transform., first as a monthly e-journal, and now as a full-blown blog, evolved from a simple newsletter that reported on just our little universe into the premier periodical for reflecting upon and lifting up the emerging field and movement that has become known as Transformative Social Change.

We are proud of not only our ability to draw forth the threads of connection that indicate our progressive movements are forming a fabric of something greater than the sum of its part, but also our moments of prescience, in which we named–or even called for–what was to come. Aptly, that occurred most often within this feature column, INcite. When you pronounce the name with the stress on those capital letters, you’ll see what we’d always intended to provide.

Like most pivotal elements of movement-building, the value of mirroring this “movement of movements” back to itself will be understood better, later. For our part, we hope transform. continues to be a resource and an inspiration for our grand work to continue in a way that is increasingly recognizing of both our shared intentions and our varied expressions. The Occupy movement, with all its challenges and yet-unknowns, has the tender beginnings of becoming a transformative social movement. It’s up to us to take what we know and make it so.

If you haven’t checked out the blog yet, you really should. The new content added every day is there to inspire and challenge you to see the thread of connectedness amidst the diverse expressions of deep change. In the meantime, these ten essays from the last year, including some timely reprints, tell the tale of the movement that was (and is) to come.

January | state of union: resolution for revolution
The year began with a call for a single New Year’s resolutions: that we commit to revolution. In order to do that, we called for forming a “state of union.” Union within our movement, union with each other, union with ourselves. The idea being to gear ourselves up towards “seeing beyond the crippling illusion of separation and acting from the abiding awareness of our fundamental, indisputable interconnectedness.”

February | red, white and black: standing with the people
Egypt provided our first massive glimpse into the possibilities that open when we no longer accept the weighty hand of domination and seek to return the lever of power where it rightfully belongs: to the People. We recognized early on that even though it seemed far away and under drastically different conditions, Egypt’s plight was really not so different than our own. “As movements of people calling forth transformative social change, we are further empowered when we recognize our relationship, deep connection and interdependence with the movements towards justice in the world.”

March | when the people rise: why self determination will always overcome fear
An explosion of uprisings by Arab peoples against their heavy-handed governments captured our imagination. We watched a single act of defiance become amplified across nations as people cast away false stability to regain that fundamental underpinning of justice that dominant forces most seek to control: the right to determine ones own way. “If nature abhors a vacuum, then indeed, it resists none more persistently than a vacuum of natural selfhood. When the breaking point of lack of fulfillment meets with the illuminating function of self-awareness, human beings, like nature, seek to restore balance.”

April/May | real and not real: on border and divisions
While countries scrambled to be on the right side of the revolutions, a reprint from May 2010 invites us to re-examine how we divide ourselves. With the only true race being the Human one, and all of us need to belong, this incessant separation sits at the root of our inability to co-exist, instead fostering fear. When that fear prevails, “i have found the thinking, choices, behavior and resulting consequences of our people…incomprehensible at a heart level.”

June | doing darkness: change vs. transformation
In another reprint, we revisited how to distinguish mere change from true transformation, with six tell-tale signs. The case was made for naming a movement, along with the recognition of what calls us to transform: “…it is birthright that calls. In this Way, we have to allow ourselves to hear and respond to the evolutionary and revolutionary call that pulls us inexorably forward into becoming our newly formed selves–personally, politically, organizationally, institutionally, across all society–making room for a vision yet to be seen.”

July | a more perfect union: using our wholebody
Back to thinking about union, the historic passage of the right for gays and lesbians to marry in the the good ol’ Empire State of New York reminded us to consider what an embodied movement would look like: “It will be self-determined and other-honoring. It will be systemic, endemic and talismanic. More than anything, it will, because it must, be transformative.”

August | apes will rise | rebellion for the heart
Speaking of prescient, Hollywood’s prequel of a now-classic tale mirrored the uprisings taking place in the UK. As in Planet of the Apes, our primadonna-ish, puritanical culture was less able to see beyond the destruction to recognize the very frustration that we, ourselves, share. Revolution won’t always be pretty. Those rising up were indeed the voice of the people, because “the People are the shape-shifting stewards of our humanity who rise up cyclically to counter the forces that would have us tread backwards in our evolution by vying to protect the status quo.” Even when the form they take offends.

