When Hummingbird Appears in England

I know the 1000 Hummingbirds.. who rose first for the Water and who recognized one another beyond creed or color or race. Direct encounter experience of Hummingbird is not in any way confrontational, it's deeply and wildly exalting. Thus we caught our breath.. and breathed anew... walking ourselves into a different plane of consciousness, still present, still alive, still upon the Good Earth, still mundane but oh, brilliant mundanity!

When Hummingbird were first sighted in England we knew then that our attention and presence of mind/heart had come full circle and the light-of-heart lessons of Hummingbird had been fully downloaded into our caked-clay selves! "

I am a threshold practitioner/facilitator/orchestrator...

Births and birthings of all kinds, deaths; big and little, graduations and completions, from all manner of life-moments, commitments and completions, initiations....

Who said "No trumpets will sound" (destiny is made known silently).....

Well, these junctures that profoundly shape a person and a life and thereby, a community and a Humanity, these we acknowledge and honor, and grow from bringing such seminal events into the light of awareness and integrating what we are weaving and why.

Oh... and.... World Wide Web..... I Love It.

We are endlessly weaving shimmering threads the like of which have never been seen before on this plane.

In 1974 we lived off the old grid.. in Wales; Brecon Beacons (British Isles).

In 2004 we lived off the old grid in Santa Cruz; Bonny Doon (California).

Finally the big quantum leap was to live ON THE GRID; the Global Energy Grid that Bucky identified in the mid-20th century but it was too radical for 20th century folk to grok ("The biggest secrets are kept by public incredulity" McLuhan).

Back then people just couldn't wrap their heads round unlimited energy for free, and there certainly hadn't been the political will to support something that would tip the old structures on their heads.

The moment we lit up 'across the board' on the GEG will be numinous in us forever and attain legendary status before our great grandchildren are born. Why?

Because it IS the event that that Teilhard De Chardin foresaw:

"When we have mastered the winds and the waves, the tides and gravity, we will harness for God (who is Source who is Us) the energies of love, and then, for the second time in the history of the world we will have discovered fire..."

In the end it took a level of cooperation and trust that just hadn't been attainable before. Perhaps our little forays off the fossil-fuel grid over the decades did in some small way help us to find our way here though.

We like to think so, but truly, it IS about LOVE... that's how come we eventually could HEAR it was there all along... and enact the Big Switch.

We actually live in several very cool places: 3 main home bases, all equally home (with some other occasional sojourn places), which a whole bunch of kith & kin call home, and all of us are semi-nomadic by choice, spending weeks or months of the year, in different seasons, staying put in one place, going with the growing season, all woven with scintillating conversations that weave through the days of our lives.

Remember that old professor back in the late 20th century, with his brilliant initiative: "Take Back Your Time Day' (Medieval Peasants Worked Less Than You Do..) Well we did!! And Wow.. Lives Worth Living..

Our home bases are an evolved form of William Irwin Thompson's Lindesfarne, where folk who congregate are fired up with what it takes to realize our full human potential.

I consider myself very fortunate in that my home life is deeply woven with tribe that include blood relatives, extended family, and what you might call friends but they really are my kith and kin, we share so much so deeply, so far back and so far forward.

Connection, Relationships... with the Land, with the Water.. with an evolving Humanity.. which wholly encompasses the animals and animus and anima, the Breath and The Air..:

"The Air with its penetrating strength Characterizes the victorious banner that is Trust

It gives light to the fire's flame And sprinkles the imagination of believers with the dew of hope

Thus does Trust show the way

Those who breathe this dew long for heavenly things
And carry within them refreshing, greening love
With which they hasten to the aid of all
Then, with the passion of heavenly yearning
They bring forth rich fruit."

Hildegard von Bingen (1098 - 1179)

I got to be this person by living with the burning question: "what would it take to realize our full human potential??" Then..., being thigh-deep in the shifting shoreline of grandchild births; it's about breath and blood and mucus, yes!

But the magnitude of birth drives into the dreamtime and each one brought new insights, opened new doors, begged new questions, prompted new vows.... And then... well, then the Greatest Experiment in Democracy in the History of the World sprung a major leak and what oozed out sure looked like it needed lancing anyway....

