EcoDharma Doula

Messages from the Edge

March 2024

(as cited in de Mille, 1991, p. 264)

If you missed the Feb 11 Earth Salon, we gathered as individual contributors to express the bounty of our collective (if you missed it here is a recap). Also, on Neutral Day last month, I shared inspiration from Itzhak Perlman about dealing with a symbolically broken string. This tale landed with some of you. From it, I learned a lesson in improvising with the unexpected. At the time, I was reading The Heart of the World, which is about searching for sanctuary in what appears to be a hellish realm (I highly recommend this book). There is considerable journey and path involved and improvising with uncertainty. This led to my reading two books (back and forth) on improvisation (Free Play by Nachmanovitch and Becoming Music by Miller and Lande), where I found the lead-in quote to this month’s Message from the Edge: yes, the exact quote was in both books in a display of how synchronicity (and improvisation itself) appears to work…through serendipity and repetition.

As civilization teeters on the verge of collapse, there is uncertainty about individual versus collective action. One of the foundations of improvisation is replacing limiting No/But responses with expansive Yes/And replacements. When hearing a new idea, instead of thinking, ‘No, that will never work,’ we could consider ‘Yes, and that could lead to other improvements!’ It is a bit like either/or both/and: we tend to think about duality despite our training in non-duality (or perhaps complementary duality) that expresses the space for accommodating contending forces. One example of these forces may be individual versus collective action. I hear arguments about personal responsibility versus system-wide change; both are essential. This is in our ‘current situation’ around top-down and bottom-up hierarchies. I hear many ‘that will never work’ responses from influential people we think of as leaders. My sense is we need both top-down and bottom-up.

This brings us to the lead-in quote for this month’s Message from the Edge: keep the channel open. Martha Graham has given us a most convincing argument for exercising our unique contributions. In the trillions of beings that have graced this Earth, we each have unique gifts to offer that have never and will never, be duplicated. If you wish to see individuals leading to collectivism in action, I urge you to look at the Feb 11 Earth Salon; the link is in the abovementioned recap. And with a tip to searching for Beyul, it turns out that besides opening our hearts to let Nature in, the real refugia is within us. To experience outer sacred spaces, we have some inner preliminaries that must be accomplished.

In our year of the Wood Dragon, a simple tweak of reflexively responding with a ‘Yes…and…’ might go far to realize some of the channels Wood Dragon years usher in. Keep the channels open!