I am in Athens whilst it burns, in Europe while it scrambles to find its ground as its foundations shift, and in the East in this year of citizen-led movements that have cracked things open to an uncertain but newly oxygenated future. In being placed in this way, I am learning to see with new eyes and find some sense of stillness in the movement. I notice that I am continually being asked to let go of ideas or identities that are not longer relevant and at the same time to tap deep into my roots, to access what is important in my lineage, my values, my own soul's calling.

As I move around the world to learn and unlearn, and offer what I have between East and West, I am struck by how inspiration, friendship, action and a radical hope for a new world is spreading and taking root beyond the borders of place, across generations and time zones.

the new radicals

Forty-five years ago, Martin Luther King spoke about a radical revolution of values. Today we are seeing New Radicals creating collective ways to activate, nurture and sustain values that serve people and the planet. The Observer has recently named The Finance Innovation Lab which is one of the initiatives I am part of co-creating, one of Britain's New Radical ideas. Why? I think it, along with the others that are highlighted, are creating environments where we can activate the values and simple behaviours that bring out the best in us. Or as Louise Hooper, a funder and participant of the Lab, says "places like the Lab offer innovative approaches and values needed in order to really change things at a systemic level."

I think the radical part is that we are invited to water that which sustains us at a deep level and imagine and create ways of doing this together. Even things as complex and daunting as new financial systems that dare to serve both people and the planet.

"growing culture"

Since the protests last week in Athens, I have been uncovering many initiatives here, ones that are seeded by citizens and groups who are collectively re-imagining their culture. As the systems here quickly disintegrate, there is a collective memory of the famine in Athens during the war. At the same time, citizens are self-organizing and supporting each other in important and creative ways. There are collective kitchens who are pooling resources and new urban gardens such as the Edible Landscape at the Athens Airport! These are the seeds of the new culture that bring memories of the past and memories from the future, into a new timeline.

Reconnecting to land, traditions, indigenous plants, and local cooking re-members generational wisdom and grounds it back into the earth of the present. It reminds me of the work of Santropol Roulant in Montreal, bringing together generations and culture to cultivate community, nourishing tummies and souls, activating our human potential and building the kinds of relationships that create life lines. There is an important alchemical process in seeing with new eyes what is already there and transformating it through touching it, engaging with it. It's taking the soil and dirt of the everyday and ordinary and transforming it into the gold of what sustains us at a very deep level. It is the Alchemy of Community.

This kind of heart-felt, soul-nourishing citizen-led stuff leads to something beyond change. It is more like transformation where we ourselves are transformed, in how we think and live and relate, as we step into the unchartered territory of creating new pathways for something new to emerge. Like a collective chrysallis.

social evolution

An incredible example of transformation is the renewal of a devastated Detroit/Motor City through people getting their hands in the soil of their lives. Citizens in Detroit have re-named it the City of Hope, and have developed 1,600 urban gardens and a culture of resourcefulness and beauty that is a beacon for what is possible when we get together:

"I mean, along with growing food, we are growing culture. We're growing community... to make sure that our existence is no longer threatened because of being marginalized in a system that's killing us and we ain't got no say-so in how we live as human beings. So developing consciousness, I think, is very important. It's just not a warm and fuzzy garden, you know. We're not just growing food, we're becoming part of this process of existence in the whole ecology system that exists not just in the garden, but has existed since the beginning," says Wayne Curtis, co-founder of Feedom Freedom Growers.

Elders like Grace Lee Boggs, the Chinese-American philosopher and activist who has seen almost a century of life offers a unique perspective of history and a view to the future. Having lived through the social revolution of the 1960s alongside Martin Luther King, she is now stewarding what she terms today's social evolution. She sees people deciding they are going to create new concepts of economy, new concepts of governance, new concepts of education, and that they have the imagination and capacity within themselves to do that. They are doing so with a consciousness not of "rights" or of "solving problems", but of evolving as a humanity. 

