Secret Guides and Weird Waymarkers

“The maples sweat now, out of season. … 

— Jay Parini, “Some Effects of Global Warming in Lackawanna County”

Tonight, as I write, a full moon hangs in a sky of gods and myths. The North Star. The Big Dipper. Cassiopeia. These are practical navigation points used by seekers, seafarers, merchants, and travelers of all kinds over the centuries. We’ve relied on these maps: the cycles of the seasons, the placement of the stars, the direction of ocean currents. But what happens when what we take for granted is no longer available? Even Polaris, the North Star, is shifting its position and will eventually be replaced by another star, Vega. What do we do when our navigation points change, when the internal and external maps we have relied on are no longer available?

In a time between worlds, in a phase shift of massive transition, in what is not so much an era of change but a change of era, what do we do and how should we be? What are the cues and clues, the signals and signs, the ways in and through? What shimmers at the edges asking for attention? What skills and capacities, postures and practices are called for in these times? The confluences of catastrophes, as writers for the Dark Mountain Project aptly put it, have only just begun. We have choices. We have agency. There are many ways of traveling rough seas and unknown landscapes.

“My heart is moved by all I cannot save. So much has been destroyed,” writes Adrienne Rich in her poem “Natural Resources.” “I have to cast my lot with those who, age after age, perversely, with no extraordinary power, reconstitute the world.”

I imagine that if you are reading this, you may be on a precipice of some kind. It’s possible that you, and the work, people, and places in the world you care about, have questions to which you do not have the answers.

And this is important. To not know. This is the moment in the old stories, the wisdom stories, where the seeking of a new or very old way—a deeper truth—begins: with an unanswerable question. These are never easy things, these quests; that is the point. These quests begin with an invitation, a challenge, a sense of confoundment. Something doesn’t make sense. To confound is to bring into disorder, to mix things up, and it suggests a process: to be lost, unraveled, and possibly found, but changed.

“If you have a longing for something, there is a good chance that your longing is to feel the edges of something you’ve never seen,” the author and activist Stephen Jenkinson says in an intergenerational conversation series called Forgotten Pillars. “Each detail has a trail that you can read … and if you really pay attention, you can hear an old song in the broken pieces … You have to drop your authority on the matter.”

What has caught me, and what are the edges of my own understanding? I’ll make an offering here, an invitation to stay in the playground with not knowing. It’s a stance of curiosity, from the Latin root curare: to care, to administer medicines. It’s a suggestion to set aside what is held tightly (certainties, roles, definitions, and identities) for a moment and try on other ideas. To make a move. To try on a new pelt. To open the dragon’s lair of imagination and sit on the gems no longer. If there is a time to take a risk and crack a shell, it would be now.

Fluidity: My Father Is a Feather

I want this piece to reflect a dance between the deeply personal and the larger systems, with the knowledge that my personal experiences are fractals of what I work with in larger systems. In the spirit of the adage “how you do one thing is how you do everything,” I must pay exquisite attention to what is right in front of me: Be an inquirer, a querent, an investigative mystery worker, a seeker queering the lines of my own understanding.

So, I will begin closest in, with my closest kin: my father, Tim. He is 88. His once low and gravelly voice that spoke on political campaigns and in public leadership roles and that still speaks of (and to) my mother with great affection a decade after her death, now has the cadence of clouds. He’ll often say he is “floating” when he is confused, sad, or feeling lost. But when I walk through the door to his apartment, he is sheer delight: “Vanessa! Where have you been? I missed you!” Lately, he adds right away, “I love you!”

It doesn’t matter that I saw him just the day before. We are here in the now, diving into a conversation that has cycles and spins. It is a washing machine of silence and revelations. He will ask me, “What are your projects? What are your plans?” He’ll ask several times and then he’ll ask again. It’s a teaching from a beginner’s mind: What are my projects, what are my plans? I hear myself answering a fourth time and notice that I say something I hadn’t thought of before.

My father invites me to pay exquisite attention, to go beyond the obvious and find what was hidden all along. It is an ancient form of practice called repetition, used by martial artists to gain mastery, inventors and scientists to iterate experiments, spiritual lineages to reveal the essence of a person, and explorers to find their way in uncharted waters. To sail the same waters over and over is to notice the rock, the flight paths, the scent that was missed the first 10 times. Repetition with exquisite attention is a navigational device for the unknown. A compass for cultivating attention; each detail offers a trail. Spins and cycles, and aha!—the catching of something new.

