Creating Our New World from Inside to Out

Fuzzy, Snowy Morning Reflections

The mythic story of the earth and the gods whispers within us. John O’Donohue

May we increase the volume so that we can hear. Then, may we listen.

I found myself challenged to settle in, put pen to paper, and to invite Muse to join me this snowy, blustery morning. (Yes, The Pivot starts life on paper in my journal before making its way to the digital realm, cyberspace, and to you dear reader.)

Simply writing that sentence takes me on a quick journey through the vast technological developments in my lifetime and reminds me of the current pace at which technology is advancing. Muse smiles reminding me of recent exploration and reflections about just that.

With much of our cultural context continuing to focus on conquest, colonization, competition, comparison, and control unaware of new scientific discoveries that debunk those approaches, I wonder how we will apply new technologies such as artificial intelligence to all areas of life. I wonder how we might be more informed and mature with these advances than we were with the discovery of atomic energy? Will we make choices from the wisdom or our souls? Or will we …?

As I reflect on such questions, Muse reminds me of the wisdom in a recently read essay from a current inspiration, John O’Donohue: There is a labyrinth within the soul. What we think and desire often comes into conflict with what we do. Below the surface of our conscious awareness a vast unknown rootage determines our actions. … Outside us, society functions in an external way, its collective eye does not know interiority, it sees only through the lens of image, impression and function.

Individually and collectively we have separated our inner world from the choices that the set our direction. We fail to call forth the wisdom in our souls, the wisdom of Nature, of Gaia, and of the cosmos of which we are a part. And yet, as O’Donohue further nudges: The mythic story of the earth and the gods whispers within us.

May we increase the volume so that we can hear. Then, may we listen.

That story, that wisdom, that knowing is not new rather it is ancient, known to our ancestors, and imbedded within our DNA, and accessible to us. We access it in any number of ways: meditation, time in Nature, inspirational reading, connection with others, practicing heart coherence and deep gratitude. The list goes on.

My favored paths to connecting with my inner wisdom include time in the woods, walking with Zadie Byrd, heart coherence, and gratitude. Each offers a welcome mat and friendly environment when I invite wisdom in.

To help expand possibilities and to bring insights into daily life, I seek out those who are telling new stories about life. Those who are innovating new systems and structures to build a world grounded in the truth of who we are and our interconnectedness with one another and with all life. Those who challenge the mainstream and inspire me to let go of my old stories and the choices I’ve made based on them by offering a delectable menu of new ideas and discoveries. Gregg Braden, Nassim Haramein, and Woody Tasch/Slow Money are among my current areas of interest and exploration. Along with the plethora of individuals and small groups worldwide creating the new, these luminous beings help me maintain my curiosity, open new doors for exploration, and point to a world being created from the inside out.

Snowy in the Woods Out Back

Sea of Expectations

A Colorado Blue Sky Day

Expectation is resentment waiting to happen. In contrast, friendship liberates. John O’Donohue

The attachment to our expectations is the obstacle … Myra Jackson

We swim in a sea of expectations. Befriending our expectations means releasing our attachment to life unfolding in the ways we expect. It is indeed befriending all of life.

Exploring the idea of expectations and indeed examining some of my own has been ‘up’ for me in recent weeks. I’ve long had curiosity about how expectation weaves into life and has been an occasional thread woven into these weekly musings. One explored the distinction between expectations and promises (read it here).

Settling in with Muse this morning I recalled O’Donohue’s words that caught my attention some time back. While he was writing about relationships in particular and our expectations of others to be/do certain ways/things, Muse guides me to consider that perhaps expectations might become our friends.

In response to my quizzical look, Muse winks and prompts, awareness as a first step. We swim in a sea of expectations. Our lack of awareness of what we expect in the details of life is where the potential for resentment hides. Curious, I took a few minutes of self-inquiry: what do I expect in life/of life? In less than 10 minutes I’d listed 26 expectations, many of which are multifaceted (e.g. I expect my health care provider, my attorney, etc. to have my best interests) and all of which underlie daily life, actions, choices.

Until I took those few minutes to bring them to awareness it seems that my expectations were lurking in the darkness, resentment waiting to happen, ready to kindle a spark of anger should an expectation not be met.

Let’s say for example the internet connection is down, my computer crashes, the car won’t start. Or it’s raining on a day you’d planned a picnic … you get my drift here of all the things we expect to go a certain way without being aware that we expect it UNTIL something doesn’t.

What is your habitual response? A fiery reaction of anger? Springing into action to ‘fix’ the ‘problem’? Curiosity that the Universe seems to be redirecting you? Do you perhaps journey through all the above?

While I strive for the later (curiosity), I’m inclined to leap into action. Muse reminds me that sometimes the fiery Aries tiger reacts, suggesting that the trigger is that I’m attached to things being a certain way, to MY expectations being met. And to a tendency to ascribe some fault to myself when they aren’t. What did I do wrong? What error in my thinking ‘caused’ this?

