my mind, is why do people that we call poor seem to be more happy and connected to their lives than the rich kids that I went to school with who were taking drugs because they didn't have a family or they had so much family pressure to be something that they were not. So I was always confused at this paradox. So the first thing that I would have to say is that if I was to be invited to have those kinds of conversations, I would want to reframe the haves and have-nots into what do we really see as life? What do we value about life?

What do we really ask to leave for our children and for their children as our legacy, I would want to have a more root system conversation about living a good life and leaving a good earth for the next generations. Because I think that would allow us to go to a more meaningful conversation than a conversation about who has and who hasn't and what we're trying to aspire. Because to me, that just goes into that modern day myth and narrative of trying to live in prettiness, which is, I remember Froome was not pretty. Not all of Froome was pretty. When I first went there and when I left, it was much prettier. But it also felt better.

I didn't see the diversity I saw before. I didn't see the edginess. A pearl is created by the grit. So we need the diversity. So I feel that what we need to come back into is some more fundamental conversations or basic conversations about what does life really mean to us? And what are the things that make us as human beings feel alive and feel fulfilled? So that when we die, because that's the only certainty,

we kind of can feel that we are leaving something for those that come, those that follow, that those that will take forward what we have brought in. And I feel that somehow we've lost touching that fundament. And that's why our earth is in danger. And actually, we as a human species are in danger, we are facing our own suicide, the most. And so I feel that we have to be very careful how much the gentrification has actually entered into our own selves. Because when we talk about haves and have-nots, to me, that's a gentrified perspective immediately. As opposed to, have I met my neighbor? Do I know who you are? Do I know your story? As opposed to me saying, oh, you've come from London, or oh, you were born in Froome. I feel the conversation

needs to be more about how we humans want to live and work and basically save ourselves from our own extinction that we're facing right now. And how our language and our framing affects how we think and how we think about these issues. Absolutely. And it's very important that we don't also think that it's all out there. It's an inner process. These things have come into us. The gentrification is in me. And I need to check it as well and be careful how I live my daily life,

really simply how I live my daily life, how I speak to the person I pass on the road or don't, how I help somebody or not. Those things to me are inner workings that we have to be very careful that we don't think that because I use ecological products, because I'm aware of one, two, three things, I'm better than. This is also gentrification. So we need to be very awake to our own inner selves and what we have taken in and how that has polluted our own systems. And to clean it ourselves.

So what's the balance then between inner work and inner change and also systems change? Like how do you kind of navigate that? Sure. So now you bring me into my living wholeness work. This is very, very core to what living wholeness is about. With my two partners, Sarah Whiteley and Vanessa Reed, we've been really action researching through the way we live our own lives, by the way,

what it means to work with systemic transformation. And what we have found is that, and it's nothing new. I mean, Mahatma Skagandi spoke about it, be the change that you want to see in the world. We cannot have systemic transformation unless we systemically transform ourselves. Now the balance point, we have found two balance points. We call it our root map. One balance point is between the individual and the collective. If you go too much into the individual transformation, you lose touch with the collective. And you don't transform what's going on inside you for the greater good. If you go to collective, you think you're the savior and you've got all the answers and you don't take time to look and check in within yourself.

So you need to hold the balance between the individual and the collective. The other balance point is between the visible. The other balance point is between the visible, what is in form and material and we can see and we can touch and feel and taste, and the invisible. There is a huge, huge source of information that in our modern world we have disconnected ourselves from. The earth energy, old traditional forms of medicine, traditional ways in which we related with spirit as well as with neighbors and community. These are all invisible realms that can give us a lot of information. And many, many indigenous people, thank God for them, have preserved these practices and have kept them

in their bundles. And thankfully, slowly, slowly, we're seeing in Canada with the First Nation movement, we're seeing it in the United States as well. You're seeing it in Australia. This new voice of the ancient voice coming through the indigenous people, but not only the indigenous people and the First Nation people, but also those of us that went to those lands, speaking those, that invisible that has kind of been pushed away with reason and logic and research and science and all of that. So we hold these balance points, to come back to your question, in working with the living wholeness practice, because the practice is about holding the balance point between the visible invisible and the individual and the collective so you don't

just focus on one element and not the other but systemic transformation will not happen by us just using our heads it will not happen with us just structurally changing our governments. We've done that. We've had revolutions. And then the next government comes in and we do the same thing because we haven't changed ourselves. We haven't allowed the change that's going on out there to touch us or the change that's coming from inside us to touch the outside. And so with what we're researching and what we're doing through our lives is we're continuously looking at those balance points that I just mentioned. But for us, systemic transformation from a living wholeness perspective is it cannot

