Notes:
Johanna Massey:
We listen differently to poetry. It comes from a different place.
Five Guidelines:
1) Come from gratitude
2) Don't be afraid of the dark
3) Have a vision
4) Link arms
5) Act your age
Re. 1. Its very important to be grateful when you are anxious or in trouble.
Re. 2. Good things happen in the dark, you know it :) We need to own and see the beauty in suffering with our world. "What batters you, becomes your strength" - Rilke
"To the rushing waters, speak 'I am.' To the standing Earth, 'I am.'"
Re. 3 + 4. Paul Hawkin writes in "Blessed Unrest" "We are in the largest social movement in human history." Shift in awareness/consciousness. Upaya Zen Center. Keep the vision that we can survive.
Re. 5. To celebrate our true age, to celebrate the full authority of 14 billion years of yourself as human. There is an authority in that when you stand up to the bulldozers to say what you have to say, do what you need to do. Its not out of your nobility"
We are being breathed.
We are not making the decision to breath.
Its happening to us.
Richard Rohr:
- Where is the sustainability and vibrancy in church? When the guru or priests keep being brought in from elsewhere?
- Permaculture insists that we must be intellectually and creatively imaginative and frugal in other matters of life.
- about regenerating old lands, not conquering new ones, Jesus called it healing.
- Bryan McClarin calls it evacuation for the next world, when we should be focusing on this world.
- Island of Iona off Scotland, Celtic Christian history place. Celtic knot - symbolizes system of interdependence.
- How do we recognize we are part of bigger systems? and act our age?
- We've been making people dependent on some higher level of consumption dependent on higher technology.
- Need to practice religious permaculture
- The difference between being correct and being connected. Difference between being independently right and having right relationships.
- All'h - the very "huh" - breath.
Yahway - created to imitate breathing - inhalation and exhalation. Back to being breathed. God is being itself.
- You can only lead people as far as you yourself have gone. Need to be transformed.
- Many of our wars have been about how we name God.
- Whenever you transcend to a higher level of consciousness, you include what brought you there, the previous stages. If you can't include, honor, respect the previous stages, you haven't transcended.
- Storage and Flow - two words that preoccupy permaculture, we can teach you how to learn for yourself, how to store and flow, so simple, its hard t teach.
- Santa Fe means holy faith.
- How can this be taught in the seminars of the world? Very hard to get people and places open for teaching contemplative spirituality - it makes the organized religion unnecessary.
- Get big or get out - American attitude. Doesn't want the CAC to get any bigger. Whenever 2-3 of you gather in right relationship, "I am present" Once you move to the organizational level, exclusion starts happening because certain questions of insurance, policy, procedures, etc. come into play. Start being asked and the natural flow of things can't happen because unnatural questions are being asked. The alternative is to stay small and stay real. You have to rachet down your lifestyle, a simpler way of living.
- Permaculture seeks to see the world as relationship of brother and sisters.
- Bruno Barnheart. Owen Barfield - mentor of Tolkein and C.S. Lewis called it, "Original Participation" Through breathing, dancing, nature, sexuality, poetry, the promise of full and final participation. We have been in 500 years of the "desert of non-participation" of just words.
Q & A:
Loving people/creating first and using things to help people. Watch out that technology does not take the place of face to face relationships.
So much about responding to immediate danger. Brains not hardwired to look at things a year away. To move to the feeling of the immediate level requires a level of imagination. Practice-based rather than belief-based.
The person one needs to hear from is the person inside.
Allowing others to speak, not me. Better to ask people what they're feeling and thinking rather than telling them what you're feeling and thinking.
Going to somewhere new, leave home out of small world view. Art, music, dance, poetry, other ways of knowing beyond literal, left-brain consciousness is much larger than thinking. Its not irrational, its transrational. Going beyond words. Deep silence and then speak - see what wants to arise - quaker meetings.
Waking up together by sharing energy.
The magic and power that can be released through sheer apology. Until there is vulnerability from the dominant, imperial side, when finally capable of self-critical thinking and seeing own faults and asking and starting over.
"You can't see what you weren't told to look for," Brian McClaron, probably a necessary humiliation.
Bill Mullison - founder of Permaculture - grassroots movement return to local life.
Bless yourself, thank yourself. Walk around the block and say hello to anyone you meet. Get involved in doing things beyond the discussion, back to the physical, hands-on world.
Joan Halifax - Upaya Zen Center "I have not made my life, it is being made and evolving, trust in the darkness, we've only idealized light and gain. Both/and way of thinking.
Learned ignorance - learning that you don't know. Being comfortable with disorder and pain and finding God in it.
The Gaia meditation. Coming back to life.
Final Thoughts:
R.R.
Even a little bit of God is more than enough. The openess of heart.
J.M. All'h!
Ojai Foundation and Findhorn.
The Death and Resurrection of Earth. Earth as Christ.
Opening of the global hearth.
We are living at a time when we can once again see ourselves and Earth as sacred.
Look at your hand, know that this was once a fin, think of all that has shaped this hand in an unbroken series of events, your own human history. Our service to Earth is in your hand. Know that we belong and we are sacred.
Center for Sotacataline in Juarez, Mexico.