Just as developing and maintaining friendships requires the nurturing care of awareness and to not being attached to our friend being/doing certain ways/things, perhaps expectations can be nurtured as friends with the same awareness and releasing of attachment to them. Muse says it more clearly: Befriending our expectations means releasing our attachment to life unfolding in the ways we expect. It is indeed befriending all of life.

As we put a cap on this week’s musing a few thoughts and queries dance into awareness:

• Gratitude is a key to releasing my attachment to how and what I expect life to be.

• What is the relationship between expectation and intention? Is there a pivot from expectation to intention?

• Innovation, calling forth and being open to the new, requires releasing any attachment to the details of how life unfolds.

It seems a door has opened … fodder for musings another day.

Last Light of Sunset

Humility: Voice of the Soul

Tracking

Through prayer we learn to see with the eyes of the soul. … It refines your eyes for the unknown narrative which is quietly working itself through your words, actions and thoughts. In this way prayer issues from, and increases, humility. The normal understanding of humility made it out to be a passive self-depreciation in which any sense of self-worth or value was diminished. Humility has a more profound meaning. Humility is a derivative of the Latin word ‘humus’ meaning ‘of the earth’. In this sense, humility is the art of being open and receptive to the inner wisdom of your clay. John O’Donohue (essay in Eternal Echoes: Exploring Our Hunger to Belong)

In the early morning quiet with warming fire in the woodstove on this cold morning, I rediscovered this O’Donohue wisdom that I’d  read sometime back. It shined light into the darkness that I’d been holding around humility. I understood that my story about humility held the limits of the “normal understanding” that he speaks of. A new story could now emerge in the light.

In the past couple weeks, I’ve made passing reference to humility here in The Pivot. The first was mentioning that I bristled when a bio-field scan suggested it as a priority. ‘What’s wrong with my humility?’ I bristled, ‘I have plenty…’. Then, as I wrestled with the teaching style of the leader in a class I’d just started, I recognized that a dose of humility might be an antidote worth exploration.

If not front and center in these early days of the new year, humility has certainly been highlighted in the soup of my reflections and musings with ever-gentle Muse nudging me along. Today, thanks to O’Donohue, I’ve come to better understand why the suggestion that humility needed to be addressed triggered my defensive reaction. Likewise, his wisdom further opened my heart and the door to create a new story.

Reading the scan results with fresh eyes and heart, I wondered if the language had changed since my first reading. There was no ‘problem’ with me that needed to be ‘fixed’. Rather I found an invitation to walk through a door opening as another closed. Endings and beginnings. Phases and stages. Dissolving and evolving. Life.

Muse and I chuckled as I read the scan’s introduction: As we start to recognize the greater forces at play in bringing us through a Choice Point, life often invites us to gain humility. As we end a cycle in our lives and begin another there is potential for some of our old world to dissolve (or collapse in some people’s experience). This is because nature follows cycles. As we are part of nature we can expect some aspects of our lives to follow the same kind of cyclic pattern. (NES Health - Personal Scan)

Muse nods with a smile as I recognize that these ideas are familiar. I am Nature. Nature is me. My soul speaking its wisdom and calling forth the new. Clay being placed before me for co-creating, discovering my part in bringing forth the new world that is gently cracking the shell to burst into new life.

I am not alone. Much of our world, our old stories, our systems, our thinking is dissolving and collapsing before us. What a time to be alive and co-create the new future rising!

This is my soul gently speaking her understanding of our connection to Gaia and to one another, indeed to all life. Soul has a better understanding of our true nature than either body or mind. The soul knows! And now I understand the necessity of humility to hear her voice.

Humility opens the way to let go of resistance, to surrender to the flow of life, to discover the freedom in non-attachment, and to relinquishing the quest to control that which is not mine to control.

The door of the old is not completely shut. Yet, as the door and light of the new are shining, an unknown, yet somehow familiar, narrative is taking shape within to guide the thoughts, words, and deeds of the days ahead. May that light shine gently and brightly for one and all. And may we each hear the voice of our souls.

Crestone Peak

Soul Stirring of Winter

Beauty Abundant

The geography of your destiny is always clearer to the eye of your soul than to the intentions and the needs of your surface mind. John O’Donohue (Purity of Heart is to Will One Thing in Eternal Echoes: Exploring Our Hunger to Belong)

As winter weather continues to settle in and we move closer to the Winter Solstice, I find myself more pulled within. Much of what I read stirs something in this soul. I feel a choice point coming, a gestation of something that as of now has no words, no form, no clarity. Certainly, no certainty. I wonder how ‘it’ will emerge or even whether ‘it’ is an ‘it’ at all.

Muse gently reminds me to embrace the stirring and all that isn’t known, then guides me back to an experience that seems to point toward some shift on the horizon.

As I was putting away an abundance of leftovers a few days after my Thanksgiving feast with friends, I listened to Robin Wall Kimmerer reading her essay The Serviceberry: An Economy of Abundance in an Emergence Magazine podcast (find it here -- https://emergencemagazine.org/podcast/). She was speaking a topic near and dear to this heart while picking serviceberries: an economy based not on scarcity as it is now but on abundance, reciprocity, flow, a gift economy.

