Your NameDanilo Musso
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Cohort AssignmentGreat Britain & Ireland Hybrid In-Person/Online with Intensive in Devon, Spring-Summer 2024
1. What do you see as your primary work at this stage of your life?

I am in an orientation phase.
Finding / defining the field in which I fully wanna invest my energy and creativity for the next years.

For now that field seems to be:
Hosting and accompanying group and community process with music. With the focus on community building, and resourcing deeper vision or purpose.
Musically accompanying the processes of transitioning towards reciprocal and non-commercial forms of human togetherness.
A major inner work that I am currently doing is to stay open and feeling in a field of dullness and suppressed emotions (collectively). Cultivating the knowledge of a radically different way of living and of being human than what consumerist/ reductionist society instills and propagates. Over and over shaking of layers of a depressive worldview that says: we are not capable to leave the established structures, they are the right way of doing.

2. What role do you see as yours to play?

Capitalism is overdue. How do we want to live instead?

I see myself playing a role in building and co-creating ways of living that honor our dependence from nature. Forms of living based on the understanding of the responsibility to cherish and nurture that what we depend on. Communities based on the understanding that wellbeing of ecosystems is intrically linked to our own wellbeing.
The common ground that feeds and supports us all? And how do forms of living that celebrate and reciprocate the source look like? Be it the source of foods, soil, water, of energy, the sun, rain, of material.

I am at a point where I realized that I don't own anything. That brings me to the contemplation of how the act of temporarily passing on the materials we call our own can be an act of enhancement.
Part of that to me means banishing capitalism from the major domains of our life. From our food, water, and energy relationships, our love relationships, our own thinking. Decolonizing our own minds from consumerism. Leaving the idea that we can extract something somewhere else without harming ourselves.
Bridging the world of a more beautiful future that exists in my body and in the collective imagination, to this world. Hosting spaces that enable/ encourage humans to access this field of vision and to gain the courage to source their activity and work from that place. Building community, healing relationships, regenerating land and meaning. Being uncompromisingly present with what I do.

3. What goals or aims do you have in regard to the above?

Practically concretizing.
Meeting and learning from people who are on this path.
Finding a place/ teacher/ master where I can learn and explore into using music for accompanying group and community process.

Visiting community projects and Ecovillages, a thing I have been doing during the last months in Germany. Finding out about already existing solutions to establish noncommercial ways of living and organizing into a yet mainly capitalist society. Incorporating that knowledge. Sharing that Knowledge with other people and projects.
Leaving the necessity to finance my basic existence through money, worked for in a job that feeds destructive practices.
I feel and know from experience that setting up noncommercial nets of human togetherness, releases resources and freedom to not be existentially dependent from money. I want to experiment with such models.

4. Where do you feel your next arenas for personal growth are?

Discipline - staying with ideas, undertakings and following them to the point of realization. That specially applies to musical practice.

Reliability - I am often involved in many undertakings at the same time. That makes it often hard for me to keep track of all the points where I am needed, thus I often miss micro reliabilities. Really working on my reliability would be to work on keeping a focus on what is essential and narrowing down the number of projects/ things/ people I am engaged with.

5. And for professional growth?

preciseness, structure - I often feel unstructured in how I follow and persecute Ideas and projects. While I often have the big picture in mind, I move many areas in a parallel matter knowing they are all essential in moving towards the big goal.

I have been working on many projects in a self-chosen manner. e.g. buying an old farm and setting up a self-sustained students’ residence with a group of 50 students,
setting up a school project where we offer experiential spaces around the topic of direct democracy in schools and Universities around Germany.
several music projects,
None of these projects stem from a "professional" background. Which on the one hand I also don't see the necessity for, as I know very well why and what for those things need to be done. But sometimes I feel the longing for a more "professional" structure. A bigger arsenal of tools or best practices to have a hand to structure what I do.

I feel like meeting with experts in the field more often and getting feedback around a concrete project would really enhance my learning.

6. What have you invested in to get you where you are?

half year work experience in regenerative agriculture and gardening.
Two years of work, setting up, conceiving and financing a self-sustained residence for 50 students in Osnabrück.
organizing a regenerative food system for that place.
financing, research on how to embed noncommercial projects into capitalism.
Travels through Ukraine, Russia, China, Argentina, Albania, most of the European countries,
university study of cognitive science.
practical study of direct democracy across Germany.

7. What fields of learning and which thinkers have been important in your life?

Some of the people listed here are not really thinkers providing some great new framework, but rather ones who practically apply basic ideas. They inspire me most.

- Lukas Klapp, my Piano teacher - musical expression, Free Jazz
- Karl Marx, often digested by my father.
- Long discourses and analyses of the capitalist system.
- Ciara Moynihan - my Ex-girlfriend and ongoing love. She introduced me to the regenerative paradigm and to TRP
- Werner Küppers - Nomad and Artist devoted his life since 23 years to the realization of direct democracy in Germany.
- Friedensreich Hundertwasser
- Friedrich Nietzsche
- Charles Eisenstein
- Ursula K. Le Guin
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Experiential Fields.

- Living in Argentina for one year in a host Family
- Living in China for 3 months in a host family.
- academic studies of Cognitive Science - causing a deep disillusion about how far away academic discourse often is from addressing real world problems.
And how far the academic discourse has drifted into abstract theory. Blinding many to see very basic absurdities of our political system.
- Work in a CSA - Community supported Agriculture
- practical study of composting, the food circle, the water circle.
- Direct democracy - Joseph Beuys and the idea of society as a collective sculpture. Seeing P
politics as arts.
- political activism for the transformation of the German Car industry - Tobi Rosswog
- visiting Ecovillages and communities in Germany
- Love school - ZEGG, A community in Germany doing practical research on the influence of Capitalism and Patriarchy on love and Sexuality. And how Sexuality/ eros can be reintegrated as a central element in building and sustaining healthy communities.

8. Can you frame your philosophy or cosmology of life? What role(s) do humans play in it?

The whole earth is a living being.
We are more brains nowadays than what we used to be, when our minds were more open to the reality of the non-cognitive nature of life.
I believe that we as humans are part of a larger metabolism that exceeds our capacities to understand it, as it is providing the faculties we use for understanding. Metabolizing and being metabolized at the same time. The point is not to understand and explain it with the mind, but to enhance and celebrate it, sensually inhabit it.
I find there is higher intelligence at work in holding this all together. Restoring our relationship with that higher intelligence to me is a central act.

Date CreatedJune 19, 2024