happen if the inner and the outer does not reflect each other and doesn't speak to each other and doesn't come into communion with each other. Otherwise, we're just kind of living like paper people, cutouts, you know. So you mentioned you were involved in politics in the UK. I'm wondering, have you gotten engaged with systemic transformation here in Athens, like working with the political movement or with groups here? Yes, very much so. I'm not attracted to the political system as it exists, yet I am a highly political person. So I use the word political from the point of view of being a

citizen and being a politis, which is citizen in Greek. And I engage through that through my citizen agency rather than through a political party or a political system. However, it seems to be my fate in life that somehow politicians and political parties and people like that invite me to do work. So yes, and the way that I've done it is through a different doorway, because I don't work with a partisan political frame. The doorway that I've always worked through is participation. And as one of the co-initiators of the Art of Hosting, which is now kind of an international network of practitioners that are working with a combination of different participatory methodologies. Why? Because we believe, and a basic assumption of the Art of Hosting is,

that many of the solutions that we have worked no longer work because things have shifted. They've become more complex, and we need new solutions and new ways of living and working. And how do we do that? We need to bring the diversity of our perspectives together, even in the conflict, and transform that into newness, into innovation, into new ways of living and working that will kind of allow us to stay on Earth.

So the art of hosting, the way that I have participated and brought this work in, is because people intuitively know that we need to engage with one another, especially in the situation now in Greece. And because some of the boundaries and barriers are naturally breaking, there is an interest in participation. And so the way that I've done it is with other local partners here in Greece, we have set up what we call the Art of Hosting Athens. And we have been running trainings for the past four years, where people come and learn the methodologies. And through learning the methodologies, we've been invited to work with the Green Party. We've worked

with the liberals of Greece as well. We've worked with anarchist groups that don't have a structure, but they're still wanting to work on things that are either, that have been squatting a building or doing things like that. I've worked with the city of Athens and the mayor of Athens as well, who is very interested in community engagement in a very authentic way. So yes, I've been bringing this work here. And it's very interesting, because here in Greece, people are very hierarchical and very, very academic. And I don't bring either of those things. I just bring my practice and my authentic self.

And it's a disarming thing for people because they can hear the authenticity, but they can't place it in the box. But you don't come from this university or you don't, you're not the great professor of that or you don't come from this university, or you don't, you're not the great professor of that, or you don't work for this institution. But that's what I've been working with here. I've also worked with the European Union here as well, because I work with the, I've been working with the European Commission since 2009 as an external consultant to them, bringing participation. And we've trained over 2000 people, 2000 European Commission staff in working with participation. So I've also done some work here in Greece through them. So the

European level, not just the national level, as well. But it's very, I don't have like some great big strategy that is going to, you know, move the system or whatever, because I don't believe systemic transformation happens like that. We will never know where systemic transformation comes from. You just have to experiment, prototype, experiment, prototype, and learn. Learn as fast as you can and just keep doing it, you know, and something will shift something and we'll never know what it was. Because that's complexity. You know, so if we try to track it and we try to, you know, we'll only know it afterwards. And then, of course, we'll have to tell the story to the next generations, which is what our ancestors did for us.

I don't think the ancient Greeks knew fully what they were doing. But the stories were held and told. And so we hold a root system back there. Do you know what I mean? We're not as conscious as we all think we are. We become conscious afterwards when we've seen something and we've learned something, but that's the beauty of life. We can't control it. And so the system will shift. It is shifting, but it's shifting in so many little ways that none of us will be able to say how it happened or where it happened. We'll just piece it together and we'll tell the story in years to come. What do you think is the story right now that's emerging? What we're living, I think we're living this worldwide, by the way. This is not just Greece. But somehow the limelight is shunned on this country.

And I do believe that energetically, from a geomancy point of view, the eastern Mediterranean region, from Egypt up to Greece, this Aegean eastern Mediterranean, you know, so much of the cradle of civilizations have come from here. And I do believe that with what is going on right now in the world is that we are living a simultaneous dying and birthing at exactly the same moment. And it's extremely difficult to track it all because the system that we have based our thinking on, the capitalistic system, the mechanistic system,

is dying. And it's dying because we're living beyond the limits of our Earth. It's so simple for me. You know, it's like we cannot continuously grow. We don't have five planets. We don't have 300 planets. We have one planet. And we can't go beyond the limits of the Earth

