Thank you for being here.
Listening over the past few months to varied podcasts and reading pieces by a variety of writers, over and over again there is the acknowledgement that for many, if not most, this current time in our world is filled with more “disrupters” than ever before. The disrupters are highly capable of producing fear, anxiety, and loneliness as people search for ways to navigate them.
I would add that we are in what feels like surround sound drama and the negative, often on repeat.
I believe there are, in equal number if not more, exceptional events happening that highlight the capacity to be different, live differently and “do” different, such that our world can be and will, someday, be transformed.
For each person, even with conditions that might be termed global disrupters, the list can vary in terms of impact. To gloss over experienced impacts would be naive and like the old saying, “sticking one’s head in the sand.”
Have I been impacted in ways that are challenging? The answer is absolutely, yes.
And…I get to choose intentions for how I want to be present as I face the challenges.
One example that is fresh is a podcast on Sounds True. Tami Simon interviewed Kimberly Manns and Tony Schwartz, creators of The Reckoning, a program that focuses on shifting from being so externally oriented to internal orientation. In that way, we become adept at staying regulated in a difficult, stressful world and learn to be in charge of and responsible for where and how we focus our energy.
As I begin to contribute in this online space, I do so with a deep desire, deeper than ever before in my life, to bring people together to dwell in possibility, to not only believe, but know that we can come together to lessen fear, lessen anxiety and lessen loneliness, just a few conditions where there is a longing for lessening.
There is also longing for community and belonging, what I have begun to think about as a collective that becomes contagious.
I want to bring us into deep conversations that yes, dip into incredible resources that are never absent, but which we often forget about or gloss over. I call them “wells;” however they can be called by many names.
The wells have the most magnificent capacity to remind me and us of who we are at our best.
They are ready and waiting to continually fill us with resilience, hope, reimagination, endurance, love, civility, goodness, grace, presence and so much more.
I believe as we approach the wells with our concerns and challenges, and as we stop and dip, and dip again and receive, that we will carry away from them more than we need. We will carry more than enough to live fully as individuals and have an overflow to be shared. We will make a difference.
We will begin to create new imprints.
We will choose to give away less of ourselves and our time to the surround sound drama.
We will, instead, fill up our hearts and spirits with that which calls us and others to far more inspiring, innovative, wise, collaborative, co-creative models that are, yes, models then shared with people of all ages and stages.
I envision wells being as exciting for children to visit as 100 years olds. I envision wells changing conversations in education and corporate settings. I envision that the results (for those who love that word…who love to measure) of dipping into the almost infinite number of wells available will change ways of being with one another, how we live and work and play together.
I invite you to meet me here, to comment, to ask questions, to contact me if you want to bring this conversation into a particular place in your life and to become part of this brilliant collective. Brilliant as in my imagining what you will bring and brilliant as in the light we can shine into this world that is deeply desiring of finding and inviting it to stay.
May we dip and pour into life that which nourishes and buoys us and another and the other.
As I write here, it will always be about the wells without necessarily using that word all the time. I don’t want someone to say, “If I hear the word well one more time…” Just know they are a huge source of what carries me in these later decades of my life and for my work in this world.