This is the Hour. And yet…

‘It is time to speak your truth.

Create your community.

Be good to each other.’ 

Hopi Elders, 2000

A prophecy issued by Hopi spiritual elders* 24 years ago continues to float through my mind: ‘There is a river flowing now very fast’.

With each passing day, our ability to influence the course of climate collapse diminishes. It’s a deeply personal and collectively vital moment.

If you’ve chosen to let go of the shore to play your part in the massive improvisation act that is underway, what do you see? What do you feel? What does it take to keep your eyes open and your head above the water, as the elders encourage us to do? 

In recent work with leaders, I’ve been moved by people’s commitment and skill in challenging old patterns of behaviour, vulnerably standing for something new, tapping deep wells of energy and creativity to find lines through. It seems that transforming our ways here on Earth into something that could be compatible with a good life may yet be possible.

I’m also caught by the reality of how often we can find ourselves as though spinning in an eddy current. Held in a pattern that refuses to allow us to make progress. Frustrates and/or confuses us. Brings us into conflict. 

Including with our allies and with our (very) own sense of who we are. 

Two of the eddies I see playing out may be familiar to you, also:

One, the urgent need to make the business case for decarbonization when capital costs are high and emissions don’t come with a price tag. The result? Immobilization. The status quo prevails and destruction continues. 

The other, the heartfelt ambition of leaders seeking to respond in some meaningful way to the harsh realities of climate collapse only to find themselves at odds with those who are foregrounding their responsibilities as defined by today’s consensus reality. 

Deadlock. 

On one side desperation takes hold. The clock ticks, grief grows, hope fades. On the other, eyes roll and attention returns to immediate matters. Tensions simmer. Relationships fracture.

There’s certainly a version of both in my own life, as I upgrade my 1950s-built home, and as I continue to explore my best contribution professionally. How to balance truth telling and stern holding to account (for myself, for others) with compassion (for myself, for others)? How to grow my capacity to listen ever more deeply into different truths, and how to support others to grow theirs?

The intensity of the binds that we can find ourselves in suggests that we have come to our real work, and that we’re taking it seriously. With low-hanging fruit picked, we can no longer avoid the deep-rooted dilemmas that underpin this moment. 

Important questions for each one of us arrive with new resonance. What are we standing for, and what are we no longer willing to stand for? What is the vision for how our shared values will live and breathe into the future? What does it mean to be successful, and how are we using our power? What is our relationship with risk and what enables us to act with the courage being called for?

Every decision we make is consequential, serving to reinforce an unsustainable, life-threatening status quo, and/or genuinely contributing to meaningful transformation fit for our unfolding future. How do we discern which next steps are our best bets in the patterning of hope?

The Hopi elders tell us in their prophecy:

“It is time to speak your truth.
Create your community.
Be good to each other.”

What does this look like for you? 

Who are you swimming with? 

Do you have a clear sense of your truth, given the dizzying spins you may find yourself in? 

How are you developing a quality of trust with others, secure enough to work through your own and others’ strongly felt dilemmas - together, in a way that taps the wisdom that exists between you? 

Do you feel included, cared for, seen, able to bring your voice, heard? Do others?

Our growing Leading Through Storms community invites deep exploration of all that matters, including who we choose to be in this moment. Training body and mind to bring our best self forward in even the most challenging of circumstances, we believe in the profound importance of catalysing more generative relationships, experimenting our way into the future. 

I read that the rotating motion of an eddy current can cause nutrients from deeper waters to rise to the surface. In the quiet moments - when I find myself reflecting on the real (or imagined?) futility of my habitual energetic tilt towards possibility - I wonder: 

What if we slowed down long enough to reach further into the intensity and persistence of the eddies we find ourselves caught in? 

By caring to speak and hear uncomfortable truths differently, might we experience some kind of liberation here and now while also patterning hope and a different kind of integrity into the future?

*********

If stepping into community with others would be supportive to you and your leadership, join one of our events.

If you’d like to explore all that is challenging and possible as you work to transform some aspect of your community, workplace and/or wider systems, join our upcoming online programme, The Patterning of Hope. Starts Nov.

Our website includes a variety of resources that you may find helpful and please do book a call with one of us if you’d welcome an exploratory chat about what it means, and what it takes, to lead through storms.

* Many Hopi spiritual elders claim that we are living in the final days of the current age and, for more than 60 years, have predicted various Earth changes that signal this. One such leader, David Monongye, warned: “When earthquakes, floods, hailstorms, drought, and famine will be the life of every day, the time will have then come for the return to the true path, or going the zig-zag way.”

The “zig-zag way” refers to a line found on Prophecy Rock, a panel of ancestral Hopi rock carvings in northern Arizona. The zig-zag is the upper of two parallel lines, thought to represent the path of the Two-Hearts, who are wreaking havoc on our Earth Mother and living contrary to ecological principles and the laws of Nature. 

The lower line, on the other hand, is the path of the One-Hearts, who are close to soil and the growth of corn, beans, squash—that is, adhering to the true Hopi way.

The upper path is divorced from the natural world and totally immersed in the synthetic, manufactured reality of iPhones and Xbox 360s. In essence, it is a lifestyle that the Hopi call koyaanisqatsi, which means “world out of balance,” or “life of moral corruption and turmoil (regarding a group).” 

The lower way, rooted in earth-based rhythms, finds solace and spiritual sustenance from corn pollen, sunlight, soaking rains, and vast desert vistas—a life in accordance with the Creator or the Great Spirit.

Source: ancient-origins.net

Image: Walter Baxter / The Corryvreckan Whirlpool / CC BY-SA 2.0