Seeds for a happy planet

Yesterday morning I got Judy Wallace from Brussels airport, and after many months of regular Skype calls, we finally were two days together to start preparing for the gathering Women Moving the Edge. I like this kind of working with plenty of time, room for little stories to tell, time for a walk and to prepare our own food and time for silence and some meditation. For me this is a natural flow and it is the only way that Life is really honoured in all its aspects.

Fascinating to see, that if you do your preparation ‘right’ you go through the same process as what the group will go through. Especially this time, as we are not real facilitators, but more the callers and the hosts. We are holding the space for this gathering to make it happen, but we don’t know really what is going to happen as we will be ‘on the edge’ and will try to live ‘in emergence’. My shaky moment was this morning when Judy tried to go into some design of the first day and my body told me that we were ‘not there yet’. I get a lot of clues from my body about being on track or not; about something that is missing; mostly it is tuned on: do we address the real issue or not? Sharing all this, it became clear that this ‘wholeness of knowing’ is exactly one of the core elements of what women have to bring into the world!

Driving my car this afternoon to do some little shopping it suddenly dawned on me that in these large groups conversations, like World Café and Open Space, we know that ‘the whole system’ is in the room and that every voice needs to be heard; but there is another wholeness that still needs much more exploration: the whole system of how we know! This is not only by talking!

It reminded me of what I wrote more than a year ago, after participating in Evolutionary Salon 2:

Open Space as/is a talking culture.
Bringing more senses into communicating:
using dance to become present in your body
using meditation to still your mind
doing rituals to relate with ancestors and other beings
walk the land to relate to the earth
use drawing as a deeper level of accessing wisdom.

Judy brought a book with her that seems really great: Artful Leadership. Awakening the Commons of the Imagination by Michael Jones. I’ve only read ten pages, but there is a lot of stuff that I would want to highlight and it speaks about the same topic. He is writing about ‘the space between’:

“So much of a leader’s work today is not about playing the notes but listening for what’s emerging in the space between.”

And he is writing about ‘reverence for the moment’:
“When I think of this process of becoming, it seems to involve a shift of attention from goals and outcomes to means and processes – to reverence for each moment. Reverence opens the way to respect, and it is difficult to generate respect when your mind is set on a narrow set of goals.”

One more quote about ‘living in the question’:
“… an artist may ask: “Is what I am doing leading me to feeling more alive? Does it hold my interest and curiousity? Does it express beauty in a unique and original way? Does it lead me to feeling more nourished and engaged? Does it capture or express the moment in a way that feels right and true? And does it connect me in some way to a larger sense of the whole?” Such questions are answered more fully at the sensory level than the intellectual.”

Wouldn’t life be beautiful and great if we all would live in this kind of questions? With the capacity to access our sensory level as easy as our thinking? If we can move this edge in some way in and with our women’s gathering I will be happy… more to read in the next couple of days!

This entry was posted on Friday, March 2nd, 2007 at 9:51 pm and is filed under beauty, living life. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.