Blessings, Gratitude, Love and the Precious Gift of Life

This week I have been 'receiving' gifts of appreciation from some people who were in Leiden. I have experienced awe, joy and been moved to tears of pure bliss. Thankyou.

The exchanges too between Sylvana Storey and Matthieu Daum were so powerful in their intensity, intimacy, connection and pure manifestation of the power of love and appreciation as a constructive action. .


Whilst this was happening I met with Kirsty Foster where we were exploring some of her reflections after working with some young men in the making from an all boys school. She was amazed at their capacity to teach each other; to hold and be together full of admiration and support; where there was a recognition that group survival was more important than the survival of the 'ego'. She said. . .

'their ability to embrace each other was awesome. .it was somehow cool to do that in that school. .they understand the magic of it'.

Yesterday, Karen Izod and I connected about doing some work together themed around 'Creativity in Humanity' - initially some gender focussed work. .and her poem that she shared in Leiden held even more resonance...

TUG OF LOVE

With your tug I am
being cast adrift.
I feel the pull
under my feet.
Vapour trails criss and cross
their ways through my consciousness.
Their mists settle upon us.

Yesterday - Zachary came to Wales, I was able to offer a hosting haven and whilst we met Karen sent through this wonderful link - blessings. .

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6BkT6-CDIjw

And last night there was a three way connection between us and Karen shared another of her wonderful poems. .

ON LONDON'S STREETS

More black boys
More white boys
Lie, dying.
Dead even.

Bayonets through the gut, through the arm
Punctured
Head, for some reason,
over the top of some particular parapet.

Who is this enemy?
Is there some general, back straight
pondering the strategy?

Mothers watch
Fathers; eyes casting for the
Relief on the landscape.

What did we learn before
About sending our young men to their deaths?
Wasn’t it that we had to find a way to talk?

Did I miss something, or
Did we say it wouldn’t happen again?

Copyright Karen Izod 2008

Today. . . I see that the footballer Jermaine Defoe's brother, Jade, a man of colour has been killed. I am reminded of the preciousness of my life and the gifts contained within it. This links so strongly for me with Rene's earlier Facebook invitation this week regarding Appreciation and Inspiration.

I remain even more aware of the need for our collective connective to act constructively in the world. Between us we have a range of shoes, boots and sneakers , we are going to put on our Red Shoes and dance - will you too?

Thankyou for your precious gifts, blessings and much love
Christine
x

Commitment ...

When talking to Sytske yesterday about some work we will do together this autumn, her eye fell on a quote she was offered by John, and it's a piece of old wisdom by Goethe ...

"Until one is committed there is always hesitancy, the chance to draw back, always ineffectiveness, concerning all acts of initiative and creation, there is one elementary truth, the ignorance of which kills countless ideas and splendid plans. The moment one definitely commits oneself, then providence moves too. All sorts of things occur to help that would never otherwise have occurred. A whole stream of events issues from the decision, raising to one's favour all manner of unforeseen accidents and meetings and material assistance which no man could have dreamed would come his way. Whatever you can do or dream you can, begin it. Boldness has genius, power and magic in it."

It was just what was right to remind us to commit to our intention. And then on the Presencing community website today i noticed a link to a video that reminded me of the importance of a sense of wonder ....

So commitment and wonder - and then we are nearly coming back to old Benedictine values of stabilitas, conversio morum and obedientia ... staying with things and continuously listening out for what needs to be heard.

It's just so scary sometimes to be bold!

Love, Anjet

Constructive Action. .an invitation, a dance, a call. .

This is a message that I received last week and as a response to what our blog has evoked in others who were not present in Leiden. Allan Munn and Alasdair Munn are a Father and Son combination – having spent many years in Zimbabwe and both sharing a very powerful passion for constructive action on behalf of Africa. It humbled and excited me. .

