On the other hand, I have been gifted healing technologies that enable me to send healing energies to others.

I have been reminded by wise elders that when political fragmentation seems to be destroying hard-won resources and capacities that the roots of these actions are probably informed by trauma and the solutions are likely to emerge through healing and strengthening relationships.

Another Integral evolutionary admires an article that appreciates two apparently conflicting points of view for their individual merits and searches for the possibility that they may both be able to serve a greater good/context without tearing each other apart.

And I have been asked to contribute integrally informed frameworks, modes and ideas about living the transformative learning in a community that wants to teach others.

All of this leads me to be curious about the need for us to practice deep awareness, meditation, and compassion, to resolve our own shadows and trauma.

Witnessing all this turbulence (both positive and negative) within communities wanting to practise the most intelligent behaviors for global wellbeing, suggests to me that with such a VUCA world we will have to adapt to many life conditions. And those life conditions arising from consciousness and culture will be exacerbated by life conditions arising from floods, fire and climate change. We are on a journey to control ourselves even as we realize that we cannot control the environmental contexts in which we find ourselves.

Is the lesson that in order to adapt with any degree of wisdom we will need to transform our worldviews, perspectives and capacities to meet the levels of complexity that we have created for ourselves? Perhaps, by investing in the transformation processes we know are calling us, we may then be positioned so that we can actually regenerate from the inside out – self/ others/place/planet?

Click here to read the full Thought Piece.

On the 11th of September 2001, when three planes not only crashed but destroyed the lives of thousands of people, they also woke up the world to our profound interconnectedness. The Future that day brought both deep shadow and unexpected light.

I didn’t realize how intently the Future was calling me as I watched reality TV be invented at an unimaginable scale. I sat staring at the screen confounded by hours of replays, horror and global consternation. I imagined years and decades of disastrous fallout from this event.

I imagined economic meltdown, global depression and dis-ease everywhere. I felt the negative effects ripple out from NYC to the rest of the world. What would happen to world trade? How would fear pollute relationships? What would blame do to international agreements?

But the Future had many ideas much more powerful than my fearful contractions. Within hours of viewing the twin tours implode, I was reminded about all that I had learned about community, preparing for a disaster we had called the Y2K bug – a computer malfunction that predicted the failure of global energy systems and the dimming of lights and energy utilities worldwide.

But that disaster taught us about a key paradox embedded in the laws of complexity – that if you change 10-15% of a system, then the rest of it “changes for free”.  Along with many other technology service providers who attended to overcoming this human-made Y2K problem,  I watched 99% of the world’s lights turned on for the celebrations of the Year 2000. It turned out that so much mitigation was successfully programmed into our global technology infrastructure, that we prevented the feared outcomes.

But it wasn’t just technological upgrading that the Y2K phenomenon precipitated – it was also the capacity for being in community with one another.

During the Global Ecovillage Network Europe 2018 Conference, The Wisdom of Conscious Communities, a circle of 5 Elders and 5 Youth (from different ecovillages) dialogued about each other’s perspectives and relationships living in an Ecovillage. Each generation alternated with questions and answers. What follows are some of the “call and response” inquiries that emerged, as each generation engaged respectfully but passionately with the inquiry.

Readers should know this report comes from my personal notes as well as my personal interpretations. Some responses may have been combined from several speakers to provide a flow and flavour of the narrative but where possible the sequencing of responses has been retained.

This was one of the most powerful engagements at the conference, demonstrating the Integral City Inquiry and Living Intelligences in dynamic interaction within the contexts of Ecosphere, Individual (Inner and Outer) and Collective (Cultural/Storytelling and Structural/Social) Intelligences.

Marilyn Hamilton, Scribe

Youth / Elder Listening Circle

Youth Question1: What view does your ecovillage have for youth to vision and integrate into your approaches to sustainability?

Elder Responses:

• In Damenhur youth and elders work together.
• At The Farm we are now 47 years old and have 4 generations living together. We started with a generation of 20 somethings, whose parents noticed their kids had a good thing going – so the parents moved in. That made 2 generations. Then our younger generation had kids and they in turn are now having kids. So, I get to be with my parents, my kids and my grandchildren.
• We have a Council of Elders who hold a mature vision. But we also teach meeting skills to young children, so they are facilitating meetings from a very young age.

Elder Question 2: These days it seems difficult to have hope. What keeps you going?

Youth Responses:

• I am full of hope.
• The old age ended in 2012.
• I feel the astrology of the times.
• There is post-war healing.
• [These days] babies’ eyes seem to be warrior eyes.
• I look inside and make a choice.
• I am pessimistic but hold on to values.
• I have hope in every day actions.
• I live next to a forest-system and that system is inside of me.
• I don’t want to “dance the last dance on the Titanic”.

There I have it. My own identity and perhaps my very survival is in question. That is a shadow of change I somehow didn’t see coming.

Perhaps this blindness to such shifts in my fundamental sense of self arose because his survival of chronic illness had become intertwined over a long time with my own survival and evolving identity as a caregiver? Caregiver was an identity that I assumed reluctantly and only came to appreciate as an “ashram of compassion” that could expand my very underdeveloped capacities for compassion. That was an unexpected gift to me who so deeply desires to honour and live by the Master Code: To care for self, others, place and planet.

Now I remember that this kind of deep caring is intimately bound with our very sense of aliveness. And I recall the first quality of “aliveness” is the ability to survive. With my partner over 40 years, I had figured that out – both in health and in sickness. I had a life. He had a life. And we had a life together.

But now that he is gone, two parts of that equation have disappeared – his life and our life together.

I wasn’t prepared for the impact that would have on the first part of that equation – my life, and my identity.  These profoundly personal losses of relationship call me to redefine my very identity – and in doing so ripple through my every capacity to live the Master Code.