Be an evolutionary agent

 

“You become the evolutionary agent.”

These words of Andrew Cohen, in Evolutionary Enlightenment: A New Path to Spiritual Awakening, jumped out at me last week. I realized that the chapter title I have been using for Nest City’s 9th chapter, “Be the best citizen you can be” is something else: be an evolutionary agent for your city.

As citizens, our openness to the creative, evolutionary impulse within each and all of us to pursue our passions in our work allows us to make continuous contributions to our personal and collective habitats – cities.

Cohen presents 5 tenets of evolutionary enlightenment, which as both practice and goal, allow the infinite possibility within us to come into Being:

  1. Clarity of Intention. Make a bold, foundational commitment to be a vehicle for the evolutionary impulse in this world. “You are a potential bearer of the future, and therefore the impulse that is driving the evolutionary process is only interested in you according to how much of that potential you are able to fulfill (p. 122).”
  2. The Power of Volition. Embrace unconditional responsibility for what has been yours and ours all along – everything – and make it conscious. This is necessary to make you “available to participate in the present and future in ways that would otherwise not be possible (p 128).”  The evolutionary process does not need “the burden of your own, unresolved negative karma – both personal and cultural (p. 132),” and so you have a free choice, to choose to “activate the process of evolution in and through yourself. You become the evolutionary agent (p. 133).”
  3. Face Everything and Avoid Nothing. Be “emotionally willing to bear a degree of reality – both in regard to yourself and to life itself – that you may have been unwilling to tolerate before (p. 141).” Allow the walls of self-protective denial and avoidance to crumble, and you will wake up to the nature of consciousness, human experience, the complex workings of individual and collective development (p. 142).” Stand tall when you are no longer hiding anything from yourself (p. 143).
  4. The Process Perspective. Conjure a bigger context, a perspective from where you “see your personal experience, which at times can feel overwhelming, within an infinitely larger context. The drama of your personal desires and concerns is … always secondary to the prime directive of the Authentic Self, which is the evolution of the process itself. When you are lit up by the evolutionary impulse, there are times when its creative passion completely overshadows personal concerns … (p. 153).”
  5. Cosmic Conscience. Notice the moral imperative to ensure that the evolutionary process evolves through you. Imagine a kind of cosmocentric care, “not related to your ego, well beyond your self of self and ego. “It comes from a deeper higher part of yourself that is free from all the lesser though very real dimensions of who you really are. When you start to emotionally respond to life from that part of yourself, something extraordinary has begun to happen (p. 165).”

Cohen reminds us that the goal of life is perpetual development, involving both a path and a goal, and that they are the same. The above tenets are practices and explorations and an end-state, one and the same.

They are also a reminder of earlier posts this series, and how cities have come about – through our work, and more specifically, as we pursue our creative passions in our work. (See Concluding city patterns.)

When we choose to fully pursue what the world, or cosmos, calls of us, an pursue our innate desire to respond to our creative impulse, we are serving the evolutionary process itself. When it comes to cities, we are building habitats that serve our very evolution.

It is a free choice to become an evolutionary agent. And being the best citizen you can be means being an evolutionary agent. It means putting the ego aside, remove its ability to sabotage your desire to respond to the cosmic call to let out your creative impulse.

“I invite you to begin now. Begin beautifully.

Begin riding the waves of your joy and interest.” 

Risa F. Kaparo

 

What does the evolutionary agent in you long to do?

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This post is part of Chapter 9 – Be the Best Citizen You Can Be. Here are some plot helpers of Nest City: The Human Drive to Thrive in Cities, the book I am sharing here while I search for a publisher:

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Where are the women?

 

The poem I caught while listening to Elizabeth Debold‘s presentation at the Integral Theory Conference – Connecting the Integral Kosmopolitan this week in San Francisco…

182 - where are the women poem

 

Thank you to Elizabeth for sharing her exploration of wo/men in evolutionary enlightenment. Following your passion means you are being the best citizen you can be.