September | the transformation code: how to make a movement
Just before the Occupy movement parked itself in Zucotti Park, we began to recognize that an uprising does not a movement make. This essay points to HOW it is that movements comes into being. The assertion is that “Movements Aren’t Stumbled Upon. They’re Generated. Here’s How.” Taking the study of excellence in individuals to a movement level, three keys to more effective movements are shared.

October | where’s your wall street?: riding the raging bull to freedom
At this early stage, no one knew how far the Occupy Wall Street actions could go. It hadn’t yet clicked for most of us that the beginnings of a movement unlike anything we could have dreamed into existence was taking root. But, we could smell it. Because “by defying definition, flattening leadership and both utilizing and transcending organization as we’ve known it, shifting from spider to starfish, OWS creates within it’s morphing boundaries the one thing so many of our uber-defined efforts at movement-building have inadvertently managed to quash: opportunity.”

November | three lessons from occupy: practicing our values in times of change
Finally, having called for a movement, been in solidarity with others, explored how to make one and encouraged making an emerging movement our own, we learn in real time from the one we find ourselves in the midst of. “…we can afford to strengthen our practice in being present. So that we are able to withstand the sometimes very uncomfortable process of hearing all the voices that need to be heard.”

As one essay muses, “Who knows? Perhaps one day, we will look back on September 17th, 2011 as the beginning of the New American Revolution in which we finally captured not just votes but the imagination of the entire US as a People. But for now, it’s sufficient to seize the opportunity of this moment…”

We, the editors, contributors, tech-geeks and mid-wives of transform. hope you will seize the opportunity to journey back through this fascinating year of change, and get ready to throw your hat in to ring of revolution for 2012. A transformative movement of the People, for all People, is the movement we’ve been waiting for.
—yours in truth, aKw

—
copyright ©MMXI. angel Kyodo williams
changeangel: all things change. (sm)

angel Kyodo williams is a maverick teacher, author, social visionary and founder of Transformative Change.
she posts, tweets & blogs on all things change. permission granted to retweet, repost, repast & repeat with copyright and contact information intact.

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Over the past year, I’ve been making the sometimes painful transition from working harder to working smarter, often against the grain of long-established habits instilled by ideas about work ethics and the meaning we assign being at some work “place” doing work “things” in a work “way.” I’m all good with taking time off…what I need is not having a great divide between the two. At the moment, I take advantage of technology to build a bridge to something altogether different. I take more and more working vacations, or workations.

This workation, I read The Talent Code (Bantam Dell, 2009) in which author Daniel Coyle frames a “code” for talent. This code consists of three elements. Though he presents them in a slightly different order, I offer them chronologically:

• “ignition,” instigating motivation fuel
• “deep practice,” the act of installing natural broadband and,
• “master coaching,” building the skills in others

We’re at a great place in many ways and yet, there’s something that hasn’t yet clicked—there are still energy leaks that allow momentum that we gain (think: the herculean effort of synergistic collaboration generated for Obama’s election) to peter out in such a way that it feels like we’re starting from scratch again and again.

Over the next few months, I’ll look at some of the barriers we experience—some known and acknowledged, others not so much—and by the end, we just might have something we can apply with precision to all aspects of the work we do for change to get better results, more predictably and more consistently, that build on each other and are sustained over longer periods of time. That like clockwork, in a phrase: we make more effective movements.

ITHS
The Talent Code’s catchphrase is “Greatness Isn’t Born. It’s Grown. Here’s How.”

Through myriad discussions that he revisits over and over again, probably the most important gift Coyle offers is to liberate the notion of talent from mysterious and amorphous ideas that leave us in a gray space of some kind of magic that only certain lucky people possess and therefore you either have it or you don’t and you go the way of the rest of the lemmings, pre-determined to live out an unsatisfactory life. He unpacks, reframes and then repackages talent and hands it back to us as what it should be rightfully understood as: skill. What’s great about that is we’re generally in agreement that skill isn’t pre-existing; it can be taught and, once taught, it can be grown. The proposition here is that we have what we need and who we need. Then what’s tripping us up? ITHS or…It’s The How, Stupid. Time to get to the how.

If this were a book, I’d make the catchphrase “Movements Aren’t Stumbled Upon. They’re Generated. Here’s How.”

The central concept The Talent Code asserts is to define skill in this way: “Skill is myelin insulation that wraps neural circuits and that grows according to certain signals.” It succinctly states that “…the story of skill and talent is story of myelin.”