Place-based movements like Detroit, Montreal and Athens, along with issue-based ones like The Finance Innovation Lab have in common the audacity to question what is, the imagination to dream new possibilities and the practices to unleash our potential. New Radicals, it seems to me, get their hands in the soil of the change they wish to be. As Grace Boggs says,

"There's something about people beginning to seek solutions by doing things for themselves; that we have that capacity to create the world anew."

Here is the great little video that really shows the energy of what the Lab is catalysing in Britain, and how is it already organically reaching its tentacles out to Greece, the US etc... Click here for the video: Finance Lab video (you can hear me in the voice over as part of the Hara Practice Collaborative)

And if you are you interested in how this New Radicals idea came about and who else won, here are the really amazing ideas and projects in the UK that also won this award - 50 New Radicals - it's pretty impressive to see the creative responses to a rapidly changing world, economy etc..

awakening
the artist
the girl with the swirl
who wears two kinds of plaid
and dances in the light down the streets of Paris

awake to her mother's thrift and swish
the vogue in the home
a pioneer mentor, perceptive and clear
with deft, elegant fingers
hand-making our costumes for Hallowe'en
crafting strawberry birthday cakes and Easter egg poems

awake to her father's protection
torn between roles imposed and the heart's desire
companion to speed, endurance, agility, skill
patient caretaker, omelettes for breakfast
he takes a piano lesson from his daughter
and listens, watches, asks and listens

these energy lines run through me
like the stems of my parent's roses
pruned into glory
...to simply be glorious
  in the daylight sun
  and the moonlit rest

the scent of beauty wafts through
the practical, our every day
and lets the mystery unfold
  as petals peel from
  the dust of life

in search of my mother's garden
my fathers' poetry of movement
  the artist's palette is revealed

tracking and tracing an inheritance
through tended gardens
acts of love
through stories of diva aunties
and mandarin patriarchs
lay-ministers, painters and poets, called to serve
  as mystics in society

remembrances
i am awakening to these remembrances
  threaded in the lining of my soul

silent ululations
ancient and elemental
call through this membrane of Light that is my body
   transforming pain - deep and embedded -
with luminous love

the scent of attention, intention
becomes a mantra
flowing through my veins, cells, sinews, limbs
melting the stiffness of calcified stories
just as Aegean waters caress rough cliffs
     into soft sands
feeding, cleansing, nourishing, purifying
     my silken Earth

my skin is raw -
   new to this world
I stand here naked
my art, a protection
this protection, an art

“I’m right here with you - in you,” Source whispers
   and offers her shimmering kaleidescope of Truth
“In Sacred Passages, we are never alone
in this circle of wisdom
we are midwives to each other’s wholeness
warriors in the blending of shadow and Light."

"It is a first act of courage
    an invitation to intimacy
that initiates a pilgrimage to the Temple of the Possible
honour what is most precious
and let the collective field love you back into coherence ~
this is an act of will and act of surrender."

we look each other in the eye,
     through the eye of our storms

veil after veil is lifted
the path is revealed
to welcome you home.

(download)

Click here to download:

pilgrimage_to_intimacy.zip (15.18 MB)

this poem was written on may 22, 2009 at the Art of Protection, at Axladitsa where i met Yitzhak. the invitation was his, and from life herself, to take a deep dive of initiation in and through intimacy and partnership. an invitation for our souls to journey ~ together and on our own - to find our way closer to home. i realize i write a lot about coming home, finding home, returning home ~ and i believe this might just be my ultimate quest.

(download)

Click here to download:

hermitage-of-the-soul-GJLKPuo7ku9vK8K7WOn9.zip (11.75 MB)

I have been living in a kaliva for the past three weeks. A kaliva is a sacred structure in Greece - a place that hosts the alchemy between people and place which produces the golden-green oil of this region.  Kalivas are the stone dwellings Greek families use during the olive harvest.  In past generations, families would not only store their olives here but hand-press them into oil using large flat stones found on the land. Kalivas swell with activity, dictated by the cycles of living and dying, where the rituals of harvesting result in the olive oil that sustains households and fuels the future.