"The handmaidens of despair meet in their webs of intrigue. Scissor ears with ipods clip the news and BlackBerries go picking themselves through the NSA traces but the server is down and the market is skittish as unemployment goes north and futures sell short. The beggars of description roll the credits in the streets." (American Economy by WIT, 2008)

That was the year (2008) when we began, as a collective, to realize that EVERYTHING that had fired us up over a lifetime, had prepared us for this, for this Sovereign Step we were taking as a People.

I know about thresholds, meltdowns, graduations, breakthroughs.

I know that Naming is important and celebrating small and big things is crucial to wellbeing.

I know that Play is a child's work and probably a grown-up's salvation.
That dirt under the fingernails is a good feeling.

I know that feeling good is the surest way to creative and innovative outcomes.
I know that lucid dreaming fuels day trips, and day trips are just another trippy dreamscape.

I know that wilderness is full of wisdom
And that words were created to share the pictures we carry in our hearts.

With the Institute for the Future, a non-profit research organisation based in California, Ms McGonigal is using the ARG approach to evaluate future scenarios with the help of thousands of players.

In 2007's "World Without Oil" (for which I was a podcaster; 'Bodi Lane'!), for example, players worked together to determine what humanity would do in a severe oil crisis. (Many of its conclusions were validated when the oil price spiked in 2008.)

Ms McGonigal's "Superstruct" (played through in 2008), uses blogs, videos and wikis to encourage people to imagine the world in 2019.

Her aim, she says, is to use such games as large-scale brainstorming tools, "to build our ability to respond quickly, and in large-scale collaborative ways, to what might happen in the future."

excerpted from Economist.com
Monitor
Serious fun
Mar 5th 2009
From The Economist print edition

Jane McGonigal | Institute for the Future
Director of Game Research & Development

Jane McGonigal takes play seriously. She studies the power of games to impact the real-world -- and she creates games that do just that. A pioneer in the field of "alternate reality gaming", her previous projects include The Lost Ring, World Without Oil, Cruel 2 B Kind, and I Love Bees. She is an expert on applying game design and game theory to real work and real business, and has consulted and developed internal game workshops for leading technology companies in Asia, Europe, and the U.S., as well as more than a dozen Fortune Global 500 Companies.

Ian Christopher wrote and directed the world's first Crop Circle Documentary, "Something Wonderful Has Happened...But It Was Not In The News!"

This full length feature was produced around the Millennium and I was privileged to be Ian's moderator when he came to present his findings to the annual Ecological Farming Conference at Asilomar in California.

Ian Christopher founded the Mariposa-Pacific Research Institute in Palo Alto, California to provide important findings to other researchers, authors and speakers. His interest in the Crop Circle Phenomenon prompted Ian to analyze the results obtained from years of investigations and studies of the mysterious formations in England. The wealth of data presented in this movie was compelling and truly heartening.

At this juncture in my life I had by serendipitous circumstances got to step into my first and newly formed crop circle by over-hearing a woman in Glastonbury, run into the store I was standing in, and tell her storekeeper friend, she had just dropped everything to go straight to this crop circle she heard had was newly arrived in a field near Stonehenge....

"Do you have room in your car for me?!" I boldly asked. And she, having never laid eyes on me before said "Of course!" The crop circles are like that.

I loved it in the crop circle, and I loved it that the farmer had just stuck a donation box on the gate, saying we were welcome but please walk in the tram-lines so as not to damage the crop, and the money raised in his little tin box would go to local charity..

For years now I had been sending Crop Circle greeting cards to friends and family; cards produced by Santa Cruz Comic News editor, Thom Zajac. The wonderful thing about Thom's crop circle greeting card line is that the blurb says, even if we can't fully fathom what they're about or what they're for, they are wondrous for their mystery alone, and the patterns make us feel good. If that is all, then that's a lot!

There is evidence that intricate, highly complex crop circles have appeared in totality, without a time lapse.

The DNA structure is temporarily altered by crop circle phenomenon:

The crop is not harmed, not smashed, not crushed, not damaged; when left in subsequent weeks, it will again grow up towards the sun, its DNA over the weeks reverting to pre-crop circle structure

Last year I well remember my oh-so-welcome plate of home-made scrambled egg on toast, I ate here after I lay for a long long time in a nearby crop circle.