Persephone Arbour

Guest post: SUMMER THOUGHTS, by David Spangler

. . . There is one theme that has been rattling around in my brain for a couple of weeks, one that I’d like to develop more fully in the months ahead, and that is the theme of participation and partnership.

Consider a small town in which everyone has a house and a garden and all the houses are clustered into small neighborhoods separated by hedges. People are aware that they are in a town but it serves more as a backdrop to their everyday lives than as a true community. Everyone is busy attending to their own affairs, their own gardens, and their own homes, with some attention left over for their immediate neighbors.

But then one day a discovery is made. There are underground wires running between all the houses and not just the ones in a particular neighborhood cluster either. The whole town seems to be interconnected in ways no one had suspected. Furthermore, these wires are attached to a peculiar instrument that had always been in the house but which had not seemed to do anything, so folks had just been ignoring it. Searching about, they found old dusty manuals that suggested that these devices, called “telephones,” could be used to talk over a distance across the hedges to people in other houses, even people in neighborhoods on the far side of town. Suddenly the sense of being part of a whole town became that much more real.

Unfortunately, they also discovered that many of the wires had been broken by the digging and plowing that people had been doing in their own fields and around their homes. If we really want to have a whole town, the people said to each other, we need to fix these connections so we can talk to each other. And this is what they did.

However, they discovered even this was not enough. Interconnected though they might be and although they were now communicating and aware of each other in new ways, they began to realize that to truly be a town they had to build it together. Communication by itself was not sufficient for community. A level of mutual participation, caring, and co-creativity was also required. For the town was more than just a collection of houses and neighborhoods; it was a collaborative creation, a shared consciousness and identity.

A few weeks ago I took part in the annual Lindisfarne Fellows gathering. The Lindisfarne Association is a gathering of scientists, economists, business people, contemplatives and mystics, artists, political activists, and educators all of whom are working at the cutting edge of cultural transformation. Since its founding in 1974, it has been at the forefront of work being done in a number of fields to foster and promote a worldview that is holistic, ecological, and based on the interaction of complex, dynamical systems. In the language of my parable, these are people who have been actively rediscovering the buried wiring between the houses and the neighborhoods and promoting the idea that we are all living in one interconnected town. Along with many other groups and individuals over the past forty years, they have helped make this idea commonplace in our society, even if its implications and potentials have not been fully understood or implemented yet.

Many of the Fellows are now in their late fifties, sixties or seventies, although new, younger people have been invited to join, and there is much talk about passing on the torch. The holistic worldview—or what Lindisfarne would call the “Gaian worldview”—while widely accepted is still not yet the foundation for decision-making in the halls of government and business, though the trend is in that direction. So there is much work still to be done. But the most important work from my point of view is not merely in establishing for good and all that we live in a holistic world in which all of life (all the neighborhoods) is interdependent and interconnected in profound and complex ways. Having established that we are, in fact, citizens of a township called Gaia or Earth, the next great task is to learn how to be participants, collaborators and co-creators with the other neighborhoods that make up this world and in the process fixing the connections that our human activities, particularly in recent years, have allowed to become broken.

For make no bones about it, we live in a broken world, though one that I feel can be repaired. The connections between parts of ourselves, between ourselves and others (particularly those different racially, ethnically, politically, economically, or culturally from ourselves), between ourselves and the kingdoms of nature, and between ourselves as physical beings and the subtle or non-physical realms of life and intelligence are nowhere near as healthy, whole, or vital as they could be. Much of this “wiring” has been buried and forgotten or outright broken, leaving us struggling within a fragmented—and fragmenting—consciousness of the world.

This to me is a huge issue, and it is not solved simply by accepting and believing in a holistic paradigm. It is solved by collaborative mind and action, a reaching out across our boundaries to create wholeness through, at the very least, the use of love, caring, and appreciation. It is also helped by developing an appreciation for the many ways in which we are connected and the nature of some of the “subtle” wiring that we’ve overlooked for decades in our technological and materialistic culture. That is a topic, Subtle Activism, which I want to explore in future David’s Desks.

I suppose my summer thought then is that as challenging as the work has been over the past five decades for thousands of people to articulate and foster a holistic, ecological worldview—a worldview that has yet to be fully accepted—the real work, the “town-building” work, is yet ahead of us. If the holistic paradigm has asked us to revision and redefine the nature of the world around us, the next step asks us to revision and redefine ourselves in co-creative and participatory relationship to that world. It means accepting levels of both surrender and openness on the one hand and power and capacity on the other with which we may feel uncomfortable and unfamiliar. It asks us to step up as partners to the world, learning to “think like a planet.”

For more information on David’s work and writing visit www.lorian.org