Mye-what?
The short story of myelin is that for a long time we’ve focused on neurons and the firing of their circuits being key to making things happen. Which is still true, but that firing is like a light switch: it’s either on or off. If it’s off, nothing happens; if it’s on at the wrong time, it doesn’t matter. Turns out the neurons are held within an infrastructure that was long referred to as just “white matter”. Among other things, the white matter contains myelin. And because myelin is literally insulation that wraps around the neural circuits, it keeps the energy of those firing circuits from leaking. Up to 3000 times improved information processing for better results, more predictably and more consistently, that build on each other and are sustained over longer periods of time. In a word, more effective.

More than being able to do stuff, skill means stuff happens when it matters. Skill is the right stuff at the right time.

Three Keys to More Effective Movement
When I think about such a code in movement terms, I see three familiar things:

Motivation—what Coyle calls “ignition”—requires energy passion and commitment, which are most often put in play by having locked into a powerful vision of our ideal selves and future around which we organize and energize.

From master coaching, we gain the endurance we need to carry movements through temporal illusions so we can weather innumerable Tea Parties and understand the setbacks they cause as mere moments in political time. Movements may look like they suddenly “spring” out of nowhere, but it’s mentorship provided by our elders that keeps us on course. Being able to grow stables of “talent” in the form of inspiring leaders, strategic organizers and damn good people is sustainability that matters.

Vision, Practice & Endurance
In the end, there are no surprises as to what we need to make movements work. In some configuration our current movements have had all three things but haven’t had them altogether.

Much adieu has been made about the Arab Spring, but while its scale is impressive and initial impact admirable, upon reflection it has thus far been plagued with the same thing that stymies our movements here at home: (perceived) lack of coherence of the elements needed to transform an uprising into a truly sustained movement. Enough of the right stuff at the right time.

Next time we’ll look at what gets in the way of skill and what we can do about.

We need more than just a Spring, we need Summer, Fall and Winter too.

Let’s build our movement-making skill and break the code of transformation.

—your in truth,aKw

dedicated to all the people willing to listen for the resonance, take the time, and share practice as we find our way to real change.

—
copyright ©MMXI. angel Kyodo williams
changeangel: all things change. (sm)

angel Kyodo williams is a maverick teacher, author, social visionary and founder of Transformative Change.
she posts, tweets & blogs on all things change. permission granted to retweet, repost, repast & repeat with copyright and contact information intact.

Faceboook: Like angel on Facebook
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As an east coast native, the traditional four seasons of the year have become deeply embedded in my psyche and soul as a map and a means for organizing my life. Winter, Spring, Summer, Fall, repeat. Seasons are like phases in the cycle of Life. Going from one to the next represents Transition: the in-between space of moving from one way of being in relationship to life into another.

Taken together, the turning of the four seasons into a year reflects our collective relationship to and dependence upon nature and all her rhythms, according our journey with the sun and the entire vast universe.

I have come to appreciate this internal alignment with the cyclical rhythms of the Earth, herself as a powerful counterbalance to the false constructs of busyness and get-it-doneness made by Men. Capitalism and consumerism have erected false notions of the rhythms we should adhere to. We are corralled from one hopping holiday or sale season to the next.

While many people use birthdays as their marker for a new year, I’ve always used the early Fall. Fall is both a beginning and ending for me. A time for simultaneously harvesting the learnings of the Spring and Summer before it, while fervently preparing for the rest and gestation of the Winter to come. Once upon a time, I resisted this rhythmic pattern, noticing with chagrin that come Fall, I would invariably take things apart, reorganize them and put them back together again. Sometimes in my reconfigurations, things would get thrown away. Sometimes everything would go.

The people in my life can’t always quite make sense of this internally-driven process from the outside and through the years have mistakenly viewed it as my being restless, inconsistent, breaking down or working through some kind of crisis.

The reality is I’m not any of those things and I am all of them: I’m just Meeting Change.

So while I make a reasonable effort to accord with or renegotiate external commitments and the demands of relational life, there are times when, like the seasons, I must honor this internal rhythm whether it makes sense to or works for others or not. Once you can hear it, to not honor the resonant call for meeting change, is to not honor life itself.

