The Ripple…

It is sunrise, 5:50am here on the Eastern slope of the Continental Divide of the Colorado Rocky Mountains. I’m sitting next to the small pond I built over a decade ago that is now home to seven different heirloom water lily varieties, wild cattails, water grasses, and the odd assortment of plants I collected from the nearby streams. It’s also home to snails, green frogs (who are still in their tadpole form), snakes, water striders, damselflies and dragonflies, and an assortment of fish, the intrepid survivors of the relentless dusk assaults of a prehistoric Great Blue Heron who put this pond on her nightly dinner map years ago.

This place is heaven to me. It is alive with its own wildness. I lost whatever meager control of this ecosystem I ever had about five years ago when I noticed fish swimming around that I didn’t put here; the eggs having found their way here on the webbed feet of the wild ducks who come through for an evening bath now and again.

I came to the pond with my computer this morning to write to you about Ethics. More specifically, to speak to the Ethical Self that comes from our ecologically embedded, erotically intelligent rewilding. 

Enrollment for our Embodied Ethics course, starting August 31st, is now open! It’s my job to put a call out to practitioners, clergy, teachers, parents, business folks, leaders––in fact, anyone in a position of power who wonders how to take up their right-size in a way that is generative, inspiring, and even radical, while also being eminently beneficent. 

Marketing, as an endeavor, is not ecologically embedded nor is it erotically intelligent. In fact, it is the antithesis of wild. Here, I’m faced with a deep conundrum. It seems to be seeding the worst kind of karma to enroll a course using tactics and strategies that go against the fundamental principles we are teaching. 

So, as is typically my way, I delivered myself to the pond to observe and listen. Perhaps it has wisdom for me when it comes to how to simply put the word out and let you all take it from there. As I sit here, I let myself believe everything I ‘hear’ and see, everything that occurs to me in this deep listening place. And I simply observe...waiting for the morsel of ah-hah that inevitably comes.

I watch, almost without breathing, as a small green bottle fly gets stuck in an orb-weaver’s web. Its weight is just enough to cause the web to dip and its tiny body hits the surface of the pond, which creates a ripple in the water, and adds even more weight to the fly. The fly’s wings, beating rapidly, draw the attention of the fish who come up to see if the cause of this disturbance is of interest. 

And sure enough, it is of great interest to one of them. And the fish gobbles the fly in one gulp. With that, the web pops back up to its former shape, the surface of the pond returns to its glassy stillness and by the time all this happens, the fish is already back down at the bottom of the pond, where it’s cooler. Belly full. Singular task complete.

The ripple that is mine to make this morning, my version of the plump green bottle fly to your hungry fish, is simply the offering itself: that there is a deeply intelligent, Ethical Self alive and well in most all of us, whose relationship with power is a shapeshifting elegant dance of constant listening and reorganizing, one that is in intimate relationship with the many layers of Life all around and within it, who is nourished by transparency, humility and courageous boldness in service to what it holds dear. 

Including and transcending the dictums ‘do no harm!’ and ‘obey the rules!’ this Ethical Self also follows a far more complex set of guidelines and principles: the ones that guide thriving ecological systems. 

If this entices you to the surface of the pond this morning, I encourage you to join us for this 12-week journey. In addition to teaching some things, we will also be practicing together, in large and small groups, with real world situations that are the dilemmas we each face regularly. 

We will not come away with any hard and fast rules. But we will likely feel the presence of rarely-used muscles stretching and strengthening. And we will, no doubt, wrestle with ourselves and each other as we get quite intimate with the tendrils of the carceral model of ‘right’ and ‘wrong’, ‘good’ and ‘bad’...things that have almost nothing to do with authentic, generative, ethical behavior.