Unconditioned Love

It's not unconditional love i yearn for, it's unconditioned love. Love without objects. Love that arises sublimely from the very process of being alive.

While we may strive for unconditional love, it is an ideal we can no more than aspire to until we have faced our own conditioning. And that can be the work of a lifetime. Finding and then facing our conditioning takes courage and devotion.

How can i love you unconditionally, without projecting any of my shadows or demons or angels onto you unless i have become intimate with them? Unless i know them in every dimension? Until i have freed them from being anything other than what they are? Than what i am?

What does unconditional love mean anyway? Does it mean nothing more than a non-negotiation? Is merely an absence of transaction? I don't think so, although that is how many people see it. I hear others talk about wanting to be loved by another who won't put terms on the relationship or who will love them just the way they are. In their words i hear the desire for both freedom and intimacy. In their eyes i see fear and pain and self-doubt. In their souls i see chains.

To me unconditional love, is really unconditioned love. The love that arises when we are at one with What Really Matters. With what Is. Whatever you want to call that, Spirit, Universe, God. And yourself. How can you/I love anyone until we can love ourselves. Fully. All of our disowned and unloved and ugly and inconvenient and imperfect and plain disappointing moments/parts/habits/behaviours/histories. Because these self-judgements arise from our conditioning. From the values we learned early, early. And they create our suffering. And our loneliness. And our unlovedness. Our joylessness.

I yearn for a love that is not based on objects. Me included. No wendy-thing. I feel an increasing longing, a pull towards a love that arises ever-fresh, in each moment Now, from the source of all-that-is. It arises as joy in my center--from my core. It arises all around me. And i believe that in relationship it is no different. It is merely the recognition of that ever-present arising in another. The beloved.

The beloved may be self, the beloved may be child, the beloved may be partner, the beloved may be Source. Love arises, unconditioned from the center. We are always held in that grace.

Breathe in the grit of this moment, breathe out a spark of joy. Breathe in the love of the sacred ground you stand on in this moment, breathe out a full-blooded breath HAH! and feel your feet on the earth.

What are the stories you tell yourself about love? What don't you love about yourself? Why? What parts of you have been colonized by the loveless lies of modernity? Where is joy? When did you feel it last? Look there. Then look deeper.

Unconditioned love arises in each moment for each of us. It's there. Always. Like the space between breaths. Hidden sometimes behind dragons we fear to confront. And so i yearn for it. Not having challenged all my dragons yet. The yearning itself grows sweeter each day. So i learn to love what is unresolved in myself. And take another small step closer to the joy that never fades.

A bit of Pratchett for your enjoyment

Been Tweeting a bit of Terry Pratchett's brilliance and so, for the uninitiated and old fans both, here is a bit of classic Pratchett from "Hogfather".  This excerpt occurs near the end of the book and is a conversation between Death and his granddaughter, Susan (Death talks in caps, of course):

Susan: "...You're saying humans need...fantasies to make life bearable?"

REALLY? AS IF IT WAS SOME KIND OF PINK PILL? NO. HUMANS NEED FANTASY TO BE HUMAN.  TO BE THE PLACE WHERE THE FALLING ANGEL MEETS THE RISING APE.

"Tooth fairies? Hogfathers? Little..."

YES. AS PRACTICE. YOU HAVE TO START OUT LEARNING TO BELIEVE THE LITTLE LIES.

"So we can believe the big ones?"

YES. JUSTICE. MERCY. DUTY.  THAT SORT OF THING.

"They're not the same at all!"

YOU THINK SO? THEN TAKE THE UNIVERSE AND GRIND IT DOWN TO THE FINEST POWDER AND SIEVE IT THROUGH THE FINEST SIEVE AND THEN SHOW ME ONE ATOM OF JUSTICE, ONE MOLECULE OF MERCY AND YET---AND YET YOU ACT AS IF THERE IS SOME IDEAL ORDER IN THE WORLD, AS IF THERE IS SOME . . . SOME RIGHTNESS IN THE UNIVERSE BY WHICH IT MAY BE JUDGED.

"Yes, but people have got to believe that, or what's the point--"

MY POINT EXACTLY.

THERE IS A PLACE WHERE TWO GALAXIES HAVE BEEN COLLIDING FOR A MILLION YEARS.  DON'T TRY TO TELL ME THAT'S RIGHT.

"Yes, but people don't think about that."

CORRECT. STARS EXPLODE, WORLDS COLLIDE, THERE'S HARDLY ANYWHERE IN THE UNIVERSE WHERE HUMANS CAN LIVE WITHOUT BEING FROZEN OR FRIED, AND YET YOU BELIEVE THAT A . . . A BED IS A NORMAL THING.  IT IS THE MOST AMAZING TALENT.

"Talent?"

OH, YES. A VERY SPECIAL KIND OF STUPIDITY.  YOU THINK THE WHOLE UNIVERSE IS INSIDE YOUR HEADS.

"You make us sound mad."

NO. YOU NEED TO BELIEVE IN THINGS THAT AREN'T TRUE.  HOW ELSE CAN THEY BECOME? 

