Author: Beth Sanders

The antennae of possibility

 

I trust the antennae of possibility

in my choices

and serve Me

growing

with thresholds

appearing and disappearing

shifting how I sit

in chaos

sailing

in big energy

gathering

abundance

in a changing

me

 

_____ _____ _____

Some friends and I have started a book club to explore Leading from the Emerging Future, Otto Scharmer (Theory U) and Katrin Kaufer’s new book, chapter by chapter. This is my harvest from our exploration of Chapter 2.

If you missed it, here’s the Chapter 1 harvest – Life guard.

Life guard

 

Oh, life guard

making sure no one gets in

over their head

is it really that risky to stand at the edge?

Start believing in You

and you’ll know your self.

The biggest threshold you have

to face is in you.

Guard it carefully.

 

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Some friends and I have started a book club to explore Leading from the Emerging Future, Otto Scharmer (Theory U) and Katrin Kaufer’s new book, chapter by chapter. This is my harvest from our exploration of Chapter 1.

A house in order assembles light

 

A house in order assembles light

Focused energy

supports our planet of cities

a house in order

assembles light

to let go

to let go of the underbrush

to trust that what I bring to the world

is valuable

to trust that what I integrate

is what I need to integrate

and the rest just sits

at the center

as the fullness of emptiness

comes present

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A poem harvested from the check-in of the Integral City sangha this afternoon.

 

 

Don’t take your thoughts too seriously

 

The momentum of the world around me is overwhelming at times, particularly in cities. We tell stories about our cities to ourselves and the stories we tell are the stories we create. Do we tell ourselves that cities are big and ugly and inhumane, or that they accelerate the development of our well-being, in health practices, the arts, and economic opportunities?

Eckhart Tolle (in Stillness Speaks):

The stream of thinking has enormous momentum that can easily drag you along with it. Every thought pretends that it matters so much. It wants to draw your attention in completely.

Here is a new spiritual practice for you: don’t take your thoughts too seriously.

As a citizen, there is great value in recognizing when I am simply getting caught up in things, particular the drama in my mind. As Tolle puts it, “it is easy for people to become trapped in their conceptual prisons.”

We have thoughts, and we ought to notice those thoughts and tell the stories of what we are noticing because we notice ways to improve our cities and this serves the evolutionary impulse. But we do not need to get caught up in the momentum of what we see. See it, be aware of it, and yet hold it light enough that we do not take the new story so seriously that we hold onto it as tightly as we held the first story.

To be comfortable with uncertainty, we need to be able to hold our stories lightly enough to toss them when they no longer serve us as well as they could.

Are you holding a story that limits your experience of the city?

What new story is emerging in the city you see? 

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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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Be a conscious voter

188 - Be a conscious citizen image

As numerous as the candidates were at last night’s election forum that I moderated for the Downtown and Oliver Community Leagues, most remarkable were the 140 people in the audience, attentively listening and taking notes. (For a recap, check out Mack D. Male’s post.) These citizens were taking the opportunity to see their future councillor in action. These citizens are taking the initiative to be informed voters.

Now that’s a good way to serve your city. Exercise your vote.

An even better way to serve your city is to vote consciously. Here are some questions I ask myself before casting my vote:

  1. Who is running for election?
  2. What do they stand for?
  3. Do they have the ability to run a large organization?
  4. Do they know what that large organization is for?
  5. Do they know what they want to do, and can they realistically do it?
  6. Do they have good relationships with people they disagree with?
  7. Are they open to learning new things from any source?

These last two are important, because it is not possible for a councillor or council to please everyone. It is unreasonable to expect every citizen to be happy with city hall, because we will all be unhappy with something. The real question is whether the people we elect are smart enough, skilled enough and have the emotional intelligence to build relationships to get things done. I don’t have to agree with everything they do, but I do have to trust that from their vantage point, they see things I don’t see. To trust them, I need to see that they are open to learning from anyone wanting to have their ear.

That’s how I vote consciously.

What action do you take to vote consciously?

 

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Want an election forum in your league? You have the support of the Edmonton Federation of Community Leagues. I will help you design your event and moderate it. Just get in touch – beth@populus.ca

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Be a conscious citizen

 

A few years ago, a friend told me that the world is run by those who show up. I’ve wondered since, are cities run by those who show up?

Cities are made by citizens, so all of us who live in and interact with cities have already shown up. Each one of us, as we build or buy homes, choose apartments, and  work to make our communities better places, are making our city. We have all shown up and the evidence that we have show up is simple: we have made cities and we are in an ongoing relationship with cities as we remake them.

The city is a dance of voices and values, where we all have a hand in the creation and recreation of our cities. Civic politicians and developers, along with professional engineers and city planners physically make much of our cities. Civil society makes sure we are organizing ourselves well, and to the standards we expect. As citizens, we work to make our places better.

