I realise that I touch people
I don’t have to be part
Of an ‘edgy’ organisation
I make a difference

Surrender, Surrender
To who we are
I have to get that, I am
Already doing it

I walked the woods backwards
Feeling the strength at my back
I walked it backwards twice!
And I did not fall

The simple and the explicit
The touching and being held
The simple gestures of touching
Connecting

The question is:
Is staying disconnected an option?
Because it is uncomfortable
For a few moments to connect?

I am not really ready to find anything
I am still in the inquiry
Still in a place of seeking

Why am I afraid?
Because women in my time
Were burning bras, hating men
I did not want to be part of this

Yes, it is about us being powerful
About us being out there
And touching men, touching women
Out there, in the space we want
To act upon

Have we lost something?
I know there is a deeper level
We do not have to drop it
We touched it and left, touched it and left

For me the real feminine is to
Stay in that connection all the time:
To stay present to your body and senses
To contain your attachments
To ego, or to whatever

We are just beginning to see
How much we are living in the masculine
- Not to say that we are doing a bad job -
Our track in consciousness of the masculine
Is so deep
The new track is hardly visible
And it needs all our consciousness
What is the subtle that calls my awareness?
Allowing the silence
So much noise
So many words

They will not heal us
Only when they are connected
We hardly touched what is
Connection to Source

So much to discover deep inside us
Inner wisdom, inner knowing
As Priestesses we need to bring it out
It is still there

The Feminine is about collectiveness
Holding the Whole
The only way we can nurture
Ourselves back to this
- Not just as feminists – is to come together
As women
It is needed, it is necessary
As far as I know
All Priestesses, all Witches
Have come together
In Circles to hold the Source

To get a physical experience
Of how it is to be in
Feminine Energy
We are overwhelmed with the masculine
How we work, our cities, our buildings

It is only fair to get a physical
Experience of the Feminine

We are more knowledgeable
About Zen
We need to be in experience
Be in the body
Be in the layers of the body
Then use our consciousness

Let the words come out
From the deep layers, not the minds
And the grandmothers sit around us
Three, four, five circles
Just lean back!
They hold us
Lean back!
Life is happening anyway
Just sense how it wants to be born
Which muscle you have to stretch or release
Evolution is happening anyway
Get out of the way
Rest in silence

I know that when I sit in circles like this
And this is not the first
Then when we are ready
Source vibrates out of the centre
It’s a resonance
I can move from it, speak from it, act from it
But unless I am open
And those that gather
Can contain resonance
It is lost
Until the presence is ready again

I have no doubt
That Source appears
When there are men and women
But there is a quality that emerges with women
Because Source is deeply feminine
There have been times throughout history
Delphi, Witches, 8 million women burned
Because they held power of self
They were connected to this
This was perceived as dangerous

There is a reverence to embodying
And the noise is so, it is everywhere
The static, the confusion
For me, I guess, in this moment
I am understanding the reason I came here
It is to reconnect to the brilliance that is
This energy called Source
To plug myself in again
And to witness others into that to

The other name of Source
Is Home
Not good enough to just know it exists
And feel it from time to time
We have to act from it
And invite it into places without question

I am feeling so much pain
In my body
Can we dance?

And we did!

Then where does I exist? Where is the conversation happening? In myself? In the others (too)? Or is the conversation happening in the ‘in-between-ness’; in this empty void? Which is according to Ervin Lazlo, not empty at all, but full of energy.

Are we shaping this energy between us through our conversations?

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.

We were wondering about: What is the transformative dynamic? What made us come to this point, this state of collective wisdom, this Circle Being? Many elements were named…
start from silence…
deep listening…
walk the talk…
contain the pain and destructive forces…
holding chaos…
emptying for the whole word…
start from diversity…
trust the system…
listening to Life itself…

But the real answer was to me:
A community that has the willingness and the practice to tune into the notes of grace.

This answer leaves me with no more words… almost… I’m not sure what grace really means. I only know it from catolic talk in my childhood, and still I know this answer to be true.

Our closing was an expression of this ‘being tuned’. No one spoke about it, but a certain moment everything was said, all last practical questions got an answer, and we all ‘came down’ from the chairs to the meditation cushions. Silently we gave hands and somebody started humming ‘Amazing grace’… everybody joined in… and we were right on time to go for lunch.

Looking back I have two – totally opposite – feelings about our ‘moving the edge’. One is a total fascination and awe for what happened, and the other is a feeling of ‘this is kind of normal; I didn’t do anything special.’ I do know that we moved the edge a little further than in Moving the Edge last year. We included much more the body, the movement, the dancing, the drawings; there was more a wholeness of knowing. And the collective awareness stayed much longer. The use of the systemic constellation made it possible to let a new idea emerge that I’m sure nobody ever thought about.

I want to quote here Andrew Cohens last Quote of the Week. He describes exactly what we experienced:

“…in an evolved spiritual context, the nature and purpose of human relationship would be a creative engagement at the highest level that would mutually ensure evolution and development. The quality and content of our relationships is really the ground in which the evolution of consciousness can occur. Consciousness is One, not two. It’s an infinite singular field that we are all sharing—a field that has no beginning and no end. So the evolution of consciousness is the evolution of that field itself. And it is only through the conscious cultivation of this intersubjective field, which occurs in the creative friction of intentional, awakened, focused human engagement, that consciousness evolves at the leading edge.”

I’m wondering what the next step will be in this unfolding evolution…

For me, Evolution of Consciousness is the bigger context that I’m looking from; writing on.

And what I see happening in the threads that I followed and was part of during these last years has to do with building a collective capacity, a capability of the community. Of course we could name it as collective intelligence or collective wisdom, but I want (to try) to describe something that mostly is not understood by these concepts.

What I see is that the (morphogenetic) field that defines who we are, as humans, is changing. And it seems changing at rapid speed. We, as Westerns, are all deeply identified with our separate self, our identity. And it is this separate self that is wondering how collective intelligence or collective wisdom can happen. We stand in awe; we don’t understand it and we name it magic.
Strange enough to us, the magic is not happening inside us, not inside the box we identify with, but between us! And it seems that the other separate selves can experience it too! So we are not crazy… there is magic in the middle!

When I refer here to community I mean the whole bunch of people that, in one way or another, is part of the tip of the wave; the tip of the evolutionary wave.
The part of the wave that I can see is CI related and I can see evolution happening over time and beyond particular groups or gatherings. Tim Merry named it as: “the same learning field though the geography often changes.”

I see us moving from experiencing the magic now and then up to the expectation that it will happen again, and even further to the trust and the inner knowing that it is there, right between us if we are only sensitive enough to give it time and space to experience.

This magic is only viewed as magic when looked from the separate self, within its own box of identity. When we look from the identity of interconnectedness, from the Whole, it is only natural; totally obvious that it happens, that it is there.

Experiencing this interconnectedness while being, living and communicating with others is the new capacity that I see building up. It is not a capacity of individuals only, but it is a groove in the consciousness of the collective, of humanity that becomes more and more visible for those how know it exist and which is seducing for others to follow it. I saw it building up from the conference calls with the CI-conveners, in the first Evolutionary Salon, through the video conferencing between Seattle and Belgium, and in the Hazelwood Retreat.

I see in huge capital letters the importance of showing this evolution to the people who are part of it; who are actually living this evolution. My part in the showing is writing in this blog