 

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This post is part of Chapter 9 – Be the Best Citizen You Can Be. Here are some plot helpers of Nest City: The Human Drive to Thrive in Cities, the book I am sharing here while I search for a publisher:

_____ _____ _____

 

 

Beware “I haven’t been asked” trap

 

He’s our poet – but you might not know it: Parliament’s official wordsmith bemoans lack of meaningful work. That’s the headline that stood out for me this morning in today’s Edmonton Journal. The issue: Canada’s parliamentary poet laureate, Fred Wah, “has been asked to write just one poem during his two-year term.”

Reporter Randy Boswell tells us that “Canada’s national poet has warned that the taxpayer-funded position risks becoming ‘homogenized and diluted’ and expressed frustration that during his two-year term in Ottawa he’s been asked to produce just one work – a ‘mediocre’ poem about the Queen’s diamond jubilee…”

Here’s what Wah said to Boswell: “I wish that my government had asked me to write poetry about immigration policy, about Idle No More, about Canada’s complicity in the Middle East, the Enbridge pipeline… I haven’t been asked to do any of those things.” I read sadness and disappointment in Wah’s words. He would love to offer more, but he hasn’t been asked.

He’s fallen into the “I haven’t been asked” trap.

When we wait to be asked, we disengage ourselves from the work we really want to be doing. By waiting to be asked, Wah is not feeding his own writing – and his soul – by exploring his passions and desires. By lingering in this trap, he might be missing that he has been asked. The official “ask” of Wah, according to section 75.1 of the Parliament Act of Canada, is to write poetry:

The poet laureate may:

  1. write poetry, especially for use in Parliament on occasions of state;
  2. sponsor poetry readings;
  3. give advice to the Parliamentary Librarian regarding the collection of the Library and acquisitions to enrich its cultural holdings; and
  4. perform such other related duties as are requested by either Speaker or the Parliamentary Librarian.

That first point is significant: the poet laureate may write poetry. He is not required to write only for occasions of state, or only at the request of either Speaker, or on specific subjects. Simply: the poet laureate may write. According to the Parliament of Canada website, his position enjoys great freedom: “The poet laureate is free to determine his or her specific activities within these parameters.” In his official position, he has the freedom to write, yet it is not  choosing to write.

Choose what you want to do.

If you wait to be asked, you might not ever do it. You might not ever feel that you have been your true self. You might not ever offer all you have to offer the world around you. Meaningful work is what we make for ourselves, not what others make for us.

Wah’s trap is familiar to me. I have found myself waiting to be asked on many occasions. Sometimes for years. None of us are immune to this and I do not hold any disregard for Wah. We all make these traps for ourselves; it is the human condition. What they really are is a threshold to cross – and the struggle to make the decision to cross it.

Jump in.

Thresholds are a natural part of our individual and collective learning journeys. They help us reach the places we wish to go. The struggles we experience at such thresholds are powering us up to be better citizens – and create better cities.

Wah has many things to offer the world in his writing. He offers a lot in speaking up about waiting to be asked. My ask of Wah is this – write about whatever moves you. Write to make the world a better place. Boldly grow your Highest Self to grow a better world.

Follow your passion to change your city

And Parliament too, it seems.

If you weren’t waiting to be asked, what would YOU do?

 

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This post is part of Chapter 8 – The City Making Exchange. Here are some plot helpers of Nest City: The Human Drive to Thrive in Cities, the book I am sharing here while I search for a publisher:

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Donkey engine

 

While hiking last week on the West Coast Trail, on the western edge of Canada’s Vancouver Island, my brother and I came upon a derelict and abandoned donkey engine. We stopped to marvel at its existence at the edge of civilization.

Donkey engine beside the trail

Long before foreign sailing ships reached the coast 200 years ago, the Huu-ay-aht, Ditidaht and Pacheedaht lived on Vancouver Island’s west coast. Our trail map reports that as trade increased, “many sailing ships met a tragic fate navigating in these unfamiliar and hazardous waters. Sailors soon referred to this coastline as the ‘Graveyard of the Pacific’.”

One of the derelicts of the times is the donkey engine, which took part in the work to establish communication between villages and new lighthouses – a telegraph line that also became a trail for shipwreck victims and their rescuers.

So what does a donkey engine on a remote trail have to do with city making?

Think of it this way – when we need something to improve life for self and others, we organize for it. And in the process, we change the shape of the places that are involved. One the west coast, when the shore became a graveyard, people recognized that action needed to be taken. They took action, built lighthouses, a telegraph line and a trail. And they left a story behind.

