Intentional Society: Glorious visions
Coming soon -- Season 4 starts with an orientation call for newcomers on October 2nd and first general session October 3rd.
Paul wrote to the Corinthians almost two thousand years ago,
“When I was a child, I spoke and thought and reasoned as a child. But when I grew up, I put away childish things.”
This is used religiously as an exhortation to maturation -- and yes, we gain many capabilities and benefits from maturing and socializing into the adult world. But, as with all things, there are also trade-offs and costs. The late great systems thinker Donella Meadows wrote,
“Children, before they are squashed by cynicism, are natural visionaries. They can tell you clearly and firmly what the world should be like. ... As they grow up, children learn that these visions are “childish” and stop saying them out loud. But inside all of us, if we haven’t been too badly bruised by the world, there are glorious visions.”
To want, to desire, often gets put in this same bucket. For children of a certain age, to see something beautiful and glorious is to want it -- the two are fused, with nothing between them. While it is to our benefit, overall, that we learn to deny some of our desires, many of us become so good at gaining distance from our feelings of want that we lose the vision that our desires would paint. Visions stuffed down can fade away.
With that present in our awareness, during last Sunday's season-finale session of Intentional Society we brought out some of the desires -- for ourselves, for others, for the world -- that we don't typically share in "normal" daily life. I laughed, I cried, I was inspired by the beauty, tenderness, and embodied wisdom that came out around the circle.
Paraphrasing into snippets here, people shared their desires to...
- reach a state of no longer holding my true self back
- more fully express, in every way, what I really am (vs what I wish I was)
- be less careful and allow more spontaneity in emotional embodied expression
- approach everything with more integrity and courage
- reconnect with some of that childhood visionary state of pre-cynicsm
- let go of fears of embarrassment holding us back
- find the fun in the challenge of what we’re desiring
- find inspiration in our non-human neighbors in nature, trees, water, birds
- bring the parts of ourselves we don’t like, bring those into wholeness as well
- shift to long-term thinking and perspective, increase responsibility and ownership
- be much more visible to each other, where walls become irrelevant, like stars situated in the galaxies
- be able to and allowed to sense into the bigger mysteries of life, and live accordingly
- have real courage, integrity, honor in institutional leadership people that get it and aren’t hedging all the time
- have more leadership and followership in myself, to extend faith and not always be so hyper-skeptical
- appreciate the present moment, and at the same time, wider scopes of space and time
- see that when something bothers me about a person/groups, it’s something in me that I can’t accept
- make space for all beings to find the love they crave, that they’ve missed, that they need
I desire for you some experience of resonance, as you scan these expressions of longing. Do you dare to stay open and present to your deep wishes? In what space and with whom can you share, incubate, nurture that resonant childlike wisdom?
I'll share more about Intentional Society's status and direction next week, but I just felt as if I had to come back to this first and share these with you. Maybe this actually was the best way to get across a sense, something of the true spirit, of what we're learning and doing together. We're making a space of community where we can sense and live into our real, authentic, integrated selves. Whatever else flows downstream of that, these headwaters spring from the well of becoming the selves whom our childhood selves dreamt of being.
Cheers,
James