Mystery, Spirit, Trust

Hmmm…

It’s natural for us humans to make sense of things. To make sense of the journey. Individually and collectively. We can’t not. Due to the kind of brains that we have. I would suggest also, due to the kind of hearts we have. We seek meaning. We can’t help to seek pattern.

Seeking and seeing pattern is generally a pretty good thing. It helps us to see the broader arc of time and circumstance. It helps us to see the broader ecosystem of experience.

The shadow side of pattern is getting stuck in reductive linearity seasoned heavily with the lure of predictability. Its outcome is a kind of numbing. Shutting down an ever-changing dynamic into a fixed and rigid entity.

I was in a sense making moment Sunday. Glad. With friend and colleague, Quanita. We were thinking about the group we had worked with that day. We were seeking for what was underneath the facilitation, and further, what was underneath the intent to create strategic plan. We were seeking more of the story that our people were searching for together.

Here’s some of what we came up with:

  1. Mystery. Let’s not kid ourselves. There will always be mystery. Unknown. Uncertainty. Unpredictable. Nuanced detail. But mystery. In the team. In the family. In the movement. In the organization. Mystery has a different invitation than confirming a list. Mystery points both to awareness of inner, and, awareness of outer.
  2. Spirit. The operating system in mystery requires orientation to spirit. The unseen. Some layer of divine. Some layer of serendipity. Or self-organizing. Or organic appearing. I know that people have quite varied reaction to references to spirit. I would suggest there is something well behind the rational of our good brains that is in play.
  3. Trust. It’s different than knowing. It’s a gut layer of intuition. It’s internal, but most likely, arising from the external too. Trust is a choice. It’s leaning in when not fully knowing why. It’s being willing to connect ideas and thoughts and feelings without being fully clear. It’s less managing the movement of water in the river. It’s more getting in the river.

These are invitations. Mystery, spirit, and trust. In my experience, people are hungry to have these welcomed. So as to speak the truth. So as to go together, in reclaimed clarity of how we undeniably exist in connection. Naturally.

Get Out

Most of my life I’ve been seeking a relationship with the unseen. It’s a search on the outside and on the inside. It’s a search with succinct deliberateness and with passive roaming. It’s a search through my heart, mind, belly, and spirit. There were chapters of life in which I would have called it a search for the divine. At others times, spirit. Or, the other worlds. Or, or, or. But it has been most of my life.

I like posts like this from friend, Charles LaFond, “Go Ahead, Get Out!” Pick your own reason.

For me,

  1. it’s just thoughtful writing.
  2. it’s informed — one of Charles’ callings as been as an Episcopal Priest, and he knows a pile of history that I don’t.
  3. phrases like “lost to all but God.” This lost business is common.
  4. the courage it takes to get out. To trust. To leap into a chasm. To dare to find what is beyond the confines of so much numbedness and protection.
  5. phrases like “wound of knowledge”. There are times when I wish that I could lose myself as easily as my young teenaged son does into a video game.

Enjoy Charles’ writing. Sign on for his posts through The Daily Sip. Stay curious. Stay moved.