A few of my key teachers over the last 30 years have had a noticeable commonality in them — they’ve inherently recognized an intricate connection and flow with life itself. They’ve celebrated through joy and pain, a call to be alive, to be deepened in spirit.
I’m thinking of Tom Hurley of The World Cafe and the time when he was on the board for The Berkana Institute in the 90s (I think) — he spoke of the “irrepressible spirit of life that rises up through the work that we are engaged in.”
I’m thinking of Meg Wheatley, dear friend and colleague, that has since the early 90s articulated the qualities and practices of life-affirming leaders.
I’m thinking of Toke Moeller, another dear friend and colleague, that has dared to be as simple as a hobbit in doing complex work, that has dared to encourage being with the flow of life itself.
And more recently, because after all, it has become a truism to me that “when the student is ready, the teacher appears,” I’m thinking of a newish friend and colleague in Salt Lake City, Guliana, who shares from Clarissa Pinkola Estes another call to life. “Don’t be a fool. Go back and stand under that one red flower and walk straight ahead for that last hard mile. Go up and knock on the weathered door. Climb up to the cave. Crawl through the window of a dream. Sift the desert and see what you find.”
I bow to my teachers. Old and new. And to life itself, irrepressible in it’s bloom.
