If you come, we can build this together.*
(Bernadette Jiwa)

Calling is a human experience.

Everyone has at least one calling in their lifetime.

They can be heard, missed or ignored.

Last year I placed these two texts side by side, one about explanation, the other enlightenment:

Explanation is an antagonistic encounter that succeeds by defeating an opponent. It possesses the same dynamic of resentment found in other finite play. I will press my explanations on you because I need to show that do to life in the error that I think others think I do.**

It should be obvious that those who live enlightenment lives have demonstrated a unique ability to lear from everyone and everything.^

Over the years of dreamwhispering I’ve noticed that those who gain the most co-create their experience with me – we are both enlightened, an infinite game. Not “Let me do that for you,” but “Let’s create this together.”

*From Bernadette Jiwa’s Hunch;
**From James Carse’s Finite and Infinite Games;
^From Erwin McManus’ Uprising.

I’m just doing my job. But what if you weren’t? What if you replaced “doing” with “improving” or “reinventing” or “transforming”?*
(Seth Godin)

A caret is a v-shaped grapheme (usually inverted and extended) used to indicate where a word or three need(s) inserting into a line of text. I often use ⁁ but hadn’t known what it was called.

I disturb a line with “⁁” and add the additional words above or below the line. It looks messy but the line makes more sense when all the words are present.

My dreamwhispering work with many people has shown me how life also comes with the possibility of using a caret when we discern that there’s something missing.

Most of the things missing will only cost us in terms of time. Even those we may need to pay for end up being ridiculously low-priced relative to how important they are.

The messiness is real cost, though, and it can be too much for some to pay – wanting our lives always to appear tidy in front of others can be a higher price to pay.

*From Seth Godin’s blog: I’m just doing my job.

In addition, we humans can influence our evolution by the environments we construct and the choices we make; our evolution is not just a matter of chance.*
(Steven Hawes)

Blessed are the meek, for they will inherit the earth.**
(Jesus of Nazareth)

Meekness is not a condition or status forced upon us because of what we lack but is an evolutionary choice we make to relate to all things and all people.

Ours is a universe of abundance rather than a world of scarcity, a place to live in awe and gratitude with kindness and generosity.

*From Steven Hawes’ A Liberated Mind;
**Matthew 5:5.

The way I choose to put the messages of my life together into a picture is related to all I have ever seen through the eyes of other picture makers and through a constant kind of looking I do myself. What is my own is the constancy of observation of forms and the investigations of ideas and feelings as they combine into the final object to which I sign my name and for which I assume responsibility.*
(Corita Kent)

The path forward is about curiosity, generosity and connection. These are the three foundations of art.**
(Seth Godin)

My reading and journaling today has taken me back to where my dreamwhispering^ began, although I had no idea this is what would emerge at the time.

It’s more than twenty-five years ago I was a presbyter in the Methodist Church wondering about what it was that I did best and should give more time to. I have no recollection of where this thought came from. It was possibly that I’d uncovered a desire to grow and develop, but I am not sure. What I do remember is shaping a list of activities and handing these to people I thought would be honest and critical about what they saw in me.

It was a limited thing because the list only included what I was already doing, but it turned out to be the beginning of something that would grow and grow.

After my own attempt to identify what I did best through the help of others, when I came across some help for identifying people’s gifts, I embraced it both for myself and others. In a voluntary organisation there can be more roles than people. Up until then I had counted a successful meeting as filling as many of these appointments as possible regardless of a person’s abilities, but commitment doesn’t always come with passion, but passion does comes with commitment.

A few years later I was to discover thinking around talents and strengths that was to change my world. It altered the way I see everyone and I began inviting people to explore theirs – I’ve lost count of how many, but perhaps it’s pushing towards a thousand now.

And through each conversation,^^ uncovering the gifts that are in everyone for living towards others, I’ve been learning and developing, both for the sake of others and for myself:

It is when you give of yourself that you truly give.*^

Corita Kent’s opening words caught my eye because thinking from many places are part of dreamwhispering – from artists like Joseph Campbell, Scott Peck, Otto Scharmer, brothers Alex and Erwin McManus, Seth Godin, Lewis Hyde, James Carse, enhanced by the imagination and thinking of Maria Popova, Elle Luna, Brené Brown, Ursula Franklin and many more, towards “the final object to which I sign my name and for which I assume responsibility.”

In around two months I will be “asking permission to sit down,” a Methodist euphemism for retirement, and I’ll be given the opportunity to reflect on my work and ministry. I stepped outside of church work five years ago so that I might focus on dreamwhispering, although, looking back, this had been the direction I’d been moving in for some years before this.

Why am I telling you this?

Perhaps I am rehearsing some of what I might be sharing on the 23rd April when I ask permission to “sit down.”^*

But I think it’s really about reconnecting with what matters to me most of all which I hold out as a gift from my life to yours, to help you identify and know and do what you must do.

What I am is a thin silence, a whisper; what you do is the most important thing.