The donkey engine, if nothing else, stands out as a physical marker of the trail’s original purpose. When its job was done, it was left where it stood.

Decades later, the purpose of the trail is different. The users of the trail are explorers of a different kind – not shipwreck victims and their rescuers now, but hikers exploring the beauty and challenge of the terrain. (And their rescue from time to time!)

The very purpose we build structure for – any part of a city – changes over time. And that is part of the city’s story too, only we see it in many more layers. We really do shape our landscape, and we also shape the stories we tell ourselves about our cities and the places we explore.

What is your favourite layer of story in your city? 

 

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This post is part of Chapter 8 – The City Making Exchange. Here are some plot helpers of Nest City: The Human Drive to Thrive in Cities, the book I am sharing here while I search for a publisher:

_____ _____ _____

 

Ride the release safely

 

Ride the release
North Saskatchewan River in Edmonton, April 27, 2013

I knew three years ago that a transition was coming for me in April/May 2013. In 2010 I was elected my my professional planner colleagues to serve one year as president-elect, then two as president, for my professional organization – the Alberta Professional Planners Institute. Our AGM was last week and I have officially handed the reins over to our next president. And I have picked up a new set of reins; as past president, I am on the board of the Canadian Institute of Planners for two years. Knowing this transition was coming, I stepped down as president of my community league.

The nature of the transition is clear and unclear. I have shed my two “presidential” roles and took on a new board. The other transitions I am less clear on. Two significant pieces of contract work are concluding and I don’t know what will come next to help pay the bills. As I look at my schedule for the coming weeks, I see that I have created space for myself to make a transition of some kind. My antennae are work!

Last week, I spent a day with David Whyte, reflecting on my work and where it is going. A big realization came to me: Lost? Let the city find you. On my way to spend a day with a group of women exploring their personal leadership, from the inside to the outside, the ice flows in the river have firmly caught my attention. Just when I think spring’s work is done, when life is flowing freely, a jam I never knew was there releases. I don’t see the jam, just the ice and the debris it carries. The smooth surface of the river’s spring flow is now a torrent, a rush I only noticed with the ice. There’s some inner work to notice what is flowing in and through me, and how to ride the release safely, or how to boldly grow the self.

Today, I have gathered with 40 other circle practitioners to explore our work creating the social containers our world needs at this time. For me, the social habitat is a critical aspect of making cities that serve citizens – and citizens that serve cities. While the gathering is work related, it is equally about my personal social habitat and my approach to myself and my work. My operating principle remains the same: nourish self, others and place.

I have no idea what will come next, but I choose to spend time where I feel nourished, where I can nourish others and the places we live, work and play. I choose to nourish my/our social, physical habitats and my/our economic life. This is ultimately what will enable me to ride the river, and whatever she throws at me.

What ideas and practices support you in your life’s journey? 

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This post is part of Chapter 8 – The City Making Exchange. Here are some plot helpers of Nest City: The Human Drive to Thrive in Cities, the book I am sharing here while I search for a publisher:

_____ _____ _____

 

 

Lost? Let the city find you

 

Yesterday had great potential to be soul-sucking.

I signed up to spend the day listening to David Whyte, a writer of prose and poetry I greatly admire. I chose to spend the day sitting and listening, which is a very hard thing for me to do. I do not sit and listen well to anyone who speaks for an hour, let alone a day.

So I chose to simply sit. And listen. And play and doodle and draw while I was listening, to engage in parallel play, and see what would come to me.

Many things did come.

Here is one.

David Whyte was exploring our relationship to the unknown, and in particular, the invitation we send out into the unknown. His invitation (to us) is to let the world speak to us on its own terms. He read David Wagoner‘s poem, Lost:

Lost (Wagoner)

In reflecting on Lost, David Whyte remarked the forest is everywhere. It’s in the forest, of course, but it is equally in our workplaces, our families, and our cities.

I left this note for myself:

Let the city find you

This is an essential part of the city making exchange: the more we pursue the work that fills us with passion, the more the city offers opportunities for us to follow our passion.

The city helps us find ourselves.