Vital skill for forging our future

I am a long time member of the Open Space Listserve.  There are a lot of amazing folks and deep thinkers over there.  Today my dear friend and OS colleague, Doug Germann, posted this quote:

It is their presence in the whole, and the fact that they are helping the life of the whole, which gives them their individual life....Italics in original. Christopher Alexander, The Nature of Order: An Essay on the Art of Building and The Nature of the Universe, Book One: The Phenomenon of Life, p 431

Doug followed that up with his own observations and one of his wonderful questions:

What I am seeing here as an inside-out truth, is that in a group we do not lend the group our individual life, it goes somewhat the other way round about. What gives us our individual existence and life is our presence in the group, our helping of the group; in turn the others helping the group give us life. We intensify each other.

Can this be true?

So i chimed in and here is an expanded version of my reply:

Yes. It's about Circles of Belonging, Doug.  

Don't we feel most alive when we know we are truly significant?  That our existence matters essentially to another?  We can only see that truly reflected in the eyes of our community.  

It explains modern existential angst.  Without true community and a way to find our place in it--we find life deadened, numbing, meaningless.  The same thing is mirrored in organizations.  We have largely managed (all puns intended) to engineer an inhuman context for ourselves.  If we are to create a future where we and all the other species on our planet can thrive, we will need to understand the need for authentic significance deeply and begin working to acquire the skills and instincts to provide this to each other in the way we live and work together.

Re-membering and re-claiming the skills and patterns of connecting to the whole is a vital process for our future.  There are ways of being in community that we have forgotten (and many of us never learned).  And i don't just mean human community; i mean the WHOLE.  We also need to feel, really experientially, in our bones, feel our connection to earth and cosmos and all the life in it.  

I see groups working to emerge these ways of being.  Aikido is one place.  We work there on ourselves within a community of care, to understand the deeper connections between us; how our intentions intertwine, how our energy flows and merges, how we can learn to treat each other with delicacy.  As one teacher said, "Aikido is about caressing the soul".  It is one of the places i feel seen and feel welcomed to see others.

I see the Non-Violent Communication community working to build the skills for verbally connecting in ways that we can truly give appreciation to each other. Working to learn and teach how to communicate in ways that honour the self and the other, without harm.  

Again i am finding it hard to put words to this knowing.  In order to thrive in complexity, we need each other like never before and yet we are stuck in this vise of not having the skills we need to live and work well together.  That is the work i am passionately engaged in now.  How can we transform ourselves into who we need to be to thrive?  I have found that this work takes great personal courage to engage in.  We all carry the grief around of the wounds we have received from those who were supposed to see and love and appreciate us and who didn't.  So many are walking numbed, and deadened.  So many of us don't even know how to accept appreciation and love when we are exposed to it.  

So i say, these skills and patterns of connecting to the whole (self, family, community, world, cosmos) are vital to our future.  Vital to our individual and collective health.  Vital to life. We need to re-learn, to co-create, to co-emerge these skills and patterns of working and living well together.  

We will know we have arrived when, as Harrison Owen has recently pointed out, Open Space Technology is just one of the ways we do things.  I believe the deep inner resonance for this sense of one's place in the whole is what many people experience and enjoy about Open Space.  And Aikido.  onegai shimasu O Sensei.  I don't want to bore all you non-aikidoists, but there is a jewel at the center of Aikido--a sparkling diamond gift of finding the connection to each other and the whole that gives us life.  

Where have you found this resonance?

Change is dead.

What?!? I hear you say.  Change is dead?  But isn't everybody talking about the pace of change, change management, how to be more resilient in the face of change?  And the Buddhists in the group are going, but, everything is change, change is all.  Yep.  And that's the point actually.

The problem, as i see it, is that the word, change, has gathered to itself a terrible gravity and that is creating a damaging and painful illusion.  Many people, if we're being honest about it, see change as what happens between the disruption of one status quo state and the emergence of another.  And that assumption/belief/mindset/illusion served us okay while we lived in a largely simple or complicated world.  The challenges we faced responded to analysis and our solutions were largely repeatable.  Solutions also tended to be effective over relatively long periods of linear time. Hence the illusion of a status quo state that experienced episodes of change.

Enter the age of complexity.  Our challenges are now complex.  They don't readily yield to analysis, but demand of us new skills like pattern seeking and new ways of working together like collaboration (yes, new, but that's another conversation).  Our solutions are seldom repeatable (although they may inform future challenges in an evolutionary way) as our challenges are embedded in unique contexts and histories.  Our solutions converge in an evolutionary flow, each leading us in a spiraling pattern to the next iteration of the challenge. No more home base.  No more status quo.

Welcome to chaos.  Complexity if that scares you less.  So, i say, "change is dead", to shake you awake.  To invite you to loosen your grip on the idea of the shore and take the plunge into the flow.  The pace of change isn't increasing. The degree of complexity is.  The distance between the temporary handholds in the stream flowing from evolving now to evolving now is lessening. I am inviting you to learn to swim before they disappear altogether. 

I am keeping some distance from the statement "change is all there is", because i am now seeing that as an illusion referencing an illusion.  I am proposing that the ever-emergent flow is all there is. Take that into your body for a moment and see if there is a different response.  