A recent addition to my relating repertoire with my father is what I call “the joining.” It’s a quantum trick of time travel. I’ll share news of myself or my brother, and he will say, “Oh, I think I was there!” He’ll weave in details from his life: We’re now in the Volkswagen he drove across Europe as a student, we’re reliving the moment in 1957 when he offered cigarettes to bandits who helped him in a tight spot on an epic trip from Delhi to Naples. It becomes our story, or an intergenerational co-creation. He, whose radius of physical life has greatly diminished, is actively joining the bigger world with us. We are a confluence of the present, the past, and an emerging future—on an adventure together.

I call this Tim-time. The capacity to be in many places and times simultaneously: a superpositioning where particles of our lives exist in multiple states and places at once. It’s a suspension of one kind of reality and an embrace of other forms of what is “real.” Arnold Mindell, the founder of process-oriented psychology, describes this as “fluidity.” To move congruently between levels of reality, states of consciousness, identities, forms of intelligence, and roles with which we might be over-identified. Keeping up with my father is like the Fluidity Olympics; we access and move between different feeling states, identities, and time zones in the creation of meaning, understanding, and connection.

It’s also improv. By nature, improv is generative, taking the offering of the other and saying, “Yes, and …” In my father’s case, this creativity is a full partnership with degeneration. New synaptic paths are being formed as others dissolve. It is the paradox of holding opposing processes simultaneously: creation and destruction, remembering and forgetting, delight and devastation. In between is an atlas of grief and what the educator and therapist Pauline Boss calls “ambiguous loss,” because the father that I have known is no longer available in the same way. The ways that he was put together are coming apart.

The dignity of degeneration comes with honoring its intelligence and being in a courtship of curiosity with the process. This does not mean setting aside the pain, confusion, violence of change, loss, or the extinction of what we love. Rather, it means enlarging the space of possibility. “What if we stun existence one more time?” asks the poet Ayisha Siddiqa. It is true that my father’s primary identity—man, protector, husband, public figure, a version of generational success—is receding. Emerging from what disappears and from the space between opposites, or from under the bark of what was a great solid tree, is a soft, vulnerable, complex guide we are coming to know only now.

“Pay attention, be astonished, tell about it,” writes the poet Mary Oliver, providing instructions for living a life. And so I do. A brain, a body, a life force is changing form before my eyes. He is my father. He is a feather.

Our Secret Guides

When the navigation systems we’ve relied on are themselves unmooring, what do we tether to?

There are many directions to go from here. I’ve written multiple endings to this piece thinking to tie this all up, give it a clean conclusion, but paying attention to the process, to what I’ve been writing about, means staying with the strangeness. Staying on the quest. If these are apocalyptic times—a time of breakages and breakthroughs, a time of revealing truths, uncovering hidden wirings, accessing the thing behind the thing—then my father is modeling apocalyptic postures and practices.

I leave my father’s apartment and my shape has shifted. My heart grows and it grieves, and there is gratitude for this unusual practice ground. This dojo of delight and detritus. It would be easy for me to go back to being who I was before this visit. But the trick here is to stay with it, to keep coming back. I am getting worked. And what arises from practice, from its repetition, reverence, and restitution? An ongoing becoming. An ever-evolving quality of being. It is this being—me, you, us—who goes back into the work of this world, to make a new move. What strange guides are right in front of you, already revealing to you the thing you need most?

There are secret guides everywhere. Very often they can be found on the margins, with no extraordinary power, shimmering at the edges, dismissed, viewed as a burden, exiled, or worse. Take a close look and feel their presence. They are right there disguised, perhaps under a shroud, and quite likely a little bit weird.

***

This piece was originally published in the November, 2024 issue of The Stanford Social Innovation Review (SSIR) in a special supplement called Practices for Transitions in a Time Between Worlds which was curated by Cassie Robinson, bringing together wild thinkers and deep practitioners immersed in evolutionary practices. If you would like to share the article link, click here.

Vanessa Reid is faculty of Wolf Willow Institute for Systems Learning and co-founder of The Living Wholeness Institute.

The Invisible Networks

Our very existence and evolution is connected to the invisible, underground networks of life. We are intricately connected to that which we cannot see, but which sustains and infuses all life. As systems leaders hosting transformational work, what does it meant to be part of the deeper and wider “fields” of intelligence in and around us. What would be possible if we lived intricately woven with these networks?

The first time I understood I was part of a field - as distinct from a team - was when I was part of a collaboratory of seven practitioner-consultants from 3 different countries which we called The Amoeba. This was 2010, as the financial crises were hitting Europe. We formed the Amoeba to work in partnership with the Finance Innovation Lab and Tasting the Future, two large-scale systemic transformation processes based out of the UK.