The kaliva in which I am staying has been owned by our friend Panayotis and his family for many generations. It is tucked into a warm slope of land, kissed by the sun and protected from the wind. It is filled with the warm energy of a family who loves their land, and who touches it regularly with their hands and hearts.

The kaliva rests on the ley-line that connects the Aegean Sea to Axladitsa, the home of Maria and Sarah with whom I am a partner in creating many things. I am now understanding that through our Living Wholeness work, we are creating another kind of ley-line between people and places ~ connecting the emerging newness in the world, with ancient knowledge and the wisdom within us and around us. We are finding that our work is a way of re-membering patterns of living life as aligned with Life and this kaliva is like a lung, helping me to stop and breathe this remembrance in through the skin and soil of my body.

Being here is a deep breath.  

In the midst of all our travels and movement between the emerging social movements in Greece, in the UK and in Israel, the kaliva offers a pause to connect to the natural rhythms of life, and quietly into my own internal rhythms. As the fault lines open in so many of our human-made systems, they reveal a gaping wound - our longing for connection with the pulse and mystery of life. We have forgotten that we are an essential part of a glorious wholeness and that we have a part to play.  The kaliva does not ask me to retreat from the realities of a chaotic world. Rather, it offers a deeply monastic proposal, to come into community with all that is around me.

It calls out a kind of authenticity and awareness in me to engage with these complexities, to enter these questions of what it is being asked of me and of us, from a different place within myself.

I have been living in this little hermitage surrounded by trees over 500 years old, embraced by the tangible love planted by families who live with the reference of the land and, as Panayotis says, with the companionship and intelligence of the olive tree. It has reminded me that I too have a place in this eco-system, not so much as a someone indigenous to this place in the way of Panayotis and his lineage, but as a creature who cultivates reverence by the very nature of becoming more and more present - deeply present - to life's unfolding.  

This practice demands a kind of sacred re-structuring, a renovation of my own ley-lines deep within my soul ~ and a faith that I am being, rather than doing, the work that needs to be done.

photos by Jeraldene Lovell-Cole, Sarah Whiteley and Vanessa Reid

To read the story of coming into relationship with this place and the new place within me  through the teachings of one particular tree...see The Altar of a Tree.

there is an ancient olive tree that sits outside the kaliva.
she looks as though is she is just there ~
  living, growing, traveling through the seasons of the year
    the seasons of Time.
lifetimes of wind have touched her bark
  eternities of sun have bleached her leaves.

how many sparrows have sung oracles in her mass of wild leaves?
how many olives have seeded, birthed and flowered for the glory of fruition,
only to return,
   miraculously, to the soil of this tree's soul?

she offers her shade, freely
  creates oxygen, as a lifeline.
    she is beautiful, naturally.

sloping down the slight hill, she is balanced and bent
    wide and self-contained.
she is, quite simply, living life as she must,
  with all that she has,
    unmatched, humble and glorious.

every morning, as the sun rises
  I sit and breathe her in.
and at night, after the dark walk through these busy woods
of wild boar and waning moonlight
  I land here, at her altar,
     in her embrace ~
safe in her guardianship.

I have so recently come to see the magnificence of this tree

she is magnificent not only for her absolute generosity
  her perfect imperfections
    her authentic life of being exactly what she is

but because she reminds me
  that i, too,
    can live my life as a prayer.

a young man burns himself alive
no longer willing to be imprisoned
by rules that are not his

a young woman places a tent outside her home
she can no longer afford this life
so chooses one that is yet unknown

webs of friendships of those who have not yet met
years of conversation, damp, stagnating, hopeful
movements, laying still
rise
as dynasties and despair crumble

and in the heart of a holy city
Che Guevera’s image unfurls
down the side of an abandoned building
and the pulse of a country divided, quickens
could we occupy a different kind of future?

