Wow. I began this post many weeks ago, and haven't had time to revisit it till now. Too much converging to fill my days to overflowing.
(Which brings to mind a movie I was meaning to see, called Short Cut to Nirvana --do watch the trailer!--about the mammoth Kumbh Mela festival, a convergence of 70 million people at the place where the Ganges and Yamuna rivers converge, every 12 years. Well, and, that's just it: big convergence, not quite enough time to get to everything I've been meaning to get to, and every single thought and conversation reminding me of something or someone interesting and/or important.)
Alternately, I have felt for the past few months as if I am carrying around, or wearing, a big heap of threads and fuzzy strings. They're multicolored, bright and dark, a little tangled where their unraveled edges catch, and weaving themselves into strange patterns and textures when I'm not watching. Lately I've gotten to toss some of them into the center of various circles of comrades, colleagues & friends, and then I always find myself coming home with even more than I started with!
Some of the streams/threads:
Business: dissolving one and creating another one, all at the same time; the dozens (maybe hundreds!) of practical and logistical details (because we're also moving our practice location), as well as all the karmic and energetic ties we leave, and the new ones we generate.
Teaching, learning: & their relationship to hosting and inviting, to opening space for passion and responsibility in the midst of a very linear, accreditation-shaped curriculum; the notion of integral education; the "teacher formation" work originated by Parker Palmer.
Opening space for giving, receiving, flourishing (and teaching and learning...) (link to be invented soon) and the Open Space Practices that Michael & Chris are languaging & polishing
Torah: learning to read Hebrew, along with the mystical interpretations of each letter, experiencing more and more Rabbi Ted's intersection of mystical (the path of perceiving underlying radical inclusiveness) and prophetic (the call to social justice mandated by that perception) Judaism and the community that has grown, and continues to grow, around that intersection.
Medicine: working with the area of the "determinants of health"--those conditions that allow for optimal health to be realized (or not)-- because it's only partially useful to alleviate/palliate someone's anxiety or exhaustion or insomnia or neck pain when it springs from their reaction to the current state of our culture and of the world (and sometimes it's actually suppressive to do that.) Even with "natural" methods rather than anti-depressants. How, instead, to vitalize that reaction to support participation in healing of society & culture, and ecological healing?
And these are some of the books I'm reading, which somehow also seem to be converging (though I have no idea how, yet...)
Field Notes on the Compassionate Life: A Search of the Soul of Kindness by Marc Ian Barasch
Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking by Malcolm Gladwell
A Hidden Wholeness: The Journey Towards an Undivided Life by Parker Palmer
Getting Things Done: the Art of Stress-Free Productivity by David Allen
and re-reading: The Four-Fold Way by Angeles Arrien
OK. Time to fill the hummingbird feeder and deadhead the rosebush. Or, take a nap!
(Which brings to mind a movie I was meaning to see, called Short Cut to Nirvana --do watch the trailer!--about the mammoth Kumbh Mela festival, a convergence of 70 million people at the place where the Ganges and Yamuna rivers converge, every 12 years. Well, and, that's just it: big convergence, not quite enough time to get to everything I've been meaning to get to, and every single thought and conversation reminding me of something or someone interesting and/or important.)
Alternately, I have felt for the past few months as if I am carrying around, or wearing, a big heap of threads and fuzzy strings. They're multicolored, bright and dark, a little tangled where their unraveled edges catch, and weaving themselves into strange patterns and textures when I'm not watching. Lately I've gotten to toss some of them into the center of various circles of comrades, colleagues & friends, and then I always find myself coming home with even more than I started with!
Some of the streams/threads:
Business: dissolving one and creating another one, all at the same time; the dozens (maybe hundreds!) of practical and logistical details (because we're also moving our practice location), as well as all the karmic and energetic ties we leave, and the new ones we generate.
Teaching, learning: & their relationship to hosting and inviting, to opening space for passion and responsibility in the midst of a very linear, accreditation-shaped curriculum; the notion of integral education; the "teacher formation" work originated by Parker Palmer.
Opening space for giving, receiving, flourishing (and teaching and learning...) (link to be invented soon) and the Open Space Practices that Michael & Chris are languaging & polishing
Torah: learning to read Hebrew, along with the mystical interpretations of each letter, experiencing more and more Rabbi Ted's intersection of mystical (the path of perceiving underlying radical inclusiveness) and prophetic (the call to social justice mandated by that perception) Judaism and the community that has grown, and continues to grow, around that intersection.
Medicine: working with the area of the "determinants of health"--those conditions that allow for optimal health to be realized (or not)-- because it's only partially useful to alleviate/palliate someone's anxiety or exhaustion or insomnia or neck pain when it springs from their reaction to the current state of our culture and of the world (and sometimes it's actually suppressive to do that.) Even with "natural" methods rather than anti-depressants. How, instead, to vitalize that reaction to support participation in healing of society & culture, and ecological healing?
And these are some of the books I'm reading, which somehow also seem to be converging (though I have no idea how, yet...)
Field Notes on the Compassionate Life: A Search of the Soul of Kindness by Marc Ian Barasch
Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking by Malcolm Gladwell
A Hidden Wholeness: The Journey Towards an Undivided Life by Parker Palmer
Getting Things Done: the Art of Stress-Free Productivity by David Allen
and re-reading: The Four-Fold Way by Angeles Arrien
OK. Time to fill the hummingbird feeder and deadhead the rosebush. Or, take a nap!
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