These were “social labs”, living laboratories to learn our way into new social realities. We were experimenting with what it means to create highly participatory processes to inquire into and discover new pathways for creating new systems of food and finance based on fundamentally different values than the current, dominant, unsustainble ones. This required us to show up individually with all our different life and professional skills, to inhabit and evolve multiple roles, to convene, design, host and harvest participatory and highly emergent processes and learn quickly from each moment, each phase to adapt our design to the next meaningful steps. It also meant we had to continually adapt to the work as it was emerging and to shift our roles as needed. The work itself was highly emergent, so we were listening in to what the work was showing us and needing from us. To do this, we tapped in to the greater wisdom that was held - not by us - but between and beyond us.

What showed up was this. The crucial innovation towards systemic change was actually our “field nature”, our way of working together. It was as much what we did as how we did it.

Systems are Intelligences

Moving from a team to a “field” has something to do with working very intentionally with much wider and deeper constellations of intelligence. It includes the more energetic infrastructures, the invisible, unconscious and well, things that we just don’t always have names for but are actively engaging with us. In coming together with a certain quality of intention and attention, we can access a collective intelligence otherwise unavailable to us on our own. These energetic and magnetic fields can significantly shift or deepen our awareness or actions which can result in more intelligent, just, compassionate and wise actions in service to people and planet.

It strikes me that knowing how to work with -or be - fields, and the multiple forms of intelligence available to us, is necessary if we are to truly do work that is systemic. There are theories and practices for transforming unsustainable and unjust systems, but if we stay in our heads or work only with what we know already we are accessing only a tiny part of what is available. If we do not know how to access deeper intelligences and integrate variable aspects of life into our view and our practices and our ways of being, then we are caught in the limits of human-centered hubris. We need to learn to work with the whole system. With the intangible, the unspoken, the luminous. This is the “field work”.

The Intangible Becomes Tangible

Working as a field cultivates a collective resonance which is described as the “magic’ that transforms individuals and whole groups through access to greater sources of wisdom. The word resonance means “re-sound” so when there is a flow of vibration between two things, in this case two or more people, then collectively a new vibration emerges. Collective resonance is “a felt sense of energy, rhythm, or intuitive knowing that occurs in a group of human beings and positively affects the way they interact toward a common purpose,” writes Renee Levi. It arises from the field between and beyond the individuals.

There are many ways that the “enlarged life” as the poet John O’Donohue says, comes to be with us, comes to join us to create a field with the invisible. Synchronicity, as coined by Jung, is also an example of fieldwork, as it results from becoming linked with the environment in a special way, anticipating events or sensing some underlying pattern to the world. There are many examples in different spiritual practices where we access our inner intuition or “knowing”, we open to messages or connection to the beyond. Therapeutic approaches such as in systemic or family constellations founded by Bert Hellinger access the invisible web of ancestral relations that are acting on and through a family system in the present. There is being in “the flow” whereby the connection between people, place and “the invisible” create conditions for us to be more attuned, intelligent and wise.

Jungian psychology describes a collective unconscious that lives alongside and within us. It is available when we accept our whole selves through our shadows, our dreams, our inter-connectivity with our lineage, and the inter-generational transmission of consciousness. Indigenous peoples and traditions live with the invisible in many ways, being in relations with all relations - ancestors, plant-spirits, and the cycles of life and death such as in Ceremony, where all life and time is present at all times. This information – this community – is accessible to us if we invite it in and work with it, if we see it as real and tangible.

The underground networks of intelligence

What lives below or beyond our eyesight is rich beyond our imaginations. They are participants and in some cases, protectors, and they consciously interact with and support life above ground. Author Paul Stamets who wrote Mycelium Running: How Mushrooms Can Help Save the World believes mycelium, which bear mushrooms as their fruit, have not just the ability to protect the environment but the intelligence to do so on purpose. In an interview with Derrick Jensen in the Sun magazine called Going Underground, Stamets describes how the invisible and underground systems of fungi work to nourish the whole and how they transmit information across their huge networks.

“Mycellia took an evolutionary path by going underground and forming a network of interwoven chains of cells, a vast food web upon which life flourished…. Fungi are fundamental to life on earth. They are ancient, they are widespread, and they have formed partnerships with many other species. In fact, “we evolved from fungi. We took an overground route,” he writes. “Mycelia transmit information across their huge networks using the same neurotransmitters that our brains do.”

This network that is so alive and essential to life decided to do its work underground. It is this invisible work – at least it is invisible to us topsoil folks – that sustains life on the planet.

What invisible and underground networks are waiting for our awareness? 

Resonance and fieldwork are practices of cultivating consciousness as something real, tangible, accessible. Working with fields, and actually being them, helps us host the evolution of our humanity.

• What kind of partnerships with the invisible networks of life are already present with whom you can be in deeper relationship?