indignados, revolutionaries
everyday people
are joining the evolution

grandfathers, artists, single mothers, students
gather in circles, in Squares
all over the world
revealing a long forgotten constellation

the boulevards and plazas are crackling with life
limned by death, by the hands of the dying
but reclaimed, our streets become
gracious forums of encounter
and unexpected intimacies

we find ourselves cooking up conversations
by the fire of our re-lit hearts
looking around in disbelief we ask
where have we been?
we are so many

the global world cafe opens its doors
to a Syrian youth in exile
who speaks with an Israeli innovator
they are witnessed by a young mystic from Iran
in the womb of a community without borders

the cleansing tears of young men who love life
drop into the stillness of a new current

this is not a financial crisis
this is not a governance crisis
but a crisis of the human heart

hearts aflame
we source a deeper currency
so that we may find our way back home.

~Rumi

today the Palestinian Authority submitted its application for full statehood to the UN. it is a deeply significant moment and highly complex because of history, neighbours, timing.  yet underneath this is a question that is popping up all over the world.... 

if a people wish to self-define, why do they need permission from the UN or an external body? who is to say whether a people are a nation or not? what kind of authority is needed from the outside ~  and what kind of authority can we claim for ourselves from the inside?

mahatma gandhi modeled these questions in his life and invited the many to join in - he called it swaraj, which means self-rule or self-governance. his was a movement seeded during the occupation of india by the british empire.  swaraj is an incredible testament to the collective power of aligning our inner values with our outer actions; it is a practice of integrity and a practice of hand-crafting our lives. it is a movement to regenerate new reference points, systems, and structures that enable  individual and collective self-development that is aligned with life.  

collective entrepreneurship

 we are part of an unprecedented collective self-defining unfolding in the world right now.  we are witnessing people taking their lives into their own hands - in french we say entreprendre, to take things into our own hands.

in European squares, people are coming together to model new forms of "active democracy". in cities all over israel, they are protesting, talking, and taking action towards a fundamentally different future than that which the state propagates.  and are witness to hundreds of thousands of people in the arab world demanding and creating new forms of expression and participation in their own lives, and the lives of their communities..

this massive collective entrepreneurship is re-shaping the flow of power, resources. re-shaping our inner and outer states such that we are authoring our own lives, and doing so collectively.  the ground has moved and there are new openings and new edges.  these openings are the places for new conversations and new forms of relationship, ones that break the reliance on outsourcing our lives to others and instead invites us to be brave, to live life as the lover of life, and be wililng to howl.

liberating structures

my grandfather, Escott Reid, was part of a wave of institutional activists or tempered radicals who, in the 1940s-50s, set up the World Bank, NATO and the UN after the horror of two world wars.. he was also very wary of "the persistence of existing institutions" and in his later years, he spoke of these same institutions whose structures were intended to prevent wars needing to be dismantled as they lose sight of their original mission. he was aware of the tendency to persist to serve primarily their own needs and interests.

institutions are no longer the place from which we must ask permission for our autonomy. in fact, many of them are in need of our help to hospice them, to bring them to conscious closure or find a new purpose. now is not a time of  "structural reform" but rather, of structural transformation - and i definitely feel it within my own life. it is frightening to let go of the structures that i have looked to for security - the idea of certain kind of family or having a certain kind home, or what work should look like. 

so where do i find my sense of security? can i create my very own "security council" mandated to help me keep moving with the flow of how life is calling me forward?  what are the structures or ideas or archetypes out of which we are now breaking?  how do we liberate our structures so that more love and depth and relationship can be freed?  how do we sit with the pain of so much letting go - and of the stretch into the new? 

perhaps we are witnessing the UN in an iconic moment as much as we are witnessing Palestine and ourselves.  it is a massive shift in where power lies.  what kind of authority do we claim as peoples of this Earth, at this potent time of active resurgence, to transform our realities to be aligned with life? 

dare we self-define and author our lives from that broken-open place of the lover of life? lukewarm won't do. there is courage involved....