because that's what we live on, no matter how technologically advanced we are. So for me, there is this natural rebalancing that's happening. And it's hard. It's hard. It's really hard to see the dying, the literal dying that's happening, and also the letting go of the behavioral habits that we have. And then there's this new birthing that's coming, which is not yet clear what that system is. We just have moments of it. We call it the solidarity economy, or we just call it solidarity, or we call it

the Occupy movement. But those are glimpses. Those are just glimpses. It's not yet the system. They're like just momentary flashes. So we get a feeling of it, an embodied feeling of it, flashes. So we get a feeling of it, an embodied feeling of it. And then we can continue with the dying and the birthing at the same time. Like I said before, I feel it's a really sacred time in our world. And I still don't know as an individual person if we will make it. I do believe that as human beings, we can learn very quickly when the imperative is there. But we're still too comfortable. In the there. But we're still too comfortable. In the Western world, we're still too comfortable. And that's why I don't mind and I quite like being one that doesn't have so much.

Because it makes me learn. And I've had to shift my whole relationship with money since coming to live in Greece. And so I call on the disturbance and the discomfort. The crisis. Yeah, the crisis. Because that is what will give us the imperative to learn. Otherwise, we might just be Easter Island, you know? Like, we deplete it. And then slowly, slowly, as a population, we die. And it will be so sad to have an earth without humans. It will be so sad. Because I do believe we reflect back the beauty of life. And that's the reconnection that we need to do is to go back to the beauty of life how can the solidarity economy um is it in some way helping to make things a little bit

more comfortable do you see it as potentially you know moving things around and helping each other out but potentially preventing us from the systemic change? Or do you see the solidarity economy as us becoming or practicing the new economy? I think the solidarity economy is a transition. It's a transitionary period. It creates the level of comfort you need in order to really face the hardship, to decompress, you know, from the super comfort we had before we go to where we're going to go. So you need something in between. And what the solidarity economy for me basically does at its very, very fundamental level is it helps us to relate to each other as humans again. It brings us back into our humanity as a starter. But it is not the systemic change

for me. It really is not the systemic change. It just reminds us that without the loans and without the big salaries, we can still survive. Because we can survive by exchanging. We can survive by helping one another. And then we all have skills. We all have something to contribute and gift to one another. But it is not the new system. No. But it gives us strength. You know, in Greek, we say, it gives us the courage to take the next step of the journey into the more unknown that we don't yet haven't seen. So we've talked about internal transition or internal change, the solidarity economy helping us build a relationship. What advice or what would you offer people who are interested in that

systemic change? Because sometimes people can do the internal change people can participate in the solidarity economy but when it comes to system change they feel like i'm out of loss well my first thing would be to say you are the system so it's not like very far it's here we are the system for everything i am the banking system you know that I feel does harm to me. So the first thing is to look, and it depends what kind of a person you are. Some of us look inside and some of us look outside. Okay. It doesn't matter where you look, but what I would say is witness, witness what life is asking you to contribute to life, not to yourself or to your family, but to life. And when I think of systemic on a very large, I just think of life. I don't use the word systemic. I use the word life. So who am I? What is my journey on earth at this time?

what is my journey on earth at this time and what is calling me to contribute and how can I do that with as much beauty as I can. We then become artists and those are very important things in my life right now. Art, nature, and dialogue. But you have to have the dialogue to understand the calling. Whether the dialogue comes from you and me talking, and you say something to me, and I go, oh, what's that? And then I follow it. That's fine. The dialogue might be with myself on a canoe in a beautiful lake, right? Or it might be staring at the face canoe in a beautiful lake, right? Or it might be staring at the face of a wild animal that I chance upon. But what is it that's calling us in life to contribute so that more life can come?

That to me is the way one can systemically transform. If you can't hear life speaking to you and you cannot hear that calling, then you have to do everything possible to quiet things so you can have that dialogue. Because without that, we're lost humans. We're not connected to ourselves. We're not connected to ourselves. We're not connected to what we can offer. And we're not connected to a life that can be left for the future generations. Thank you for your time and for your wisdom today.

Thank you for your questions. You've been listening to an Upstream interview with Maria Scordialis. For more episodes and interviews, please visit upstreampodcast.org. Snow keeps rising in the hallways Flowers blooming from our bones that break To the morning we run To shoreline Calling us to speak of sin Waves under the earth and the rocks Casting ghostly shadows Tall like night Casting ghostly shadows, tall like nylons

As we set fire to the sea As we set fire to the sea Snowgates rising in the hallways Flowers blooming from our boats that break Into the morning we run To the shoreline