Shared Journals and Fourth Person Knowing Across Cultures and Between Generations. A Guide for Movement Building With Joy,Mutual Respect and Lasting Impact

Abstract

This paper focuses on an eight-week discussion about the formation of an intergenerational and intercultural Advisory Group for Poetry for Planet. Poetry for Planet is a global, youth-led, creative climate change movement rooted in poetry, aimed at giving voice to poets from the Global South and other indigenous voices. We report our experience of using a shared journal to capture the shadow board members’ thoughts and feelings during the eight-weeks. We observed shifts of perception that transcended our original assumptions, and we describe some potential causal mechanisms. These findings are important for similar, dispersed, intergenerational and intercultural global movements. We offer a guide devised across cultures and between generations for ‘movement building’ with joy, mutual respect and lasting impact. We explore the appearance of ‘the voice of the journal’, a creaturely, compassionate extra dimension to our writing rising from under the surface of our own words. The phenomena is similar to what Otto Scharmer and Eva Pomeroy (2024) describes as ‘fourth person knowing’ and we suggest two potential extensions of this idea: ‘fourth person healing’ and ‘fourth person climate consciousness’. Finally, we outline practical steps for setting up and running a shared journal.