Over the past month, my reflections on this platform have tended towards an effort to refine an understanding of principled direction, substrate context of our collective engagement, and who am I within that.
In that same time, my context otherwise has been one of relatively stable health (no small good fortune), a reasonable constancy of care, and a rich landscape of dialogic and conversational engagements seeking to uncover vital paths forward in the spirit of meaningful service and economic viability.
The energy in this time (leading to the autumnal equinox), I have experienced as snowballing to the point, for all intents and purposes, of finding myself full-time employed in the work of the world most meaningful to me. (Still working out how I might pay for that. ;-)
I have been interviewed for a podcast series intended to facilitate us becoming better equipped to understand the texture of our experience in the world together.
I have been working with a creative cooperative in Colorado to support their coherence of a new order of structure designed to allow them to increase their long-term viability and integrity and impact in bringing generative art to the world.
I have encountered and nurtured new friendships around the world with actively engaged, creative and impactful individuals working formally in the fields of health and other industry, while pursuing practical engagements towards the necessary underlying global transformations at hand.
I have had the privilege of serving as counselor and guide to people seeking to more deeply integrate their experience in their lives and the world today towards the pursuit of more skillful and more wise ways of being.
I have entered into dialogue with agents of a large national philanthropic foundation to explore how better to contextualize their efforts in the transformative evolutionary forces at play in this near arc of humanity’s evolution towards realizing it’s nascent maturity as a global species.
I have been introduced to ongoing work designed to evoke the intelligence of, compassion for, and service to the wisest and longest lived of our brothers and sisters in this human endeavor; a work synergized with many of my own intuitive creative longings.
Last in this list, but certainly not least, I have begun to convene others in formal conversation in reverent and ceremonial ways intended to generate some actionable intelligence about possible scopes of work designed to leverage, at the global systems transformation level, while maintaining fidelity to the most fundamental principles of earthen harmony.
Meanwhile, I have crept and navigated through the public benefits labyrinth in efforts to reduce the daily financial demands in my ongoing search for monetary support to maintain the levels of health and care necessary to pursue all of these previous efforts. That going is slow and sometimes backward, but gradually, there is great potential emerging towards the possibility of cutting my costs (medically speaking) nearly in half! Slow and uncertain going though it may be.
All of this simply to report that as I rose this Sunday morning from a deep and dream filled slumber, I rose uneasily with an enormous sense of accountability and responsibility for work that must needs doing, in contrast to a strength of health and financial runway seeming to loom as apparent and potential obstacle. Sleep was a bit disrupted last evening, and bodily I’ve had a sense of vulnerable wellness, while looking ahead to a financial runway just a few weeks intact.
It was in this state that I woke to a sunny San Diego autumnal day in paradise.
Often times I can go days without the figurative stepping into the light of outdoors; there is always plenty to do at my desk, and less so simply sitting in the chair, albeit with wheels, under the bear and beautiful sky. As a result of this, I am often acutely aware when the weather, company, and moment conspires to make possible an outing into the neighborhood under trees and in the community of public passers by.
So it was today that with more than a day’s work to do on my plate, I decided nonetheless to allow the exhale of productivity to turn in and breathe deep a few moments on the ground in the world. Nothing extravagant, just a simple stroll down the block, a cappuccino from the local vendor, and philosophical chat with Zack on the nature of a meaningful enlightenment and the many paths we might take to find it. 90 minutes of playing hooky from the pretends of existential necessity.
Arriving home we spent a few moments taking in a beautiful swallowtail neighbor drinking nectar from the bush on the walk, and appraising what duties might lie ahead in attending to the meeting of flourishing florals and city sidewalks… Conclusions to be determined.
With everything on my plate feeling urgent and important, to say nothing of demanding of more time than I could imagine finding on the calendar today, it seemed a good time to stop and take a few more moments for the nourishment provided in meditation.
To do list:
· Further the follow-up on the first round and generative actions towards the second engagement in the nascent inquiry we are calling Audacity Dialogues. (Due ASAP)
· Continue to organize, structure, and follow through on the institutional invitation to develop a wise, intelligent, and coherent journey through the Re-visioning of a Culture of Health. (Due Tuesday)
· Staying true to my commitment and intention, draft an article, generate imagery, and publish this weekend’s installment of regular offerings on the Life as Art substack channel. (Due today)
While I enjoy the great good fortune of having more than a small handful of interlocutors who share my passion and interest for wise and targeted service in this Time Between Worlds, I know of few, if any, whose continuity, coherence, clarity, comprehensive nature, and sincerity of message resonates most deeply with my own felt sense of direction as Daniel Schmachtenberger. To be sure, I do not mean to say that our perspectives are one and the same, indeed the structure and weave of his mind is truly beautiful to me and seems to fit and fill many of the spaces in my own generative inquiry.
Which is all just to say that when finally this afternoon I returned to my desk with full intent to roll up my sleeves and get into that mode of productivity that churns concrete artifacts out the other end, I found myself compelled to continue the repose of this post equinox moment and instead be further nourished by an interview I sensed would be material to the attentions intended to not only the day’s tasks, but to all of those snowballing energies mentioned above.
I was not wrong.
I have caught some wind over the last month of Stockholm Impact Week underway. With all that was on my plate, it has largely flown under the radar except simply to know its presence in the field of the moment.
Yesterday, Daniel’s closing notes on the subject came across my desk and has been looming in my browser, whispering its demands for my attention while other work reasonably held the priority of my eyes and hands.
The presentation lasted less than an hour, though I took a little more than two to get through it. With all the stopping to take notes, to share it on the various platforms of communal connection at compelling inflection points, and really synergize and plot potential generative responses, I noticed with some impression, the sense of feeling as though I had been listening not for hours, but for days.
As you will see by the reading, I did return to that to do list to keep my self-commitment to offer some weekly artifact to the world at large. I was also able to nudge forward explorations of the Audacity Dialogue (hopefully more to share on that soon.) Not least of all, I feel good about the enrichment provided today on the subject of re-envisioning a culture of health, if no outward material gain, then certainly at least an interior enrichment of the real possibilities in that regard going forward.
The demands of our time are truly and profoundly existential. Planetary boundaries have been crossed, boundaries that compel real and as likely as not, unavoidable and significant suffering. What responses we have, seem often fractured and inadequate to the task at hand. For those of us who can even embrace the sheer monument of that demand, questions of how to respond and skillfulness and wisdom in such response often seem to slow our capacity beyond the measured window of what might have been timely even decades ago.
As has been my experience since just months prior to the dawn of our global pandemic, my own balance of health in reciprocitive socioeconomic terms, mirrors in its own immediacy the very structures of uncertainty in our world at large.
As Daniel says of the species, we have reached a point of the end of humanity, either in its expression as a viable and thriving member of the biosphere, or at the very least, in its expression as being defined by a set of social economic parameters which most of us have mistaken now for actual laws of nature.
He wisely and importantly asks, “what would it take to turn the entire arc of humanity?” This mirrors my own Audacious question: without violating the principles of a profound ecological integrity (a wisdom held in trust by many of our indigenous brethren), how much can I personally do to leverage change at the global scale of our world?
The next three weeks, and time beyond that no doubt, will tell if, and if so how, I might manage that mirror of reciprocitive, synergistic integrity in the economics of my own life, I pray that I will find a way, but more so, I pray that it will serve as a useful mirror towards the if and how we might accomplish that together in the service of all the magnificent life potential yet to come on this beautiful blue spaceship to which we have been born.