It’s so funny, so human. An army of people – a vast army of people like you – are working and dreaming and planning and creating on a new emergent – something as a way to understand and support what is struggling to emerge on the planet right now.
We don’t know what to call this aspiration or else it goes by a thousand names and we still don’t know what to call it. It’s a learning about learning, a discovery struggling into the unknown like so many explorers trying to find the north pole, or the inner pole of silence. Those explorers recognize each other in so many places, online and off. They’re a fraternity with a host of handshakes and passwords they’re making up as they go along, trying to see each other. The planet is rewiring itself as they rewire themselves into it and many others will use that circuitry. Beyond bionic body parts or wearable stuff, we’re becoming part of this emergent thing. A collective intelligence, a we-space by a thousand names is being born.
But like a baby being born it doesn’t – truly doesn’t – know what it’s getting itself into. It’s getting into the world with all its wonderful mess. It’s getting into the depths of family dysfunction as well as the heights of spiritual intelligence and luminosity. It’s getting into all the stuff in between too because all are parts of who we are. The good stuff comes out of the bad stuff like the yogis say, the flower of the lotus emerging out of the muck.
On clear days it’s clear that whatever it is we’re reaching for is equally reaching for us. We see that when we notice that it’s all part of us. The struggle to communicate all this is what we are doing with each other, though falling laughably short as we do and even though it hurts to laugh,. How brave and generous of us!
I like to think you’re brooding in the night as I am on all this. Just to mention a few of you I’ve been touched by (again) in the last few days: Khuyen Bui, “I write, therefore I get surprised,” currently being not who you’d expect in a Thai monastery when just weeks ago he was headed for Colombia, a mixture of intellectual brilliance and childlike wonder and a man already found in his willingness to encounter the present.
Ben and Alison over at Movement Weaver Community dreaming of a new weaving. Check’em out on Facebook, holding a generous space for you.
Bill Kauth, co-founder of the ManKind Project which has spawned a thousand groups of men, each of which are part of this pull to a next stage up, visioning what comes next for their movement and the movement of movements. Bill wrote a generous Forward to my book and helped me get sense of it’s place in the world. I’m looking forward to movement collaboration with Bill this year.
Will, Ryan, Vihra, Lori, Mila and many more over at Enlivening Edge Community Conversations where we host practice and learn the skills of upgrading communities and organizations.
My bi-weekly exploration of open we-space with Vihra Dincheva where we share something alive for us and invite others to see how that theme contributes to them. (It’s tomorrow at 7CET, 1PM Eastern by the way if you’d like to join in! Likely to be just a few of us . . . Click this link to join: https://zoom.us/j/
Anchal Jyoti at Zenergy School of Life in India and the work she and I are doing on using Systemic Constellations to look at national histories in multiple countries, and what prevents us from moving forward.
And you, wherever you are out there. Looking forward to seeing and connecting with you in 2018.