*From Corita Kent and Jan Snowden’s Learning by Heart.
**From Seth Godin’s The Practice.
^Dreamwhispering is my name for the work of listening to what a person’s life is telling them around their values, talents and energies, towards creating a story or narrative they want to develop every day of their lives for the benefit of others. In reality, dreamwhispering is what happens when two people enter into a deep, creative conversation.
^^Conversation is the natural space for dreamwhispering. It is not a programme or course and never will be.
*^From Kahlil Gibran’s The Prophet.
(^*Dreamwhisperers don’t really retire.)

Beauty is not to be captured or controlled for there is something intrinsically elusive in its nature.*
(John O’Donohue)

Happy are those who find wisdom, and those who get understanding, for her income is better than silver, and her revenue better than gold. She is more precious than jewels, and nothing you desire can compare with her.**
(Older Testament Proverb)

When we come upon beauty life makes both more sense and is more mysterious – a starry night, an elegant idea, two people connecting in a transcendent way, a movement of life. John O’Donohue continues:

Beauty cannot be forced. It alone decides when it will come and sometimes in the last thing we expect and the very last thing to arrive. Creative artists know this well. Great skill and inspiration set the context or scene where beauty might emerge. But it is not the mind of the artist alone that can determine whether beauty will arrive or not.*

What an exciting thought. Not only are we receivers of beauty but, somehow, we are able to produce beauty.

Perhaps if we seek knowledge and desire wisdom then beauty will be more likely to arrive:

There is no knowledge without emotion. We may be aware of truth, yet until we have felt its force, it is not ours. To the cognition of the brain must be added the experience of the soul.^

Wisdom is a particular way of expressing what we “know,” the culmination of humility, gratitude, faithfulness, integrity, wholeness, perseverance, courage and generosity

*From John O’Donohue’s Divine Beauty.
**Proverbs 3:13-14.
*Arnold Bennett, quoted in Jay Cross’ Informal Learning.

Life is on the wire,
the rest is just waiting.*
(Papa Wallenda)

Show up. Keep showing up. Somebody successful said: 99% of success is just showing up.**
(Kevin Kelly)

Waiting?

Waiting?

Still waiting?

I hesitate when I should be moving, and there’s no better way to hide in waiting than to appear busy.

Something happens to us when we are moving, deeper than we know:

We now know that if you change your mind and behaviour in a healthy way, helpful changes in your body will come along for the ride, down to almost every single cell in your body.^

When we move, we change.

But not when we’re waiting.

We need to stop waiting. Thinking about something in a focused way can count as showing up and is a good place to begin – we need to show up with our minds and hearts as well as our hands, anyway. What it does is akin to the call of the starter: On your marks, set ... .

You’ll know if it has worked if, as the athlete falls forward when taking their arms away, you fall into action when you conclude your deeply focused thinking.

*Papa Wallenda, quoted in Seth Godin’s The Practice.
**From Kevin Kelly’s The Technium post: 68 Bits of Unsolicited Advice. Here’s a video of the 68 bits of advice from Kevin Kelly.
From Steven Hawes’ A Liberated Mind.

Don’t forget, tomorrow is Mindful Doodling and you’re invited.

Long-form creatives are building the storytelling cathedrals of the 21st Century. It’s time to start creating your own masterpiece. It’s time to write your future.*
(Robert McKee)

What is it that you are in for the long haul? How will you develop character, nuance and intrigue in this?

I’ve often mentioned Frederick Buechner’s neat understanding of where we find purpose, this being, where our deepest joy meets the world’s greatest need. Seth Godin puts it this way:

There’s a gap in the market where your version of better can make a welcome change happen. […] Yes, you have a calling: to serve people in a way they need (or want). The opportunity is for each of us to choose a path and follow that, not for our own benefit, but because of what it can produce for others.**

Robert McKee may be writing about screenplays but what goes as an unprecedented time for story development works for our lives, too.

*From Robert McKee‘s newsletter: The Future of Storytelling.
**From Seth Godin’s This is Marketing.

[V]astness is repeated in every system of our lives.  If we only care enough to zoom.*
(Seth Godin)

In a superabundant economy, there are countless niches to make money in, with more emerging all the time.**
(Chris Worth)

There’s a vastness to be discovered as we zoom out into space and there is a vastness to be discovered as we zoom in on life, and especially fascinating to me is the vastness to be discovered in a person’s life.

Also, around and in-between the larger expressions of work we’re familiar with are many smaller spaces to inhabit and flourish with our unique blend of values, talents and energies. They’re worthwhile hanging around with playfulness:

It turns out that many of the best ideas we have start out as filler. Stuff in the margins. Last-minute extras simply to fill space. Because the stakes are low and our defences are down.^

*From Seth Godin’s blog: Zooming in – the magic of looking more closely. 
**Chris Worth’s post for gapingvoid’s blog: The go-to guy vs. the already-here guy.
^From Seth Godin’s blog: The stuff in the margins.