Searching for Source

An re-meeting of our inner and outer world.

We’re holding a conference, make that an ‘un-conference’ called ‘Re:Sourcing Yourself in Uncertain Times.’

As part of our un-planning, we created a list of familiar tropes at conferences:

• Sitting still - in reverence below a lectern and keynoter, standing next to a giant screen

• A room with no windows, bright artificial light

• Tightly structured opportunities to be in dialogue ‘I’ll give you one minute to talk to your neighbour.’

• Look at what everyone’s talking about and jump on that theme

In her book ‘Imaginable,’ Futurist and Game Designer Jane McGonigal invites us to imagine alternative futures by listing qualities of the status quo, then revealing their opposites.

Our list of dull tropes becomes:

• Dancing together, moving with freedom and all of our senses

• Midnight in a jungle beneath a canopy of stars

• Talk when you wish, be silent as you wish - get lost in long, winding conversations - wisdom expanding between and within.

• Listen to the field, the horizon, draw down the signals beyond and beneath.

It feels good to turn things over a bit.

While our venue isn’t a jungle (yet), we are messing with what we can for now.

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Some context on how we landed on the idea - to Re: Source.

The word has been following me and shapeshifting.

From the perspective of a teacher, a resource is Year 8’s photocopying. In coaching, a resource restores energy and flow to a system. In the face of challenge, to be resourceful is to adapt and create from what we have. In modernity, a natural resource is extracted for material wealth, channelled from home to the richest - hollowing out ecosystems and communities.

… Yet, if you pause…. if you listen in, flowing quietly beneath our domestic definitions, is a stream, a river, a ‘source.’

In translation, the French noun ‘source’ is a pure spring, a fountainhead, a miraculous generosity that sustains everything. Connected to a verb in Old French, ‘resoudre’ means ‘to rally, to rise again’ mirrored in the Latin ‘resurgere.’

There’s something tidal here, the lunar feminine, that we are all caught in if we tune into the ebb and flow.

Another layer - a wise Greek American friend and French speaker shared her grasp of the meaning to be: ‘to reconcile, resolve, a coming together.’ To Re: Source then, is to re-meet with our source?

As you feel into these various definitions, the silbilant sounds, opening of the vowels, the containers of ‘o’ and ‘u,’ how do you understand this word, ‘re-source’ in your body?

I’ve forever been drawn to water, visions of waterfalls and warm rocks, frightening upheaval of waves, gently held by rivers next to soft verge, a setting sun fractured fractal in delicate meeting of surface and sky. I am water, spiritually and biologically.

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“I would love to live like a river flows,

carried by the surprise of its own unfolding.”

John O’Donohue

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Then consider how water saturates metaphor - pointing to source of creativity. The emotion welled up in him, an idea bubbling up, being well, unwell - the rare immersion of a flow state, playing a sonata, watering tender seedling, that extraordinary conversation where you overheard a quietened part of yourself awake. And the opposite is true: inspiration has dried up, she suffers from writer’s block.

So, in uncertain times that have us reaching for our phones and control - stockpiling water in plastic and ordering iodine tablets, the threat of invisible enemies encroaching on Western luxury, how can we re-learn to re-source?

The wisdom of the word tells us to look within to the spring. Call this spirit, source, self, Rilke’s ‘you,’ call it God if you like - the miracle is, it’s always there, unharmed and patiently waiting for your return.

This is the poetic voice, the voice that meets chaos no matter what.

Mary Oliver’s evocation of the motion of a river, Stebbin’s Gulch, could be a discernment of this inner source flowing between the human, the more than human and across time:

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…so it continues for miles

this bolt of light,

its only industry

to descend

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and to be beautiful

while it does so;

as for purpose

there is none,

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it is simply

one of those gorgeous things

that was made

to do what it does perfectly

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and to last,

as almost nothing does,

almost forever.

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It’s soul-wrenching then, that our rivers are toxic:

‘No single stretch of river in England or Northern Ireland is in good overall health. Just 15% of English, 31% of Northern Irish, and 50% of Irish river stretches reach good ecological health standards. Toxic chemicals persist in every stretch of English rivers.’

The State of Our Rivers Report 2024

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Our rivers as reflection of our wellness.

And yet, when we are gone, the rivers will revive. If only we could absorb their wisdom while we still have them.

Activist Jayeesha Dutta describes herself as a ‘Bengali water protecting mermaid and artist’ who has absorbed this wisdom, and so is moved to conserve it:

‘Water creates ways for itself, moving with gravity, moving around obstacles, wearing down obstacles, reshaping the world. When there isn’t an overt way forward, water seeps into the land, becomes a vapour in the sky, freezes into ice. When the time comes, water moves over the land in cloud form and nourishes elsewhere. And of course, we humans are mostly water. And look how many ways we manifest. Recognise how this deep, spiritual connection to the water energy connects me to the rhythms of our planet and our peoples - it is a necessary form of healing. Sometimes tides are high, and sometimes tides are low, but the waters remain in balance. And so can we. For me, to stay in the struggle for the long haul and keep going for another twenty years, this is critical.’

Re-Sourcing. A turning inwards to our life source and knowing, to nurture through practice and ritual, while turning outwards in community to be immersed and known in this place we call home, then to act on behalf of all of us.

If we touch a thread of this aspiration in our un-conference as the con-tributary voices meet and pool, we’ll be happy.

https://makingstuffbetter.com/resourcing-yourself-in-a-time-of-uncertainty/