Change Whose Time Has Come

Sometime in August, in the midst of preparing for our biggest event of the year, a clear knowing about what our work needed in order to move to the next level came to me. Holding some sweet sadness for what I knew had to happen, I invited the community I’d been living with in some form or other for the past five years—to leave. I wasn’t kicking people out nor had I made a decision that I didn’t want to live within a community of transformative practice any longer. What I had come to realize was, that as a living experiment—a petri dish for learning how best to support people working for justice in their own deep inner life change—our time had come to an end.

So on 9/9/09, a date representing “completion,” we gathered to bring to completion our time together in that form. As requested, each person planned a transition from this phase or season of life to the next. I had only one request for their plan: that the step they take would be one that would bring them closer to their own life purpose. That they waste no time in a limbo space, but regard their lifeforce as precious enough to not waste a single moment ambling near their path, choosing instead to step out fully onto it in whatever form that might take. They were also asked to state what they would need, if anything, to support this significant endeavor.

Organizationally speaking, this transition was invited at a time when we are, like many non-profits, picking ourselves up out of the dust and debris of the past year’s economic crisis, which is obviously far from over. Many would argue the move as less than, well…sane. But I’d argue that one of the most subtle Arts of Change is recognizing when it’s time to transition, to step forward into the awkwardness of the unknown and to meet change head on. To have continued on with folks that I had a felt sense belonged somewhere else would have been to opt for convenience over integrity, thus dishonoring this work—as Khalil Gibran named: my love made visible in the world—at its core. We each know intuitively that Love sometimes calls for a valiant honor that may set our preferences and conveniences aside. In work towards real, abiding justice and change that will last, our work, and how we hold it, must be the same.

As a result of meeting change on that day and bringing forth intention from as long as 10 years ago::

On October 31, half of the residential community—also meaning half of our staff—transitioned out. Gracefully, and sometimes not so, each person stepping firmly on the path of fulfilling their purpose in life.

On November 1, we transitioned in a new ED, thereby releasing me from the confines of organizational structures while enabling all of what I’ve been able to contribute thus far to live on until it is no longer useful.

On December 1 I will officially begin my first sabbatical after having logged 25 years of work, 20 of them with an eye towards social change.

In January, a new phase in the life of what has become the Center for Transformative Change will begin with the wind of legacy at its back and the raw power of new energy carrying it forward.

In June, CXC will collaboratively launch what we believe will be one of the most powerful toolkits to help shift the culture of social justice towards one of Transformative Social Change.

To hold these transitions off because things were far from rosy and we would be heavily challenged and sorely inconvenienced is to miss the very point of the practice of meeting change. We must come to welcome the awkwardness and inconvenience of change because that is precisely where our learning edges live. So, even as we here at CXC negotiate the sticky places (and yes, there are LOTS of them,) we know this is the right thing to do…and it is the right time.

Entering the Doorways
One of the practices of our New Dharma spiritual tradition is to bring our palms together and bow upon entering and leaving doorways. The hands form what is called gassho in Japanese, a bringing together of all things into One. It is the universally familiar gesture of namaste, prayer, respect, welcome. Out of this Oneness arises the bow, a gesture that in the West might be thought of as a lowering, but practiced well, in its quiet humility is actually a raising up. For us, it marks the transition—from outside to inside; from busy day to quiet sitting; from scattered head to One Mind; from “get it done” to “let it be”—with an imperceptibly small ceremony that gives us permission to release what came before so that we might step fully into what is new.

Transitions are the doorways to change. Choosing to engage transition and enter each doorway as consciously as possible but with a willingness to not know what’s on the other end is makes that change intentional.

Life IS change. And if you’ve been around for five good minutes, you know that Change Happens. So your only real choice is to either let life happen to you or for you to choose to live it.

One way to do that is to become practiced at happily, humbly and heartily Meeting Change.

—

With love and deep gratitude for all the unnamed stalwart practitioners of the Inner life phase of the New Dharma Meditation Center & Community that evolved into the Outer life Phase with these folks as staff of Center for Urban Peace: chandrashekara thuy tran, Karen Muktayani Villanueva, Premadasi Luna Amada, Simhanandi Evan Stubblefield, Zochi Alonzo Young, seeing it through its transition to the Center for Transformative Change. It is only for each of you that we can now step into the Social (Change) life phase of CXC to see our work for justice and deep change through. Good journey, y’all.–aKw

—

—
copyright ©MMXI. angel Kyodo williams
changeangel: all things change. (sm)

angel Kyodo williams is a maverick teacher, author, social visionary and founder of Transformative Change.
she posts, tweets & blogs on all things change. permission granted to retweet, repost, repast & repeat with copyright and contact information intact.