 

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This post is part of Chapter 8 – The City Making Exchange. Here are some plot helpers of Nest City: The Human Drive to Thrive in Cities, the book I am sharing here while I search for a publisher:

_____ _____ _____

Follow your passion to change your city

 

Last week, I asked, “What do you do to create city life?”  The relationship between city and citizens is a mesh of transactions that offers each of us opportunities to meet our basic needs. When our basic needs are met, this relationship also offers us opportunities to choose to explore our passions, and in doing so, we inevitably create new ways of thinking, making and doing: new work. Our new work holds with it the possibility of destroying or enhancing our habitat – our cities.

Follow your passion and the city changes itself.

In a quick scan of local media, here are some examples of folks following their passion, and in doing so are reshaping cities and their ecoregions (links are to other websites for more information):

  • Danny and Miranda Turner are opening the door to organic foods. They created the Organic Box, an organic grocery-delivery company in Edmonton. They are connecting Edmontonians with local food producers that need a direct-to-market access channel that lasts 12 months a year.
  • Parishioners vote to save church. In rural Alberta, Spaca Moskalyk Ukranian Catholic Church was built in 1924 and is in poor shape. Cliff Moroziuk is leading efforts to preserve the church that was slated to be destroyed in a controlled burn. A symbol of his community’s heritage is still standing.
  • Residents got their first glimpse Monday of the new Abbotsfield Recreation Centre. Behind the scenes are various City employees, consulting engineers and architects, landscape architects and planners to make the facility a reality.
  • Political scientist Jim Lightbody is chasing his passion for how city governments work – particularly when it comes to regional infighting and whether satellite cities pay their fair share.
  • Scott McKeen, former Edmonton Journal columnist, is the City of Edmonton’s first blogger-in-residence.  He’s following his passion to understand what happens at city hall, and will help his readers gain insight into how city hall works – and serves citizens. Here’s his first blog, Fast and furious on Edmonton streets.

In the end, we have to trust in our ability, and others’, to create new work and to do good work with that new work.

Where do you see people changing your city? What are your favourites?  

 

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This post is part of Chapter 8 – The City Making Exchange. Here are some plot helpers of Nest City: The Human Drive to Thrive in Cities, the book I am sharing here while I search for a publisher:

_____ _____ _____

 

All kinds of work make the city

 

Tonight I conclude my work as president of my neighbourhood association, Glenora Community League. And as I do so, I am reminded that our work as volunteers is as important as our paid work – it all shapes our individual, family, neighbourhood and city lives. It even changes our planet.

All kinds of work matter because the work we do creates our cities. Very simply, when a city starts, we create work using a resource (coal, water, fishing, farming) in a particular setting. A settlement starts where the natural habitat provides us what we need. Our work, then physically changes that place. From there we see new ways to think, make and do new things, always driven by a desire to improve the habitats we build for ourselves. And as the work diversifies and recombines, and as more people migrate to cities to pursue work, these settlements become cities.

Today, as we continue to pursue the work we are passionate about, we evolve our selves and our cities. This is a survival skill, yet building our cities is a quest to do much more than survive. We work to thrive, and as we each do so we create the conditions for everyone to thrive for our individual work accumulates into the city habitats we now live in. We are building the nests we need.

Volunteering to maintain and create places for neighbours to gather is work. Helping your child with homework is work. Feeding your family is work. Pursuing your passion in nanotechnology is work. Writing stories is work. Making art is work. Cleaning the school is work. Building a home is work. Planting a garden is work. Fundraising for homeless shelters is work.

All work shapes our cities

All work matters.

How do you shape your city to meet your needs?

 

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This post is part of Chapter 8 – The City Making Exchange. Here are some plot helpers of Nest City: The Human Drive to Thrive in Cities, the book I am sharing here while I search for a publisher:

_____ _____ _____

 

City purpose – survival and improvement

 

In my last post, the purpose of evolution is evolving, I introduced the work of Steve McIntosh and his book, Evolution’s Purpose.  There is another layer of insight from McIntosh that frames the question of destination and whether we are alive or adrift: first- and second-order purpose.

