Over the weeks prior to our presentation on Orcas, I kept feeling that we were heading into a conversation that was on the other side of a threshold we had not yet crossed. That threshold was being the one to ask the people we were meeting with to let go of everything they knew and to open their hearts and listen to the voices of the young people as we had heard them in the Listening Sessions. I thought of the Hopi prophecy called "We Are The Ones We Have Been Waiting For."
It begins with
"You have been telling the people that this is the eleventh hour. Now you must go back and tell them that this is the hour."
I do not feel a sense of doom and gloom when I hear this - as if this is the final hour...but instead I feel a tremendous rush of possibility. All of the work to bring about a new vision on the planet that has been going on for so long now is ready to coalesce. The message is saying that now is the time.
In another section, it says "There is a river flowing now very fast. It is so great and swift that there are those who will be afraid. They will try to hold on to the shore....
Know the river has its destination. The elders say we must let go of the shore, push off into the middle of the river, keep our eyes open, and our heads above the water. See who is in there with you and celebrate."
Let go of the shore. See who is in there with you and celebrate! As I reread this, I knew that this was the wisdom we needed to carry us all across the threshold. We needed this energy and this message to pave the way for the vision we were going to share. We decided to open the presentation with Stella reading it to everyone.
I closed my eyes and saw myself standing in the room with everyone there and I looked with the deepest possible love I could feel into each person's eyes and celebrated their presence, rejoiced in their willingness to let go of the "known", and felt a tremendous sense of connection to them for seeing with their hearts.
It IS the hour!
Evolutionary Pioneers
"If you are trying to do something genuinely new, you have to be a pioneer, you have to be a change-agent. In order to contribute to creating the future, you need to be aligned with the very edge of evolution...at this particular time in history, for new evolutionary stages, structures, and potentials to emerge requires rare and heroic men and women who have awakened to the conviction that this next step needs to happen and that we're the ones who have to take it."
~ Andrew Cohen
As I read this, I thought of the men and women on Orcas Island who did not question the content of our presentation, but instead the first question asked was, "How can we make this happen?" It was one of the most moving moments of my life. In the world today, the obstacles and the old ways look like skyscrapers, mountains, invincible forces. The patterns of doing things a specific way have been so deeply etched into the landscape for so long that it seems they are destined to continue.
But what I saw in the hearts of those who listened, were people who had let go of the shore and who saw a different possibility. They embraced a new seed in education. Without knowing what that seed could grow into, they felt its freshness, its aliveness and their was a willingness to open to it.
They left the discussion that night saying that they wanted to be the ones who would take the next steps. Rare and heroic. Indeed!
It felt so wonderful to be floating there with them.
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