Faceboook: Like angel on Facebook
Twitter: Follow angel on Twitter
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Blog: new Dharma: live, love & lead from the heart
Train: Train Your Mind with angel

Years ago, Gloria Steinem, the formidable godmother of modern feminism posed a query that my fading memory won’t recall exactly, but it irrevocably changed how I view my life. The gist of it was this: if life came to an end for you, if you were hit by a car or something less tragic, but equally sudden while out in the world, and someone had to go through your wallet to find out who you are, would your checkbook reflect your values? Would your statement make a statement and is it the one you would want shared? What story would the carbon copies of what you sign on the dotted line for tell about what matters to you? Not the story of a year ago before the massive nosedive we’re in became clear. Today. Now.

I know, i know….many of us are so politically correct that we don’t write paper checks and maybe haven’t for years, but you get my drift: whether its paper, plastic, prepaid or PayPal…

What’s in YOUR wallet?

Later this month, Muslims all over the world will begin Ramadan, the annual 30-day observance of a daylight fast. Neither food nor water passes the lips from sun up to sun down. The same goes for sex and any unlawful, unkind or distasteful acts. Things of pleasure and things of pain are released equally in a daily commitment to taking in less while directing one’s energy inwards for reflection, prayer and renewal. Since September 2001, I’ve engaged this deep practice of total abstinence intermittently, regaining consistency in the last few years.

When I commented on it beginning soon (August 22nd in North America), a community member scoffed at its inconvenience: it lands just as we are preparing for our own Fall Practice Period, not to mention working feverishly on our single biggest event of the year. Her concern is well-placed. The outcome of this year’s event matters like no other before: like many smart but small organizations, we’re sitting on a financial precipice looking over the edge.

This is, more often than not, the nature of deep practice: It isn’t convenient. It doesn’t fit your schedule. It doesn’t conform to your whim. It isn’t selectable for good days instead of bad. In short, it isn’t a hobby…it’s a practice.

And owing to this practice, as deeply as we are in a literal existential crisis, we are happy. Not happy to be facing the jaws of organizational Death (or Rebirth as the case may be) but happy with who we are, what we do and HOW we show up in the world. I’ve made peace with the fact that one of the reasons we’re in a tight place is because we gave up the Game of jumping through money hoops. We continue to honor our commitment to change from the inside. Daily. 5:40am wakeup bell. 6am yoga. 7am meditation. Week after week. When the bills come and when they go.

If not as dramatic, remaining committed to established personal and organizational practice–especially in the face of challenge–is a stance no less determined than that of Gandhi’s Salt Marchers, or those folks that continued to cross the bridge in Selma. We put our butts on the line and on the cushion to usher forth a new way of Being Change. Facing financial firing squads, we stand (and sit) committed to finding Right Relationship through real partnership with a community of practitioners, participants and donors that care enough to support this new way even when it is neither easy nor convenient. In the process, we stand committed to maintaining Right Relationship with ourselves.

While Ramadan is a fasting practice, it’s not about holding back–it’s about reconnecting with the places within us that have tightened over the year and re-learning to give generously from that place of connection that knows that we ourselves own nothing. We belong to and are of the Divine and are infinitely blessed to express that Divinity here on Earth. On our knees, with foreheads touching the earth, palms turned toward the sky, our very breath is a celebration of Life. Each morning, we meet the darkness in symbolic solitude and contemplate the challenge before us: a day without eating. As days come and go, humbled in the face of our increasing frailty, physical strength tapped, endurance tested, we meet our humanity. Each night, our commitment is rewarded only by the opportunity to renew ourselves to meet the challenge again. The iftar meal breaks the fast in community, a bonding together to regain strength from not only the food but the energy of shared commitment. Ramadan is ended with a feast, but also with alms-giving–sharing of whatever we have–regardless of how much, an equally significant practice of commitment that brings balance.

In an essay on The Transformative Power of Practice Staci Haines and Ng’ethe Maina, two leaders in the field of Transformative Social Change, talk about two kinds of practice: Default Practices are “deeply rooted behaviors that we do automatically, consistently, and unconsciously in response to any given situation” and Intentional Practices are ” those that we choose to do in order to transform the way we show up in the world. Through new practices we increase choice and alignment with our values.” When we are faced with challenge, it’s especially easy to return to–and justify–deeply rooted unconscious practices: fear, contraction, a sense of lack and a resulting need to control. Ramadan shows up every year with a fresh invitation to let go of craving, control and excess with no pat-on-the-back congratulations, no true witness but that of your own deepening alignment with your commitment to Change.