I listened, aware of the irony, the juxtaposition throughout: I’m packing and storing as I listen to a wise woman’s words about giving, sharing, and flow. Beyond the leftovers, I’m reminded of the abundance of pinon nuts that I harvested in the woods. Except for those shelled by a friend and enjoyed with our Thanksgiving feast, they sit on the pantry shelf waiting…

Abundance, flow, reciprocity, using, gifting … These ideas are not new. They resonate deep within as the truth of who we are, who I am. They point to possibilities some of which are emerging worldwide.

This, I think, is foundational to a level of consciousness needed to grapple with the issues of our time. Perhaps a part of Einstein’s admonition that we cannot solve our problems with the same thinking that created them.

Then I wonder ‘what needs to shift in my thinking, my being, and my habits of doing?’ so that I more fully align with what I say I believe? What habits of choice do I hold and follow that are of the systems of scarcity? As I pose these questions to self, I do so in hopes that only remnants remail. Yet I know our systems have imbedded their ways, their thinking in us, in me to keep the lie of scarcity alive: ‘there isn’t enough, hang on to what you have’.

And so, I pack and store, having on some level bought into the lie of scarcity. Yet I hold a knowing that this is one of the ways of the past that is in hospice, moving toward laying to rest so that new ways can emerge, be nurtured. How that will look in this life I’ve created and in the world beyond is ours to determine, ours to co-create. May we do so in harmony with one another and with dear Gaia, Mother Nature, our home.

Mossy Love in the Woods Out Back

Pivot to Wonderment

Fuzzy Mountain Moonrise

Wonder enlarges the heart. When you wonder, you are drawn out of yourself. The cage of the ego and the railtracks of purpose no longer hold you prisoner. Wonder creates a lyrical space where thought and feeling take leave of their repetitive patterns, to regain their original impulse of reverence before the mystery of what is. John O’Donohue (Wonder Awakens Us to the Magic of the World – essay in Eternal Echoes: Exploring Our Hunger to Belong).

Oh, what deep appreciation I have for the places O’Donohue explores, allowing us to join him through the legacy of his poetic, heart-felt words. Wonderment, that comforting (for me) state of awed admiration and respect, is what spending time with the writings of this man of the soul evokes. I’m reminded always to be present to whatever is in front of me. And, to wonder.

Wonderment seems to follow wonder. Not in a logical, sequential way, but rather as a doorway. Without wondering, without engaging my curious self, whether I’m looking out at the world or journeying within, the absence of wonder separates me from the sheer joy of wonderment, of life.

I’m reminded of yesterday’s conversation with a friend as we drove past a herd of yak on the Chok-u-rei Ranch here in the valley. My friend observes that some of these magnificent creatures stand close to one another as they graze. She wonders ‘what do they talk about in their closeness?’ I scan the herd looking for the youngsters and wonder at their playful romping, chasing one another before returning to their munching.

It is wonder that gifts us with the presence to notice the herd on this route we’ve each travelled hundreds of times over the years. The regenerative soil practicing ranch spans the only road from our community to the main highway, a 12-mile road through the flat valley floor that without a sense of wonder could be (and admittedly sometimes is) a blur.

Coming back from our journey we drive toward the mountains and quietly share our wonder at how their appearance shifts with various angles of light. Soon the moon, just past its fullness and being eclipsed by Mother Earth, will rise over the Sangres, offering another spectacle inviting wonderment of this place.

The wind blows strong and steady as I write this morning. I turn my wonder within as I aim to remember to do when weather is not to my liking. How might I embrace the wind as an element of the greater winds of change blowing all around in this cycle of time? Surely this element of air and its time of rapid movement has purpose in the ebb and flow of life. What might it be blowing out? What is the wind ushering in?

This seemingly simple flow of words eases the dread I was beginning to feel about the morning walk with Zadie Byrd. Embracing wind for what it is – a necessary element of Nature, unseen yet powerful – eases my need to ‘brace’ for stepping outside.

Muse nods with a smile, acknowledging my pivot, shifting from my early morning look at election returns to see if the unexpectedly tight race in my Congressional district has been called (it hasn’t – hope springs eternal!) to turning within to discover what wants to be shared in this weekly sacred space.

It occurs to me on this morning after midterm elections here in the U.S. that pivoting to wonderment offers a pathway for bridging the vast gaps that divide us. How might we shift from disdain, disagreement, ‘my way is the only way’ thinking and ways of being to genuine, heart-felt wonder about one another? How might we see that indeed there is no ‘other’, just the One. How might I?

I’m grateful for those engaged in the political, policy, and governance realms who are working towards bridging these divides. I’m grateful too for the wonder and beauty of Nature that surrounds and informs me in Her way. As the winds grow stronger this day, I’m reminded that wonderment is a path to embracing all of life even, perhaps especially, the wind.

Cottonwood Creek - Leaves Fallen, Ice to Come