The real question is whether we are making our cities consciously. 

As we unconsciously engage with our city, we make contributions we are not aware of, both negative and positive. By choosing to live in or interact with a city, we have a hand in running it because we are there. We have shown up, but more often than not we participate unconsciously.  We shape cities, unaware of how our choices shape the city. When we feel we don’t have a say in what happens, it is because we don’t choose to be in relationship with the city. Our choice, at every turn, is how to engage and contribute.

There is showing up and then there is showing up.

Cities are consciously run by those who consciously show up. More than just being in the city in body and mind, there are citizens who throw their heart and soul into their city life.

Conscious citizens put their true self out into the world. They choose to pursue their passion in their work, organize for it, invite and receive feedback.  In doing so, they reshape our cities, allowing our cities to serve us better. The risk to do the work they love is worth it, because it serves their – and our – evolutionary purpose.

Just as I can be with people and not really be there, I can be in my city and not really serve it. The choice is mine. The choice is ours.

What kinds of work make you feel like you are really showing up?

 

_____ _____ _____

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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Choose work that feels good

 

Did you always know you would be doing this kind of work? This is the question a young reader just asked me. My simple answer is no/yes.

On the surface, no, I did not know I would be doing this work. I remember finishing my undergraduate degree in canadian studies, and public policy and planning, feeling like it wasn’t specific enough. I could read and write, but in a family of teachers, engineers, pharmacists and business owners I couldn’t say what ‘I’ was. So I kept looking.

I have one of those personalities that likes a wide variety of things, so career counselling based on interest was always expanded the options, not narrowing them. Somehow, in that wide mix, city planning appeared. Frankly, I had no idea what it really was, but it was intriguing. I moved to a new city to do a masters degree in city planning, and on my first day of school I knew I was in the right place. It felt good.

Choose work that feels good.

As I look back on my years working, I see that the spirit of that first day of school is still alive. When jobs started to feel less energizing, I actively found ways to make the work more exciting. Sometimes that meant having a chat with my boss and/or co-workers recreate the work on the job, or finding a new job. I have the privilege, in my part of the world and in the life I have, to choose my work.

I see now that as I choose work that feels good, I am not surprised by the work I am doing, because I realize that it was always in me to do. Choosing what I like to do all along means that what I like to do grows. Its a natural progression. Its a natural extension of me.

Work is a natural expansion of You.

As I follow the work that makes me feel good, I become a more full Me. Not the ego ‘me’, but the larger, fullest possible potential of Me. And as I do so, I expand the contribution I make to the world around me. Deep down inside, I always did know I would be doing this work. Years ago, ‘i’ couldn’t see it yet.

Your work is in You.

What is the work that energizes you? 

 

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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:

_____ _____ _____

 

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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Choose to renew patterns

 

Does the new year really begin today, a time ripe with opportunity to set new patterns?

While it’s no where near January 1, a new year starts today when a familiar pattern, or a new or renewed pattern, sets in. In my family and my city, kids go back to school today. How traffic moves changes. How families organize themselves changes. People are back at work from summer holidays. The reality of fall is setting in.

I feel liberated by the structure that comes in the fall, when I feel a surge of energy to hunker down and get to work after a summer pattern where work and relaxation seem to drift into one another. As the structure returns, so does the quiet I long for to write. Here is what’s wanting to be written:

  1. A complete draft manuscript of Nest City by December 15, 2013.
  2. Nest City blog posts every Monday and Thursday.
  3. Nest City News publications the first and third Monday of the month.

To pull off the above, I have to choose how to spend my time and energy within the structure in which I operate. I have to renew my commitment to my work, family, neighbourhood, city and planet. In my work life, I have to renew my commitment to my writing projects, to my clients and the day-to-day needs of running a business. I have to renew my commitments to my self and my Highest Self.

Here’s one of my choices about where I will be spending my energy over the next three months: a book circle exploring Otto Scharmer and Katrin Kaufer’s new book: Leading from the Emerging Future. Eight colleagues and I have committed to read the book, journal our personal journey along the way, and meet after we have read each chapter to explore what we are individually and collectively learning. That will lead to a happy new year, with emerging patterns in life and work.

Happy new year! May the returning patterns refresh you. May your new patterns revive you.

What new patterns are emerging in you?

 

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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:

_____ _____ _____

A formidable arising

 

A formidable arising

 

Aligning mother

excitement fulfilled

in tension relaxing

into curiosity

still

aware

of fire

of earth

and that’s all

in the air

in the water

 

there’s strength

in surrender

forming

a formidable

arising

 

 

*A poem caught with my fellow Integral City travellers, Marilyn Hamilton, Cherie Beck, Alia Aurami and Ellen van Dongen.

 

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