‘Dear Christine

I was drawn to the blog that you listed for Alasdair, 'experiencing consciousness'.
There are some amazing concepts there and sincere people with valuable skills to communicate them.

This is a communication process very closely aligned to the rural African.
Survival in many rural communities in Africa depends upon collective thought.
Many African religious beliefs are grounded in collective wisdom and experience merged with
oral history, provided spiritually through and from the Ancestors.
They are the ones who already 'dance the dance'.

In African rural culture, the EGO is shunned. They have learned that there is little room for it
in a community that is collectively surviving.

I believe that Western societies are not primarily collective in their survival processes, rather they
tend to be self motivated, self centered and consequentially mainly driven by the EGO.
For me, in a collective society, which I sincerely believe is the only way forward for this planet, the human EGO is the destruction.
I feel very strongly about this and recently wrote this poem about the EGO, which you may like to share with me.

WHERE DO YOU WANT TO BE?

Love and fear are real
But there is no such thing as hate
Hate is born of fear, hiding in your head,
An ego marriage of the imagination and the mind.

And where do you want to be...
In your soul, in your heart?

Oh yes... but not in your ego head
We shall never connect there.
Remember, there is no hate
And that you are not scared of me,
You are scared of you.

I'm not sure if your fellow bloggers would be interested in this poem, or these thoughts
but if you think that they may be, then please share with them.’

And so I have shared with them. Thankyou Allan for this gift to the Conscious Collective, with which you are now connected. . .
Cariad Christine
x

Let it Be--Let it Flow--Let it Yield

Dear All:

This is the video of the sunrise ritual.  It was offered to ground the CCC, seeding the earth, air, and sea with the spirit of our collective intentions to provide the kind of leadership that will enable the emerging world to be...Now on to the constructive action to make it so...

love,

Zachary

Peace

Here is another video of our event, providing a different tone and expression than the first.  A "final" video that documents the sunrise ritual offered to ground the CCC experience will be posted in the near future...

Peace,

Zachary

Theory, Praxis and Experiencing

Hello Conscious Collective

From the stream of emails flows that are happening, it is indeed confirming that a collective has been seeded and is continuing in its work and awareness to facilitate a new leadership focusing on constructive action for and within the world.

I have been struck by how the emails from Aliki, Laura and Gouranga that we have received in the space of 24 hours, as we have been manifesting our ritual of intention and constructive action in the world have materialized. With these connections in mind, am drawn to our poem Conscious Collective – first and last lines in particular.

‘Seeing through to the essence that is ever present. . .

. . The encounter seeing beyond’

And so I hear a wonderfully powerful invitation to the ‘joy of being’ from Aliki Nicolaides for us each to dance in our own way, be in our own essence and go with it and prepare to be amazed. .

‘something fresh that brought tears of joy to my eyes - Happy Spring'

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vq6b9bMBXpg&eurl=http%253A%252F%252Fwww%252Etowleroad%252Ecom%252F2009%252F04%252Fthe%252Dsound%252Dof%252Dspontaneous%252Dmusical%252Dtheatre%252Ehtml&feature=player_embedded

Another connection and movement that I am noticing is from dancing to travelling – linking up with our recent blog post, with the dancing in a train station and also with the emergent strap line relating to flying, ‘fasten your seatbelts’ which has emerged in the same timeframe too – feels like we are all journeying and co-creating as we go somehow?

Am sensing that the music, dance, movement, pure energy and universal love is rippling out now in ways beyond our imaginations. I sense a quickening within me and so within us about what our Connective Collective could enable when the ‘flickering flow' gathers and moves. .

It feels important somehow to recognize how Matthieu Daum has played a catalytic role in our waves of connection – no co-incidence then that his organization is called ‘NEXUS’ – meaning connection – whose purpose is ‘ au croisement des cultures. . .’

Matthieu was also in the Constructive Action group and has voiced and made visible messages from those that could not get through the technology or the systems. .

