BeingChange

BeingChange

WELCOME

BeingChange is about creating a space – a sangha, a circle, a council - to explore together ways to be psycho-spiritually prepared for
any and all future planetary outcomes, while being lovingly and courageously present to the here and now. It's about envisioning a
viable, compassionate, just future we can live our way into. A future that's so compelling we want to contribute our best, most passionate efforts to making it a reality - even in the face of possibly insurmountable odds. Please join us and become part of the circle.

Friday, September 20, 2013

Must Reads

Bill Plotkin continues to be, in my mind, one of the most important people on the planet – his work is that innovative, that necessary, and that potentially transformational. I feel moved to give him yet another mention in this blog.

Bill has written three books and, while each can stand alone as a brilliant contribution to evolving humans and restoring the planet, combined they offer a template for human/nature healing and wholing that is of truly epic proportions.

Creating the context for the other two books, Nature and the Human Soul “introduces a visionary ecopsychology of human development that reveals how fully and creatively we can mature when soul and wild nature guide us.”* Humanity needs to grow up and out of its current stage of (pathological!) adolescence, and in this volume Bill “presents a model for a human life span rooted in the cycles and qualities of the natural world, a blueprint for individual development that ultimately yields a strategy for cultural transformation.”

Soulcraft “is a trail guide for the mystical descent into the underworld of soul: what the descent is, why it is necessary, how to recognize the call to descend, how to prepare for the descent, what the process looks and feels like, and what practices initiate and accelerate the descent and maximizes the soul-quickening benefits of the journey.” This is a process that is sorely missing from modern day culture with devastating consequences.

In Wild Mind we discover that “our human psyches possess astonishing resources that wait within us, but we might not even know they exist until we discover how to access them and cultivate their powers, their untapped potentials and depths.” It shows us thatthe key to reclaiming our original wholeness...is to fully embody our multifaceted wild minds, commit ourselves to the largest, soul-infused story we're capable of living, and serve the greater Earth community.
These three volumes embody a hero's journey of initiation into our fullest human potential and a truly interdependent relationship with the natural world. They are beautifully written, deeply heartfelt and infused with decades of scholarship and the wisdom of experience. I hope you read them and then read them again. You can learn more about Bill, his books, and the Animas Valley Institute here.

* Quotes are taken from the books. I could not have said it better.

Monday, May 13, 2013

Deena Responds

The following is a response sent to me by Deena Metzger after I asked her permission to use her photograph for the previous post. Please do read the post so you will understand the context. Deena is one of my favorite wise, compassionate, and creative elders and I encourage everyone to visit her web site and immerse yourselves in her work. Thank you, Deena, for who you are and for all you do.

Deena Metzger

"For a year, a dear friend and I regularly visited several animals, a polar bear, a gorilla and several elephants incarcerated in the Los Angeles Zoo, an hour’s drive for us. Billy, the elephant, had evident PTSD, swaying back and forth endlessly, listlessly; no matter how hard we tried, we could never indicate our presence to him though we hoped, over time, we might make a difference. There was, in contrast to what is said here (note: in the previous post), little left of him, but that is exactly why we tried as best as we could to reach him. The polar bear, Dreamer, never noticed either. But, the gorilla, that we called Miko, did notice and we bonded over the weeks. He engaged us in elaborate games of recognition and it seemed that for at least an hour he was relieved of his terrible isolation and confinement where he was also subjected to the on-going taunts of most of the human visitors.

The two female elephants who were friends and companions, and then Dreamer and Miko died within months of each other. We don’t know why Dreamer died. One of the elephants was sent to another facility, and her friend languished here. When the friend was finally returned, it was too late. Her friend died and she died soon afterwards. Heartbreak is a real disease. As real and terrible as trauma. Miko was sent to another facility as well — to be a breeder. He died within a few short months.

We had visited these animals in the ways we would visit a family member who might be incarcerated. We wanted to extend love to what others might see as damaged and not worthy of notice, or too painful to see. Some people, understandably, cannot bear going to the zoo, do not want to support such practices. But what about the animals who are imprisoned there? Heart contact -- with as much or as little survives -- is necessary. Heart contact is a medicine. Heart contact can begin the process of restoration of the earth. Since the poster, so much more has been added to my life than a simple breast. Bringing the poster into the world, and becoming a healer, I am so much more than I was once."

Thursday, May 2, 2013

Alive In the World...

I just finished a novel where one of the main characters survived the loss of a breast to cancer.

