Love is perhaps the most difficult task given us, the most extreme, the final proof and text, for which all other work is only preparation.*
Rainer Maria Rilke

John Lewis asked a “what if” question as a tool for social alchemy: what if the beloved community were already a reality, the true reality, and he simply had to embody it until everyone could see it.*
Krista Tippett

Love has everything to do with it.
Theory U envisages a journey from
I-in-me,
The self existing in the cocoon
in a small defensive world, to
I-in-it, in which we become open to new information, then
I-in-us, and we learn about each other, to
I-in-now, when we open to what is wanting to emerge,
The better society we know is wanting to exist:
The revolutionary force in this century
is the awakening of a deep generative human capacity –
the I-in-now.**
Karen Armstrong writes about how, millennia ago,
Humans began creating better stories:
The first great flowering of mythology…
came into being at a time when homo sapiens became home mecans,
“man the killer,”
and found it very difficult to accept
the conditions of his existence in a violent world.^
We speak of tolerance and respect, but
perhaps what we need a better story of love,
The most difficult task of all.

*Krista Tippett’s Becoming Wise;
**Otto Scharmer’s Theory U;
^Karen Armstrong’s A Short History of Myth.