One of those was Gouranga Chattopadhyay – he has shared with our collective his recent experiences of working with a Shaman friend in Australia where he describes:

‘After that we returned. Any time I want to see my horse friend, he appears inside my forehead where I can clearly see him. Till now I haven't understood the meaning of his quizzical look. But he remains my friend and I feel at peace in his company.

The whole experience was about being at one with all the worlds that the cosmos contains. My name for what I call cosmos is cosmic continuum -no boundary. The invitation is to encounter that at-one state more and more often.

After the workshop I went out to have coffee in a small restaurant on the Great Ocean Road. Soon the Shaman joined me there. She had bought some stuff in a shop that was having a closing down sale a few blocks away. She presented me with two mini wraparounds! One blue and one brown. She did it with such a nice smile that I didn't ask her what I was expected to do with two mini wraparounds! I use those as eiderdowns in my workroom in Kolkata!
Love.
GC

Maybe our universal love and wraparound for each other offers us some insight for reflection and constructive action as we travel. .

And over the Easter weekend – I had some time and space to reflect on what CCC had been about – a dear friend turned up with a book for me that she had just found that morning by Susan Greenwood called ‘The Nature of Magic – an Anthropology of Consciousness’. At once so many of the jigsaw pieces of the diverse theories and practical and lived experiences in Leiden fell into place for me. Susan writes about the concept of ‘magical consciousness’. .it comprises a ‘holistic’ awareness of the spirituality of the everyday, the earth, the body with all its attendant thoughts, feelings and emotions, a sense of the interconnectedness of it all. This is magical consciousness, the conception that has the capability of ‘re-enchanting the world’ for those who experience it.
Cariad
Christine
x

Dear travellers,

Our invitation to join a co-creative and connective collective offered a beginning, an opportunity for recognising our shared responsibility for how we co-create ourselves, each other and the worlds in which we live. 'In this new space, what if we discovered something beyond - where we can touch, embrace, hold and make meaning of our senses and different forms of knowing. One where we can cradle each other as we grow in our capacity to give and receive? Dare we explore this dimension within ourseves and others?'

And in the space, we danced alone and together and with co-creative loving intention. And since, the dancing and waves of movements, the ebb and flow of life has continued. Our co-created collective is deepening its connection with each wave. As hosts, convenors and guides, we have been profoundly humbled and awed by the sacred gifts that have been offered to the collective, by the courage that has been shown and how the generosity of the human spirit is revealing itself. We have each individually and as a group of four, and no doubt as a whole, been experiencing the challenges of grounding these new energetic waves of 'knowing' and 'being' within ourselves.

Peter invited us to also think about how our intentions, for the world and our collective leadership of it, might be consummated. In order to enable that process to continue, we are offering our intentions (the paper cards) in a small ceremony to the fire and the water on Katwijk beach at 0630 am tomorrow morning. We will know ourselves held by your intentions, as we (Peter, Zachary, Ankie and Anjet on our collective behalf) will also offer something that symbolizes for us what we may need to let go of in order to make space inside ourselves to walk the path that follows … knowing that the path already is, and that we are it and that we also, as a collective and as unique individuals with a purpose shape it while we walk.

Parts of the CCC process included 'stillness' and 'silence' - space for reflection, contemplation and integration. So with this loving intention - we invite you into a space of sanctuary, to 'be' and reflect with us. This is a poem and a construct that has emerged from our reflective dialogues since CCC.

CONSCIOUS COLLECTIVE
Seeing through to the essence that is ever present
To the other end of the spectrum
The dying of ego which will never entirely die
Not entirely disappear---unique spark in deep darkness

Transforming the tradition so that it also
Expresses the emergence

The gems within and around to be polished.

At once is the individual and the collective
Where we are and are not
The nature and beauty of the dance

Where strange paradox is a truth
That in any moment
Changes form and becomes
Another truth…

A flickering flow of woven movements

Let it be
Let it wash
Let it yield

As the flame to the winds
As the waves to the shore
As the wheat to the earth

Recognizing and being recognized
without having seen each other before.
The encounter seeing beyond...

