Seeds for a happy planet

Sounds, flowers, animals, spring…
I am almost overwhelmed…

The bees in the blossoming plum three,
the rooster from the neighbor’s house on the other side of the little valley,
seagulls far away near the shore,
an owl awake at daytime,
crows with their unique sound…

Two young dogs to feed and to take care of,
they are testing my leadership and unconditional love.
A pregnant cat who hides inside all day – mostly sleeping –
and goes out when it is dark.
Waking me up at dawn because she wants to come in and eat.

And flowers, so many!
Showing what spring is like:
the power of showing, of manifesting;
each with its own uniqueness.
My English vocabulary falls short here to describe the fragile colors,
to give you the names of the many wild flowers.

Am I fully participating in life, here?

My first day of eleven of being on my own. I am in Axladitsa, in a house with no electricity, and when you are outside there is just silence. ‘Officially’ I am here to look after two young dogs and a pregnant cat, but for me it is more like a solo retreat.
Yesterday, on the plane, I was musing over what would be my guiding question for today. The final version is this:
How do I participate fully in Life, in Love – here – with all the dimensions of my being?

Most of the morning I was tending the place. Doing little jobs no one had time for lately, taking care that new trees can’t be ruined by the young dogs etc. A certain moment my question came along: Was I fully participating in Life, in Love, here? I was surely not doing big things! Most of it would go unnoticed by many who would walk by. Still I could answer my own question with a full Yes! I was in a conscious relationship with this place and its many beings and its material stuff. I was taking care of them, loving them in a way.

I know since long this is the way I like to start when being somewhere for a longer time: walk around, seeing the place, do a little tending… that is for me arriving. Simple things, noticing… no complexity…
wrong word…
no complicatedness…
doing simple things and being aware of the relationship between it all, the complexity indeed. These simple things are worthwhile, have value, because they make that the whole, the complexity can flow and go on.

There is a quality in simplicity; there seems to be stillness in it.
The quality of simple beauty.
Fully participating seems to be simple, maybe even in matters of much greater complexity?
The next minimal elegant step.
Stillness

I have been reading Dave Pollard’s blog for a long, long time. This time I want to share something – because after all he is a good writer! He goes on naming what is required from us in these times:

“Instead of seeing conceptually I have to learn to see perceptually.

Instead of using the tools of propagandized modern language, I have to learn to use the natural tools of intuition and attention and appreciation and sensation and presence.

Instead of learning based on planning and presupposition (based on what I’ve ‘learned’ before) my learning must be based on openness to all possibility, on appreciation of emergence, and most of all on humility.

Instead of applying complicated, analytical learning methods I must apply the ways of complexity: experimentation, discovery, observation, imagination, and practice.

Instead of learning by the traditional means of separating myself from the object of my study (”the environment”, “the culture”), I must learn integrally, as a connected part of all-life-on-Earth.

I have to relearn to learn how a child learns: authentically (=Gk. being oneself).

………..
To move forward now I have to become un-civilized, wild. Agile. Authentic. Finally, fully, nobody-but-myself.

………..

To do that I must let go of everything I believe, everything I think I ‘know’, everything I fear, everything I think is appropriate (or not), expected, accepted (and acceptable, or not), everything I have unintentionally become and everything I have ‘taken on’. All that baggage. All that stuff that holds me, holds all of us, back, and holds us in place.

I have to become light.”

Beautiful.

Raw.

True.

I love it!

Yesterday, surfing on the net, following writings from friends, this is what I found: a truly, inspiring story, as much in the content as in the way it is published!

Monday morning, our last half day together…

Some had meditated, I had been blogging… As usual, we gathered in circle after breakfast. Taking the talking stone… seemingly totally different voices were heard, which were brought to one picture as someone saw that they were all answers to the same question. Without naming it, we had arrived to the third piece of M’s map: the Thou, the practice. We need the Body, the Heart, the Mind and the Soul!!! We need the complete wisdom, held together by the inquiry.

It brought us to our next question:
What needs to, longs to emerge through us, for the world?
What needs to emerge in me, for the sake of the world, for the sake of Thou?

We moved away from language again, took paper and colors…

L: I remembered the density of the World and its resistance. But these little orange things could break free. In my despair I was asking myself: What do I do with this world? Then this very big Woman appeared in my drawing, very dense herself… The World was in me. That gave hope! A very solid a woman can hold the world! She was equal to the task.
If this is the answer to my question… it heals my sense of separation!
Could this be our practice? of seeing through the eyes of the Divine? The whole world is in this decision…
Living in this paradox: I am the world, and the world is in me; the principle of One connects both if I relinguish myself. Then there is space for the field and what comes through it.
If I am not a body; then what is IT that is being expressed? The energetic is so fluid, quickly to move… this re-identification has implications for the field and for the development of the field.
The asking becomes paramount, it is going to bring a possibility… the cellular structure will be changed and influence others. If I ask to be present to who I really am, then it becomes contagious!
The drawing brought it’s own solution and it is possible that it is true: that we are capable of holding the whole universe. We are it, and it is US!
The fullness of awareness is not dependent on time or process. The experience of it brings it about.

