RSlow Processing as a Quality

Take time to go within to process - just as a loaf of bread is baked in this oven of yore.

As a school counselor, I spent a good deal of my time on child study. Students would be referred for "testing" if they weren't keeping up with classroom expectations. Although it wasn't the only difficulty students had, I observed a very large percentage of students needed more time to access a response than was expected. I also observed that there was more of it at the beginning of this new century (love saying that) than there was forty years ago.

I am a slow processor, but had other processing channels through which I was able to learn quickly. It did not help in social situations - a place where I was and still can be a total klutz. Now that I am an elder,however,  this slow processing is expected of me. So, I take full advantage of it.

Recently, I was at a weekend workshop which invited a lot of response to sets of questions asked. I observed that not only I, but almost everyone was a slow processor. The old style of eliciting a lively dialogue in response to a set of questions, is no longer a natural process - if it ever was. - and which it never was for me.

When I worked with the teachers who taught these slow processing students, I would suggest that the teacher ask a question, ask students to write down an answer, and then ask them to share what they wrote.
Teachers knew already that they would get more results if they gave students time to process.  Thus, the endless trips to the xerox machine to make copies of worksheets.

This is not the same. The worksheet is not the answer. Imagine a global summit where every diplomat had a worksheet to fill out before participating?

I contend that a skill for the new millenium that needs to be learned is how to take time to process a response from a place of integrity.

Too many people are listening and buying into what news media says , for example, - because it is easier to do than to take time to process one's own wisdom. Too many people are not being able to get their two pennies into the decision making process because they need time to access their own wisdom. 

The everyday world just isn't set up to allow for this to happen.  Life styles and interactive patterns need to change to accommodate this increasing quality called slow processing.

Our future depends on it. It depends on developing skills of slow processing. It depends on people being able to access their innate wisdom which comes from deep within. This is where people are today -there are few fact addicts left on this planet, only those who don't know how to think for themselves.

Let's take the time we need to speak to each other directly from the heart. Imagine how different this world would be if it were a natural pattern of interaction.

Where have you found this to be true for you?  How have you learned to respond from your heart?

An Earthrise Village Leaders Institute

View of a sunset in Amherst, MA at the sundial created by students somewhat replicating Stonehenge

In 1982, the Kenya/Uganda border was a dangerous place to be.  Hundreds of people were killed in the rebellion against the Ugandan government, and an estimated 400-thousand people were left homeless. Because of this,, despair hung around heavily like hungry buzzards circling fresh road kill. Smuggling and prostitution were businesses in and of themselves.

Three of us traveled to a village right on the border to facilitate a week long village leaders institute (VLI). The village was at the foot of Mt. Elgon. I had seen pictures of the top of this inactive volcano. The flora was lush and the fauna immense compared to wildlife I had encountered along side Kenya's roads.

Fifty or so village leaders, mostly women, began to gather for the training week. The people in this village were about the poorest I had visited to date. Everyone brought food as payment for their coming - lots of greens  and plenty of ground maize, tea and fresh milk. No meat and no sugar.  For the final celebration, one of our team went searching for a chicken or two, or some goat meat, and some sugar. None was to be found.

A VLI always began with introductions and a sharing of what folks were doing. A group of women reported that they had started a co-op garden and a sewing business and that it had failed when the men took it over and split the profits as their salaries instead of reinvesting in more seeds and supplies.  "Oops," I thought. "The group who came to teach them how to do this forgot the most important part - including the men in the business traming basics."

The other question we asked at the opening was, "What has been the most important world event in your life's time?  A young man, clad only in black sports shorts, who had walked from the other side of  Mt. Elgon, carrying a cabbage as his payment, answered, "Man on the moon - seeing the picture of the earth."

I was aghast with wonder.  Why didn't he say the recent war next door? How did he know about the men on the moon?  Where did he see a picture?  He said he listened on the radio and saw the picture in a magazine.  There is no city on the other side of Mt. Elgon.

In consideration of time, I never did get to ask him where he was able to access these communication vehicles.

This VLI continued with a verbal image of the earthrise, a picture  held in each participant's imagination.  It was our new context while learning how to work with the rest of the village on implementing plans.

How long has it been now - thirty years - and I still remember it as if it happened yesterday. I often wonder if they also remember and what is that once young man is doing today.