And how do we respond to that?  With self-organization, like we always have.  Like there was ever anything else.  Only now, we can choose to do it consciously.  We can choose to learn and create processes that leverage the power of emergence, of context, of relationship, of questions. So let go of change.  It is a concept that no longer serves us or our organizations.  It locks us in a jail of false hope and is creating increasingly disastrous consequences. We are simply in the flow of the ever-emergent.  We shape our present and future through our collective intention. Might as well step up and start taking responsibility for what you care about and see who else shows up.

The journey to this place is not simply one of mind. To thrive here, we need integrated mind/body/heart/soul systems. We need all channels online and functioning.  

Our organizations need a much better understanding of what level of response is necessary and how best to support those responses.  Change Management?--bah humbug! How about Complexity Response Management?  Or maybe Systems Resilience Patterning? Emergence Driven Strategic Leveraging?  Strangely Attractive Critical Juncture Processing? Okay, now i'm having too much fun.  What's your two-cents?

NB: A little esoterica for the aikidoka in the crowd:  ever-emergent flow: Takemusu.  (from calligraphy by O Sensei: Takemusu Aiki has descended and its energy can be felt everywhere.)

New poem up at oneplacemostsacred

Well, after a very long hiatus, i have just posted a new poem up at my other blog.  It's called Opening to the spring within.  You can view it at oneplacemostsacred.

So ends a wonderful Poetry month and Poem in my pocket day.  The poem i found in my pocket (really) is one of my favourites.  "Wild Geese" by Mary Oliver.

You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes, 
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely, 
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting — 
over and over announcing your place 
in the family of things.

Is #twitter changing #blogging?

Anyone else noticing that we are witnessing a #tippingpoint?  Something happened about 3 weeks ago with #twitter that moved it from the emerging edge to the mainstream.  Just about everyone i know, including me started tweeting.  Non-tweeters are already complaining about twitter updates on Facebook.  #Hashtags are appearing everywhere.  I'm contemplating filing to add an @ sign as my first initial.  (okay, not really)

What i have noticed is that i am more conscious about what i put in the first 140 chars of my blog posts.  That it sets the context and gives a good idea of the content of the post.  I know this isn't and won't become an absolute.  But there is certainly a solid awareness of all of the different places this will now show up and the different ways people will be looking to assess context and content.

Also, i am finding that i am turning to twitter as my main platform for watching for trends, emergent information, and new connections--rather than blog feeds or other aggregators.  I am finding the enforced 140 char limit awesome in terms of helping to manage the signal to noise ratio.  

As Bryan Alexander tweeted today: 

"Managing feeds, in addition to (or instead of) managing items, is an aspect of digital literacy that’s only just emerging" - J. Udell

Thank goodness, it's not just me whose struggling to figure out how to manage all of the incredible amount of content generated.  And how to leverage these interconnected flows of information, insight and opinion.  

I am very curious to see how this will continue to unfold and how quickly we will see hashtags and @-signs become ubiquitous.  

The other pattern that intrigues me is the speed with which this happened.  I believe, if my understanding of his tweets are correct, that Neil Gaiman celebrated his 100,000 follower and his 333,333 follower within about 10 days of each other.  My thought is that the 'viral' nature of the web is evolving and becoming more powerful.  I struggle with the term 'viral' because it feels like it is a metaphor that is obscuring the deeper nature of what is happening here.  The ecosytem (if i may use the term) of the internet is evolving.  With its self-organizing, complex adaptive systems becoming more mature and robust.  The interconnections are beginning to approach the level of those found in nature:  like in a nervous system.  This took a while and it looks to me like we are arriving at a level of complexity and fluidity that will make some very powerful things possible.  Not judging good or bad, just noting the power factor.  

What are you noticing?  Any thoughts?

Easter on Gabriola

This year was a special one:  the 10th Anniversary of our Community Easter Egg Hunt.  It was held at the Commons for the second time and it is such a special location.  I feel so grateful to have this kind of community space. The Gabriola Commons is 26-acres of community coordinated land with an agricultural focus.  

We were treated to a concert by the Juno-nominated, Gabriola-grown band the Kerplunks. (And they sang the new Lego song!)   And then the wild hunt was on!  Imagine a hundred or so 2-12'ers making like fox and hounds over the fields and through the bushes looking for eggs.  

This is just one more reason why i love living here.  Moms, Dads, kids, Grandparents, folks who just love kids and have to watch the gaiety--all gathered on the green.  Dancing and singing, clapping and cheering.  What a rare experience these days to have so much community out for kids.  And we were joined this year by eagles and hawks, snakes and ants.  Nobody left any litter, everybody had a terrific time, and money was raised to support our local 4-H club.  A big cheer to the local businesses--esp. Village Foods and Coast Realty for their steady support.  

Lots of pics:

Picnic before the show:

Tina Jones of the Kerplunks pointing out the eagle blessing the beginning of the show!

Everybody watching the show:

Do you like my Easter Bonnet? 

Rowan & GranGran

They're Off!!

The Wild Hunt

Searching for the last few

That was fun!