S: My gift is around movement and beauty. The world is doing what it is doing, and I am the tree: expressing, laughing, screaming. The world loves this beauty, this manifestation. It just helps, it supports, it is not a specific solution. Everything is on the tree: love, music, conversations, tragedy, movies, friendship; presence, marriage, beaches, tears… The density, something solid is needed to hold the world.

M: Since I was a little girl I had heard the world weep and I didn’t know how to hold her. How to be in the presence of a weeping world that doesn’t overwhelm me, doesn’t consume me? My whole life was about understanding that.

I recognise that it takes conversations and a big heart. What radiates out is something that I cannot not. It has made me a little weird… but it gave me the ability to see; things unfold for me. That is why I am good at organisational development and coaching… but it is also a burden.

Now I see the bridge, the concept of collective presencing. There are the hearts and the symbols of infinity… the brown lines are the mycellium. When I leave the space, there are others holding it. The We, and what is created through the We is my path. With the We I can fall asleep at night. It is a field of presence that is being held.
The mycellium gave me a way… it gives nutrients, and the leaves falling feed the mycellium. If we don’t understand this, the crying of the world is left.
Organisations pup up as mushrooms, live, and die when needed, giving their nutrients. This is totally different than reorganisation, aquisition etc.
This helps me to see death, and my death, differently.

J: I wanted to tap into Source and my question is: How I move with that into the manifest world? This is the challenge of my life.
I was drawing many wombs, coming up like in the U process. There is continually evolving, do it over and over, and begin to interact with the manifest. It can come into structure now. It is about continually accessing Source. It is a continually birthing process.
M: The world is working with us, it doesn’t have any struggle! The world gives us words like mycellium, it is trying to find us! When something is spoken that makes sense, it starts to blossom; without having to move it uphill.
L: They become attractors in a chaos field. In an emergence they form around a next level of develop.
S: I had a welcome feeling of the space, and the arc, the fluidity, the gentleness of the surface… I want to dive in that space that you created. It maps about ‘holding space’. I can go in and do so much. The longing itself is a spiritual practice; it is the part of the heart. The longing generates creativity! The longing creates space.

R: First came this yellow and then the colors on one side, and next the colors on the other side. Then I put it aside. I had to take it back to add the red dot.
L: The emergent at the very end happened out of the combination of all colors. It doesn’t look like anything else. It takes all my attention.
M: It looks like something is planted.
S: For me the red dot is R herself. I see all colors from Spirit and Source and R steps up in the manifest world. It is time for the woman underneath to step up, just at the edge…

It felt complete.
Our circle was closing. We cleaned up the room and went to lunch.
One last group picture and we left.
Our time was rich, good, fertile, promising for the future.

Some weeks ago I told a good friend that I want to live in the energy or space or field where I can always ‘act in an instant’. This ‘acting in an instant’ is used by Otto Scharmer in his Theory U. It describes how you can be totally aligned in your self with your thinking, your emotions, and your actions and at the same time also be in harmony with your environment and third in resonance with the future that is emerging through you.

So, it is not following some instincts, or giving in to your longings. To me it is an alignment of your personality and your soul. In my experience it is a way of being totally alive. I guess it is like a bud of a flower, opening itself up more and more, step-by-step – a better word here is unfolding.
The difference between myself and the flower bud is that I get excited, and the flower is ‘just growing’? Or maybe the flower is always excited?

Why do I feel excited? Most likely because I wasn’t fully alive before. I was holding back a lot, I was silent, I didn’t take myself serious and many more ways of being ‘normal’ and ‘obedient’ instead of being fully alive.

Acting in an instant, it feels so good! The days and moments that it happens follow each other quicker and quicker. As if time collapses! There isn’t much scheduled in my calendar, which makes it possible to act in the now: to finish tasks right away; to take steps ‘one conference call at a time’, no big projects are figured out into detail, which then need to be accomplished, but a sensing of ‘right time, right space, right people’.

If time collapses, then space should collapse too. I can see glimpses of it in the ease of conference and Skype calls connecting people easily across the globe, in sending text messages from Belgium to Israel, but I am wondering,
if the time-space continuum really collapses can I disappear from here and appear right next to you???

This is a drawing I made a few weeks ago… it is on my wall, right in front of me… it somehow shows how the new will burst through the cracks of the old…

“There is a vitality, a life force, an energy, a quickening, that is translated through you into action, and because there is only one of you in all time, this expression is unique. And if you block it, it will never exist through any other medium and will be lost.”

Martha Graham