• What are the practices that bring in the multiple levels of intelligence that are just waiting to be invited to the party?

• How would our organizations, communities, institutions be different if we saw the wholeness of integrating the visible and the invisible?

Ask a mushroom, or shapeshift into being one. Seriously.

*the orginal article was published on the website of Organization Unbound.

The Crisis In Greece — and Unexpected Gratitude

“If there had been no crisis, we could not have known this quality of being together was possible”

In the spring of 2015, for the first time in the four years that we had been working on the ground with citizens in Greece, I heard Greeks saying that they were grateful for the collapse of their systems.

No, not in a lighthearted way. Not an easy “This is all good,” but through the pain and despair of feeling the life they knew fall away, and something opening on the other side of the despair.

In the Art of Participatory Leadership training we offered in Athens, we heard participants speak with anger and shame of encountering bureaucrats not taking pride in being civil servants — but relying on old responses. Ones that protect old systems and have nothing to do with with supporting those in need, or those who are wanting to change things.

We heard the potency of loss — loss of identity, material life, money, hope — and the necessity of re-inventing oneself.

We heard gratitude for seeing new perspectives and world views, ones that offer connection with each other and with a future that has a different blueprint than consumerism.

We heard this: “If there had been no crisis, we would not have met this way, could not have known this kind of quality of being together was possible.”

Since 2011, through the Systemic Innovation Zone (SIZ-Hellas), we have been witnessing and living the incredible stories and movements of people on the ground in Greece, in their communities, across the country and beyond. People who are birthing new systems, ones that return us to the meaning of democracy: demos-people and kratia power - where citizens self-organize around what is needed, and what we dream is possible in service to the Commons.

These stories, this courage, these actions of ordinary citizens who are creating the future now, are the threads of a new narrative that is emerging from places where current systems are collapsing or deteriorating. The thickening threads of the narrative that make the new stories possible are around how we create the conditions to meet in our collective chaos, how to be in our personal chaos, and let the new patterns within that chaos unfold to show us a way, rather than trying to avoid the angst and fear of this state of being.

These actions of ordinary citizens who are creating the future now are the threads of a new narrative that is emerging from places where current systems are collapsing or deteriorating.

We speak a lot about the chaordic in this work of Participatory Leadership. The chaordic is born from creating the minimal optimal structure that allows just enough chaos to meet just enough order to find its route towards birthing new, creative ideas and realities. We call this quality emergence. But the reality in places of collapse and crisis is that chaos reigns, and chamos, the degenerative extreme of chaos, is lurking. So, sitting with and in our internal and external chaos is an essential human capacity that needs attention.

I have been learning this by working and living in Greece (and in Israel and Palestine). There are many places in our trans-local network of people and places that are filled with the precariousness of life, the unpredictability of responses, and the shaking of the old and new. Our friends in Zimbabwe have been living a political culture that is deeply destructive. It is close to chamos, a cycle that touches on hopelessness and despair and yet, and yet, citizens and artists and farmers and families continue to find ways to be in life together meaningfully, with fierce creativity. It is far from comfortable. It is filled with human emotion: historical tensions, unspoken intergenerational traumas, and the dance of paradoxes that are hard to reconcile.

What I have learned is that:

• Coming together to be in conversation about what matters most to us is a seriously political act — one that can often be a great risk to one’s personal safety or can open the risk of being excommunicated from one’s “tribe.”

• Listening in to what we don’t yet know or see is an act of faith and also a skill, and this quality of listening is the most important skill to cultivate in oneself and collectively.

• Witnessing each other in the honesty of our expression — whatever that expression may be — is healing beyond all measure.

• Navigating chaos together by doing these simple, yet very difficult, things is itself the work.

I say it is the work because once we have done this — once we have been in the hardest places together and learned or understood something from them, when we have allowed ourselves to be touched by each other’s humanity — there can arrive a clarity and depth that is a new landscape. A new landscape of relationship and trust and shared wisdom. This becomes the ground, the new soil, for what we can plant.

The knowing of what comes next reveals itself once we have met and lived the coming-through-chaos — and not before. We may have had seeds and hints, and already begun new initiatives, but we have not been initiated by the unpredictable and the unknown.

To meet chaos, to be transformed by what we did not know or see before, to let these discoveries become part of us and to let go of the old identities is a form of initiation. We are learning how to be in the chaos of our dying systems and create chaordic spaces for the emergence of the new. And importantly, we are learning how to be in this together.

This is one of the many ways that courage is bred. And when we find our courage, live from our depths, trust our relationships, feel our gratitude for the hard things that have happened — then our actions … well, they are really something.

*translocal- our network of local-to-local people, places and practices.