Seeds for a happy planet

The dialogue went deep and again we were invited to join Eve-Marie in her longing to use color and express our images of the collective She or the feminine power. Judy: “I remember sensing that this emergent feminine energy carries this power of the self-generating fire storm, a powerful image for me. I recall my drawing was much bolder than any before. The emergent feminine energy holds all the dynamic tension of the ‘gentle fierceness’ that came through in the first Women Moving the Edge. It holds Wholeness of Knowing, of Being, of Doing.”

I let the drawings speak for themselves:

Like in the first Women Moving the Edge by lunchtime it was time for us, facilitators, to lean back and give the leadership to the whole group. Meantime it was pouring rain outside, so much so that we couldn’t even see the trees on the other side of the grass field.

And what did we do? If I would give a bullet list of all the different activities you could never understand the depth of what happened. We had some silence, there was conversation, we did a presencing-movement exercise; we danced ‘the Temple dance’; we sat in circle again. There was the sound of the big crystal bowl, we made sound and music together…

But I can’t hardly describe what happened in us and in between us. First it was named as a not-knowing, and later also as a not-talking… but then, what is it?
We seem to listen, to tune into, to sense…
into what?
the delicate, the subtle, the fine, the intangible…

It seems to be possible to access – in our bodies – the unformed, the unmanifest…
the sound of silence…

silence…

collective silence…

suddenly it was there:

a connected silence;

a tangible in-between space;

a sacred space;

a space full of possibilities;

a generative space…

Grace had arrived! The We is pregnant!
And you know what? Rain stopped, the mist was gone, we could see again the trees and the whole environment!

The magic here continued. When we got up this morning there was fog all around. The hills on the other side of the valley were not visible anymore. The simple question of What is present now? brought a very rich conversation around the theme of What is feminine power?

The metaphor of the mycelium, what we normally think of as the roots of the mushrooms, is actually the plant in itself and the mushrooms are its ‘flowers’. In my drawing of our conversation I noted a lot of the words that make up our mycelium: gentleness, safety, holding, enlivening, equality, talking stone, the earth, the collective… Stories about shame, fear, rage and sadness… these personal stories who pop up from the collective, just like the mushrooms…

The conversation shifted to: purpose, power, presence. What does it mean to stand in my feminine power, and not to retreat or not to attack? What is feminine power? Is ‘feminine warriorship’ the right word? Can we let go of the old women’s story? Are we present in and to ourselves, or are we ‘over there’… From where do we engage with the others or the world?

Sooooo rich!!! The words here can hardly convey the energy, the presence, the learning, the laughter and so much more! Time to have a break and eat some wonderful nuts.

Judy and I both felt that this were enough words. We invited Eve-Marie to guide us in an experiment with drawing, using colors. That was basically it: use colors and let them take over, drop your mind and your judgments, come to the still point in your body, just go with the colors and the movement they evoke. “It is just paper.” “What would a four year old do now?” These were some of the questions that seduced us to a no-mind space, the space of creativity. I loved to come to this point where it was just the fun of let my hand move with the colors. Being present with the colors. Good stuff to come to an open mind!

In the sharing there was someone who recalled to invitation at the beginning of the drawing exercise to drop yourself into the still-point within… this still point is so full of freedom; it carries all potential! My sense is that it has to do a lot with the power of women…

Received this link today, with the following description:

Quite an amazing sight!
“There is an excellent dance, called the Thousand-Hand Guanyin. Considering the tight coordination required, their accomplishment is nothing short of amazing, even if they were not all deaf. Yes, you read correctly. All 21 of the dancers are complete deaf-mutes. Relying only on signals from trainers at the four corners of the stage, these extraordinary dancers deliver a visual spectacle that is at once intricate and stirring. Its first major international debut was in Athens at the closing ceremonies for the 2004 Paralympics. It had long been in the repertoire of the China Disabled People’s Performing Art Troupe and had traveled to more than 40 countries. Its lead dancer is 29-year-old Tai Lihua, who has a BA from The Hubei Fine Arts Institute. The video was recorded in Beijing during the Spring Festival celebrations this year. Enjoy this presentation which is 6 minutes in duration.”

Thanks to Joel and Michelle Levey for the link!

Sitting outside in my garden on this summerlike Spring evening, the fragrance of a special apple three fills my nose. How abundant nature is! The three is full, full of uncountable little white flowers, spreading its smell with no holding back.

I just finished reading the book Artful Leadership by Michael Jones. The subtitle is: Awakening the Commons of the Imagination. The first chapter is called: A Walk in the Park; The Personal and Social Artistry of Leadership. It says:

In times of uncertainty
we need to look to the spaces between
for order and coherence -
to gifts, beauty, grace, voice and wholeness -
what may be called the commons of the imagination.
Awakening to the presence of the commons
in both the personal and the public imagination
is our new art form.
It is also the leader’s new work.

For me it is a book of great inspiration. I made notes on almost every page! You have to read if you are more or less interested in Leadership for the future. It holds equal value as the book Presence, by Otto Scharmer and his colleagues. Michael, being a musician, and knowing a lot about writers, poets etc. can give beautiful words, poems and quotes to what will be essential qualities for all of us, and leaders in particular.I enjoyed reading it, as much as enjoying the smell and the view of my neighbour’s apple three.

Thanks Chris Corrigan for this link! I love it!

Would love to see this happen in my train tomorrow…

We started our third day again with some music, movement and dancing: to become present in our bodies, to be able to receive precious information from that source of wisdom and knowing. Actually the start was earlier. We all arrived more or less on the scheduled time, some were lightning the candles, clearing away stuff from yesterday that we didn’t need anymore; putting the flipcharts on the wall etc. Only then we were invited in to the dance and at the end we let the words in of Sheila Chandra:

Women, I’m calling you!
Yourr wisdom can not be lost,
your spirit can not be broken!
Your wisdom is in dreams.

(more…)

3pm now. Again I’m sitting here in the same spot. The storm has calmed down, and the place here is filled with noices and women’s voices. Almost everybody arrived, and most of them are enjoying a little rest before we actually begin.

Just before lunch three of us were – basically – adding some beauty in the room we will be working in. The photo’s are uploading on Flickr, so you will be able to see them in a couple of minutes. After our arranging of the place, we – the three of us that were here – sat some time in silence in the circle.

Silence and beauty, some of the elements that make ‘the wholeness of knowing’… more to come

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!