One day her granddaughter happened upon her in the bath, seeing the “still angry and red puckered flesh” where her breast had been.

“You notice that something's different about me,” my grandmother said.
I nodded. I did not have the words, at that age, to explain what I wasn't seeing, but I understood that it was not what should have been. I pointed to the wound. “It's missing,” I said.
My grandmother smiled, and that was all it took for me to stop seeing the scar, and to recognize her again.
“Yes,” she said. “But see how much of me is left?” (1)

I've been trying to come to terms with what I believe is the reality of Bill McKibben's assertion that “the chance that we will in fact leave to the future a world at least as rich in possibilities as the world that was left to us is nil. As in, not going to happen.”(2) That the world has changed in ways that can never be recovered. And that there's actually nothing I can do about it. I have to accept it; I have to let it go.

Yes, says Grandmother. But look how much of me is left.

But I can't let it go. It's unacceptable. It's unbearable. All I can see is the scar. To see otherwise feels
like a betrayal, giving in. Giving up. Yet, is it a betrayal to let go of something that's gone? Should it be mourned? Yes. Should it be remembered? Absolutely, in intricate detail, so our future generations will know what they aren't seeing.

But what about that which is still left and which is still rapidly disappearing? How do I stop seeing only the scar and recognize my grandmother again? “Once something's spoiled, it's easier to throw up your hands and walk away, which will be the great temptation for us,” says McKibben.(3) Indeed, I have been so tempted. So tempted.

But I remember a quote by Julia Butterfly Hill that went like this:
“If you’re the only person left, as long as your hope is committed in action, then hope is alive in the world.” As long as any of us keep love, compassion, beauty, peace, the sacred...alive in our hearts and we do not walk away from that which is “damaged”, then these will remain alive in the world. And if enough of us can do this, maybe the cancer will stop spreading.



This is a poster of Deena Metzger whose work I often cite. It is available for purchase on her web site. She transformed her scar into a winding branch with leaves, grapes, and a bird. Photo is by Hella Hammid.

¹Jodi Picoult - “The Storyteller” pg. 365
²Bill McKibben – Essay “Something Braver Than Trying to Save the World” in Moral GroundEthical Action For a Planet in Peril, pg.175. Kathleen Dean Moore & Michael P. Nelson,eds.
³Ibid. Also see his book “eaarth – Making a Life on a Tough New Planet”


Thursday, April 11, 2013

My Bottom Line...

...make assisting the Great Turning my priority over everything else.

Over the past few weeks I've been making a list of what I imagine are essential tasks humanity must take on to heal, evolve, and to restore our planet. This is my way of even beginning to discern how to move through the uncertainty and complexity of our world today. I wanted something around which I could set my personal intentions for how to be and what to do, and then let everything else go. My bottom-line essential task, which encompasses all the others I've come up with so far, is to make assisting the Great Turning my priority over everything else.

What else makes sense?

Everything from Nobel Prize winning scientists to indigenous prophecy to our own deepest knowing tells us that we are being called to a hero's journey of epic proportions. Refusal of that call is not an option yet we all do it to some measure, and some far more than others. Despite our best efforts, and for many reasons, no one I know of is completely free from the gravitational pull of the old paradigm. We live between two worlds and I keep asking myself: what WILL free us – what will free ME - to follow the call as if all life depended on it which, of course, it does.

How do we begin to make assisting the Great Turning our priority over everything else? My bottom line: we have to grow up. Or, as Bill Plotkin puts it in his brilliant book “Nature and the Human Soul,” we need to become authentic, initiated adults and (re)create authentic, initiated cultures with respect for the already quite authentic Earth. Duane Elgin conducted a survey where an overwhelming amount of responses placed the developmental age of our human race at adolescence, and a dysfunctional adolescence at that. I think this is an apt analogy in many, many ways.

And how do we begin to grow up? We heed the call and step over the threshold. Imagining what that might look like is what BeingChange is about and I will be exploring all this and more. Every person's journey is unique of course and I want to hear all about yours. Here's a preview of some of what is on my “road of trials” - the series of tests, tasks, or ordeals that the person must undergo to begin the transformation:
Healing my addictions.
Doing the despair and empowerment work, learning to keep my heart open under any circumstances.
Making the descent into soul.
Placing myself within the larger contexts of nature and cosmos.
Practicing spiritual activism.
Discovering and doing my “true work” in the world.

What can you imagine are some of yours?