Blogs

This morning I sat down and began to write about a common vision for community. My sense of community is focused around inner growth and developing unity.

This draft has omitted the important financial and labor contribution components.

So, below is a very early rough draft.

I am wondering if anyone else has any visions they would be willing to share? If so, please send these to howard@mcq.com.

**** COMMUNITY ****

We affirm, through our conscious intent, to build and sustain relationships that encourage co-operation and foster trust and respect.

As individuals, we hold ourselves responsible for developing a depth of understanding of our own unresolved and un-integrated feelings, emotions and fears.

We as individuals are also motivated to combine into co-operative relationships (partnerships, families, pods in a community, communities, etc.). While participating in these relationships and working to accomplish and realize shared goals, friction and conflict is inevitable. A core belief we hold is that conflict arises first and foremost as an internal energetic disturbance/imbalance. In addressing and working to resolve this inner conflict, we agree that the primary emphasis is to address the triggered inner conflict, not the external stimulus that serves to trigger the conflict. We agree to try out, test and, when appropriate, adopt various tools and modalities and become trained in facilitating inner growth.

Some examples of this lifestyle include:

Encouraging each other see the behavior patterns that short-circuit unity and lead to feelings of separation.

Encouraging each other to open-up and re-examine the stories and underlying beliefs that empower our shadowy fears.

Encouraging an ongoing adeptness in knowing when to be gentle and when to be direct and fierce to awaken ourselves and another.

Bringing forward our authentic voice and willingness to dialog, to encourage our individual and collective needs to coalesce into a shared vision, and into joyous activities where we can express and exchange our passions and appreciations.

© 2010 Howard McQueen

We give away our power to continue dynamically authoring our life

forgetting we are always @Choice to step into and embody our innate authority.

Most of the time, we become challenged to be @Choice

over the small things,

like feeling interrupted or not feeling heard.

And, because of past patterns that have left us with blind spots,

we blindly repeat patterns that create separation

from our inner, authentic authority.

It is really important to see what is really going on

in order to effect a shift in these victim-perpetrator stories.

If I fail to step into my courage and loose my voice

because I have the sensation that someone/something external has challenged my authority,

I have no business becoming frustrated or being mad or holding someone else responsible.

This merely perpetuates the originating experience when, as a young child, I was in a position of powerlessness.

That I am still behaving as if someone can seemingly wield power over me

reveals that I am still stuck in a repeating pattern,

that I still believe in the old story, thus perpetuating it,

that I am not remembering that just a touch of courage and encouragement

will dissolve all these stories

and allow me to be in touch with my innate, authentic authority.

This authority rests in love: love for self, love for the heart of humankind, love for speaking the truth and embodying what Parker Palmer calls

“a fidelity to the best potentials of the human spirit”.

Fidelity has such a musical, energetic quality, such a sense of tuning into the wondrous sensations of what the soul, through our Anam Cara, holds in store for us.

When we are willing to be in the moment and realize that we are, even in the extreme discomfort of challenging circumstances, fully @Choice.

Granted, life can at any moment send just about anything our way. That we are at best, a navigator and, to continue writing our experience, we must be grand interpreters to open wide and bring in all life offers us. We so often forget that we are written into the great Shakespearean playing out of life.

What a most incredible ride, that we can indeed be @Choice and have a sense of authority, without having any degree of control. Not an easy consciousness to embody and hold steady, where there is so much distracting surface noise and agitation.

Love is our softening agent, allowing is to be @Choice and free to accept life and constantly navigate to stay in the dynamic flow of the unknown.