How has the image of the earthrise affected you?

Channeling

Early in my life's time, I was drawn to what I have since come to know as "channeling". 

I loved movies like  Topper and Night of the Living Dead.  Fascinated with seance scenes in movies, I even tried  holding them with a few with friends. We did have some delightfully scary experiences. I'd become totally rapt watching my mother and aunt  make a ouija board sing with messages from spirits.

When I wanted to learn a skill or reach a goal, I would call on the spirits to assist. I didn't see anyone out of my eyes,  or in an audible voice, hear anyone.  I felt a presence which, when I closed my eyes, I could imagine. The voice which spoke was silent and came from within me and was silent, yet succinct. Interactions with this "channeling" were creative, colorful, and full of life.

By the time I was a teenager, I had forgotten all about that world of spirits.

Later, I was drawn back to this dynamic when introduced to the work of Edgar Cayce and Alice Bailey, among the most famous channelers. I read everything I could find by them. then, recalling my childhood experiences, I was convinced there was something organically real about this channeling dynamic. I  read  books by about fifty channelers, including participating in the famous Course in Miracles.

When I write or paint, the product always comes from being present in another state of being, an energy which I  have come to believe is the same experience. I also have concluded that each has a very unique, yet very similar way of experiencing channeling.  Many, if not all, creative artists, musicians, writers, etc. source their work from this "other-than-the-ordinary-me" world.

I envy psychics, mediums,  and other professed channelers their well developed abilities to access this source and let it flow from them so easily.  Yet, I can do a memorable tarot card reading on myself, now and then and again.

I prefer to describe this other world and its inhabitants as metaphorical creative processing. It is other than intuition, but not totally disrelated. My own imagination comes alive with images of a channeling entity. This is a place of wisdom accessible to every single human being in one form or another. It is a reality upon "whose" shoulders we stand to create the many faces of the future. It is that dynamic without which there is no new growth and development.

How exciting when someone or a group accesses this metaphorically enlivened creative processing into its becoming a new expression to which anyone who encounters it can relate - a new insight, a new song, a new paradigm, a new operating pattern, a new opportunity to feel love and be loved by Being itself.

Experiencing this life dynamic metaphorically is very real. We have all experienced this at one time or another. What has been your experience? Do you value this type of creative processing? Why or why not?

Trouble Maker or Agent of Change

This celtic maze was crafted at Shadow Rock UMC in Phoenix AZ

When I was in school - kindergarten all the way through high school graduation, I was not one to conform to teacher expectations. 

In kindergarten, I fell madly in love with a blond curly head and wanted to spend my day hugging him while the teacher read about the house with no windows or doors, with a star in the center - which turned out to be an apple.

In first grade, the teacher had to leave the room for a few minutes giving the order for us to all work. Some of us talked away. When she returned she asked who talked .I did not fess up and got my name on the board and my parents called.

In 7th grade, in a science class where the teacher was talking on and on, I was also talking on an on.   When she swatted me on the head with a ruler, I stood up and told her where to go and was sent to the office.

In 8th grade, three of us made polka dotted circle skirts in home economics  and wore them every day for a week to protest happy homemaker stereo-typing..

In 10th grade, the English teacher annoyed me by how he played favorites to the point where I wrote my assigned essay about it. I had to show my "F" to my mother who wrote to him, "This too shall pass - we hope". He wrote back, "To err is human, to forgive divine." 

By the time I was a senior, the 60's revolution had begun . I wrote a speech about the existence of racism in my area. I got an "F".

I danced right into the 60's revolutions. Gave my whole life to its grand purposes. Woven in and through it all was a disregard for my responsibility to myself and the human relationships in my life

It was like this: When I was very young, at a family picnic, I ate a chunk out of the center of a watermelon. Much to my grandfather's dismay, he could not get me to regret my action. Even today, I'm not sure if the lesson was that I should say, "I did it" with resolve, or if it shouldn't be I who eats the sweet center of the fruit.

This is the paradox and the dilemma. Shadow is always present. The same energy of social responsibility shows up  as reactionary rebellion or as a pioneering response. 

I decide its purpose all alone, finally - nowhere to look for the right or wrong in what I have done. Time will decide.

Reflect on an energy which has been part of you ever since you can remember. How have your actions danced between reaction and response through your life's time?