By George Pór for Enlivening Edge Magazine
The April 2018 EE Magazine Highlights can be read here.
Have you ever gone for a helicopter ride? I did once on Kauai. The bumpy air combined with the ‘copter’s tremors made my stomach turn, not to mention my environmentalist friends then scolding me for littering the island’s pristine sky.
That was a small price to pay for the extraordinary experience of revisiting, from the sky, my joy of climbing up the ridge of a (dormant) volcano, my awe as I was standing just few meters from where a majestic, robust waterfall landed, and my uncharacteristically lounging on a lazy, unspoiled beach of the North Shore—but this time seeing these ravishing beauties of nature from high above.
On the flight, the delicious intimacy of previous up-close presence with these places yielded to a different kind of delight. Looking down at them from the vicinity of the few scurrying white clouds, I saw the spacious and perfect patterns of creation by the forces of the earth, fire, water and wind. In that moment, my mind stopped, and I was sitting in the chopper in such a silent reverence that it filtered out even the bellowing roar of its engine.
That’s the memory that came back when I asked myself, what is the story that I can share with you, which could give you a sense of how I feel when I have a chance to work with enthused and faithful facilitators of meaningful changes on the ground, people who give all of themselves to what they believe, in spite the odds, and then I have the chance to rise above the landscape and see zillions of similar projects—projects in which people are working for the reinvention and replacement of that which is obsolete and soul-wrenching in our factories, offices, classrooms, and public spaces.
Seen from a helicopter view, fascinating patterns connect them, trends criss-cross them, and the larger story of the movement for civilizational renewal gives them an epic background.
What becomes visible in the social landscape of the Movement, from 36,000 feet, is the growing number of connections among its constituents, mediated by websites, conferences such as the upcoming Integral European Conference in Hungary, and meetups, where innovators and early adopters mingle.
As those connections amplify, so does the innervation of the Movement as a new kind social organism, or should I say “social ecosystem.” I would to love invite you for a ride in a ‘copter so that you could marvel at that ecosystem slowly becoming aware of itself.
Let me leave you with this question: how can we build a big enough aircraft to accommodate all those we need to have on board for making together better sense of what we can see from above? Informed by the “big picture” we saw, after landing our daily work for transformation might get wings….
George Pór is an evolutionary thinker and a strategic learning partner to visionary leaders in business, government, and civil society. He is the originator of Enlivening Edge and teaches a course on “Transformative Communities of Practice” at Meridian University. A select list of his articles and book chapters on the fields of collective intelligence, organizational and social renewal can be found here.