With much love as we continue to be held and nurtured in our connectively woven web.
Zachary, Anjet, Rene and Christine

Silent Reflections

Most of our posts to date have been from those who were able to attend the Leiden gathering in person.  David McCallum has been on a 30-day silent retreat before, during, and since the Conversation.  He was first to respond to the invitation and has held the collective in consciousness and prayer from the beginning.  He offers a view from silence on how what appears to be death may yield life—and life more abundant..,

Love,

Zachary

-------------------------

The Leiden gathering coincided with the phase of the retreat focused on purification... suffice to say, it was both dark and painful, yet punctuated by moments of insight, liberation, and a deep sense of being loved even as I am a sinner. I think this paradox of being loved even as we are, imperfect and occasionally even working at cross purposes with Life... this sounds a little like the experience several of you have described. So, while we have been engaging the grace and grief of our maturation as a collective of consciousness, these movements of spirit resonate so deeply for me/with you. A line from the New Testament scriptures came to mind just now, "that unless a grain of wheat falls to the ground and dies, it remains a single grain; but if it dies, it bears fruit beyond measure." May our love and labor bear fruit and at the same time, may we be free from concern for the outcomes...

Thank you for including me in this experience... it encourages my heart in the silence. And I continue to keep each of you in prayer by name throughout the retreat.

Fondly,
David 

Making Meaning of Our Worlds

Our Constructive Action cohort, this time through John Bazalgette, invites us to make meaning of our experience and begin to document our co-created processes.  What follows are an adaptation of his notes from the “Our Worlds” experience.  John outlines the steps that we used and offers a first glance hypothesis about what we may have sought to represent.  As always, your own comments and reflections are welcomed.

I'm with my notes now.  They're not very substantial but form a preliminary sketch of my analytic thinking as I surveyed the different 'worlds' that people created.   

For the record the proposal had the following steps:

·      Take time to let go as far as you can of all presuppositions, images, memories.

·      Go out into the town and be open to receiving the message that the world out there is wan ting to give you

·      Return and in self selected groups build a representation of the world that has been communicating with you

·      Reflect on what we have created of the message the world has  communicated to us.  

All this is rough and ready, but I feel there is something that might grow from this small seed.

I asked myself:  What is the message that has been collectively received from the world that it has been wanting to give the participants in the conversation?  I wondered whether each cluster of participants would unconsciously begin to assemble coherent but differing aspects of our collective sense of what the world of Leiden had said to us. looking at each of them and listening to the conversations that were taking place I tentatively formulated the following hypothesis.

·      The Red Group created something the expressed an underlying concern about the world's need for governance and structure

·      The Green Group created an expression of the world's need for spirituality 

·      The Blue Group expressed world's need for a sense of continuity, succession and family

·      The Yellow Group expressed the world's need for a sense of health and wellbeing.

I don't want to be held too closely to those categories.  However, what I realised was that we had designed the first steps of an exercise which, if given sufficient time (say a day and a half) could provide some stunning disclosures about collective consciousness.

With love,

John

Other Worlds

Kathleen Pogue White, who recently celebrated a milestone birthday and was not at our gathering, sent out the following video in the flow of our most recent wave of connections.  It is like a song we actually played and many of us sung at the gathering. While consistent with the theme of our work, the video also evokes the presence of another world often left unseen.  Indeed just on the other side of the glass from us in Leiden were homeless men and women, many from cultures and circumstances different from those assembled to “dance.”  As hosts we sought but did not make this level of connection happen. May this offering be a reminder to us of the more, the many, and the forgotten in our midst who are also we.  As the song says, we all need someone to stand by me…

Here is the link:

http://vimeo.com/moogaloop.swf?clip_id=2539741