McIntosh articulates the “evident purpose inherent in the urge to survive and reproduce shared by all forms of life (p. 13)” as a “first-order purpose” that is an instinctual or semi-automatic urge in most animal and plant behaviour. In contrast, “second-order purpose,” is possessed by humans. Here is McIntosh’s take on the nature of human, second-order purpose:

Humans not only have purposes, we have purposes for our purposes; we have relative freedom of choice regarding the urges or impetuses we want to act on and the appetites we want to resist. Moreover, humans can have purposes that require a lifetime of more to fulfil, we can have highly creative purposes, compassionate, loving purposes, and world-changing purposes that improve conditions for everyone (p. 13-14).

Humans experience two orders of purpose: immediate survival of self and the species, and a range of purposes that originate from our agency, that originate in response to our life conditions.

The latter of these two orders of purpose is “a self-reflective type of purpose that includes rational, moral and aesthetic aspirations (p. 88).”  These aspirations are improvements we seek in our life conditions.  Humanity’s creation of cities, if aligned with purpose at all, must have two purposes: survival and improvement.

Cities, as part of the human journey, have two destinations: survival and improvement.

Is your city organized to ensure survival and improvement?

Is your city alive or adrift?

 

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This post forms part of Chapter 5 – Destination Alive or Adrift, of Nest City: The Human Drive to Thrive in Cities. Click here for an overview of Chapters 4-7 (Part 2 – Organizing for Emergence). Click here for an overview of the three parts of Nest City.

Focus, learn and choose

 

As we approach the winter solstice and the darkness increases, my energy levels are low.  It is hard to get out of bed in the morning and get the day underway. From a life cycle perspective, winter is time to rest, from the activities of the fall harvest and for spring and summer’s growth. I am torn; I feel the pull of rest I feel that there is much for me to be doing – I should be busy.

In this time of darkness I feel adrift, in the increasing gray nowhere described in John O’Donohue’s Blessing, “The Time of Necessary Decision” (yesterday’s post.) As regularly happens, quite naturally, I seem to have lost track of my destination. Without clear purpose, I waver as I decide what to do with my time and energy.

Today’s realization was that I am overthinking things and not listening to my Higher Self. Even as I wrote in my journal about it, I felt like I was overthinking, so I had a conversation with my Higher Self. Here is what transpired:

self: Have I been thinking about how to live from my spirit instead of really doing it? Being it?

SELF: Yes. Yet you’re not far.

Release.

self: Release what?

SELF: Release self.

self: That is my learning curve?

SELF: Yes.

self: A lot of self is released already.

SELF: Yes.

self: There’s more.

SELF: Of course.

self: That next bit is hard to figure out. I’m not sure where it is, where to go to release it.

SELF: Don’t look for it, just let it go. To look for where is about control.

Let it go.

self: Is that what I need to rest into? Over the next few weeks and into the darkness? Just sit with what needs to be let go and let it go? I imagine right now some grieving, but its weird not knowing what I am releasing.

SELF: Sit in the darkness.  It will start getting lighter soon. The self to release will find you.

Remember that what you are growing into will transcend and include what you are growing from. You are not jettisoning anything, so no need to fear losing anything but what is not needed anymore. It’s still around, repurposed.

It is difficult and murky territory when in transition. Focus, learn and choose are three words that stood out for you as you explored the oracle card this morning. You are facing a soul-full challenge right now. On what will you focus, learn and choose? 

self: I focus on reaching my fullest/highest evolutionary potential in my lifetime. I am learning to live from my spirit, my Self and all that I am, freely, expansively, deliberately, consciously. I choose to nourish my Being. 

SELF: Ahhhh… Your energy has shifted.

self: This is a higher order of understanding. It’s not just look after self, it’s nourish self.

Today, I latched on to the higher-order purpose of my work.  A moment to focus, to notice what I am learning, and to make a choice realigns to why I do what I do. I am more connected to my very existence. I am ready to settle into my work, both inwards and outwards, for the next two weeks until things start to get lighter. I can choose to get ‘busy’ and distract myself from the inner work at hand, or focus on it, to learn more about the choices I have.

The gray nowhere, as all seasons do, comes and goes. While it continues to get darker, while I continue to feel somewhat adrift, I feel more alive, connected to my personal journey that is necessarily part of the larger journey of humanity.

This bit that’s alive, connected to purpose, will steer me through all shades of gray of nowhere.