Sacred Intent

Chanting the mantras of our hearts to please the deity…

I’m in with both feet these days. Not up to my neck, or over my head, but fully underwater, swimming with my eyes open, monitoring the rhythms of expansion and contraction, leaning in to wonder and creativity, present and awake and filled with gratitude.

Justice is calling out for the ritual abundance of care, courage in the face of adversity, and that fullness of spirit that knows no bounds to its generosity.

As you may know, I and friends are launching a formal initiative, Open Field Awakening, focused beyond philanthropy to a deeper necessary biophilia. If you’re in the San Diego area, please join us on April 6 for our ritual celebration of this initiation.

Meanwhile, among other things I am working on formalizing, or perhaps better said, conceiving (in the spirit of giving birth) those declarative documents that will support the guidance of our action and make our being clear to those who would synergize with this effort.

Near at hand is the organizational Statement of Intent. While this is a work in progress, I wanted to share this first reflective pass as I feel it says something worth expressing, if perhaps not exactly representing some formal place in the constructive mandala of a recognized legal entity… We shall see.

And so…

Open Field Awakening stands as a prayer and focus of intent for the well-being of all; for the flourishing of planet Earth in service to life, love, and light in all dimensions.

Today we find our feet grounded in the pain of broken-hearted beings, distressed ecosystem, and fragile futures. In the same breath, our hearts hold fully the deeper timeless truths of beauty, vast majesty, and boundless fields of possibility.

In our time of this awesome turning, we are all fragmented and wounded human beings standing shoulder to shoulder in fragmented and wounded societies with life in all its forms on a fragmented and wounded world. We look to the complex of existential challenges facing so many species, humanity not least among them, and we see through the surface features of this polycrisis to the metacrisis laying both beyond, throughout, and a part of this transformational being.

It is relatively easy and often necessary to engage ourselves in tackling those surface features of the poly crisis. Addressing injustice, climate change, sense making confusion, poverties of body and spirit, indeed any number of issues call justly out for our attention, and we respond. Alone, however, this is not sufficient to our time.

While some struggle, seemingly endlessly, against tides of acute conditions, still others lean hopefully towards quantum improvements in technology or sociopolitical and enterprise organization. Neither of these alone will meet the demands of the day; neither, we propose, will both of them together, except…

While the polycrisis represents a technical complex of systems in dysfunction, the metacrisis is not so technical as it is spiritual and grounded in the very essence of what it means to be alive.

It is a challenge of a new and inspiring order to re-envision ourselves in the sacred wheel of life. Not simply living to tackle the endless problems of a voracious adolescence seeking dominion over profound mystery, but rather striving to take our place in the sacred gift and duty of witnessing the majesty and making way for the endless stream of creative manifest revelation.

This challenge is not a colonial endeavor. It is not the work of a righteous few bringing truths to the ignorant masses. This is a subtler form, as we say, a prayer and focus of intent, of seeing the dignified splendor/sovereignty of all beings and their communities, of finding the ways to love systemically and collectively all of life. As parents to a child, though not in any way paternalistic, we seek to co-create, collaborate, and nurture an open field of inherent goodness and a thriving harmony in the world at large.

The work of Open Field Awakening occurs as dialogic, even conversational process. Through this ongoing river of engagement we uncover questions that invite lighthearted, though diligent and creative inquiry. From these inquiry, we draw and nurture cocreative prototypes from which we learn, share, and iterate. All of this arises, most particularly, in service to the realization of increasing harmony between the countless bejeweled expressions of human being, culture, and collaboration.