Now is not the time to hold out. Not on your commitments, not on your practice and not on change. Change IS on the horizon. The best thing about it is that at this moment, we can’t actually make out what it’s going to look like. Like much of the unknown, we can take that to be a mark of real danger or of real hope. I’m opting for the latter, but I’m practicing come what may.

Are you practicing what you are committed to?
or, in other words:

What’s in YOUR wallet?

Sure, the best things in life are free. And someone pays–through hard work, advocacy and showing up–for equitable access to much of it. Even if you have a little, break off a littlebit of that something. Put your cash where your heart is. We need a little change to bring about big change.

To start you off, here’s what’s in my wallet. While there were others, I am now reorganzing my priorities to support those that need it most:

In no particular order, these are organizations that need support today. Now. Of all the great work out there, I used three criteria to bring these to the top in addition to financial need:

1. Their leadership takes less, little or even no pay, not out of martyrdom, but from a place of studied consideration of what is needed and what is enough. Each brings not only depth of experience, but extraordinarily unique lenses to personal practice as the fundamental basis of systemic change.

2. Their staff, if they have one, are deeply committed to the work, giving of their time and energy generously and unequivocably. The collaborative nature, unpaid volunteers and networks of support make each organization’s impact in their fields much greater than their budgets. There’s a lot more bang for your buck with them.

but most importantly,

3. Their vision is one that holds a unique place for the new change that is still taking shape. They are holding open the doorway to new organizational ways of being, making their practice–how they are being–as important as what they are doing.

Simply said, should these uniquely situated organizations disappear, they cannot be replicated and they would take with them a bright lens into all of our future. Every dollar given to these organizations would be multiplied ten-fold by the devoted thoughtfulness, hard work, deep practice, ingenious creativity and sheer will of these organizations and their leaders, the integrity of each of whom i can vouch for personally:

Ruckus Society
https://www.ruckus.org/donate
Oakland-based Ruckus provides environmental, human rights, and social justice organizers of impacted communities nationally and beyond with the tools, training, and support needed to achieve their goals. Through these trainings, we help people learn the skills they need to practice nonviolent direct action safely and effectively.

La Plazita Institute
https://www.laplazitainstitute.org
Based in Albuquerque, Designed around the philosophy of la cultura cura or culture cures, La Plazita’s programs strengthen community, families and enable youth to leave behind a destructive lifestyle by tapping into their own roots to express core traditional values of respect, honor, love, family, and community.

the stone house: a center for spiritual life and strategic action @ stone circles
https://thestonehousenc.blogspot.com/
Just outside the NC Triangle, the stone house is rooted in place. Movements for social justice have always thrived in places of sustenance and safety where people can deepen relationships and envision new strategies for political organizing.

and naturally our very own:

Center for Transformative Change (CXC)

Click to donate:https://www.snipurl.com/cxcdonate

Holding it down on the South Berkeley/North Oakland border, CXC is the first national center entirely dedicated to bridging the inner and outer lives of social change agents, activists and allies to support a more effective, more sustainable social justice movement. As a meta-intermediary, this unique hybrid organization is both a residentially-based community of practice (not just theory!) and an astute articulator of the growing movement toward Transformative Social Change.

—
copyright ©MMXI. angel Kyodo williams
changeangel: all things change. (sm)

angel Kyodo williams is a maverick teacher, author, social visionary and founder of Transformative Change.
she posts, tweets & blogs on all things change. permission granted to retweet, repost, repast & repeat with copyright and contact information intact.

Faceboook: Like angel on Facebook
Twitter: Follow angel on Twitter
Web: Find angel on the Web
Blog: new Dharma: live, love & lead from the heart
Train: Train Your Mind with angel

Days after California’s Prop 8 was propped up by its Supreme Court, former vice president Dick Cheney unapologetically (of course) and righteously affirmed the novel idea that “freedom means freedom for everyone…people ought to be able to enter into any kind of union they wish.”

Many of us pulled the lever to cast our vote for an oddly hopeful promise of “a more perfect union” of our Divided States. We watch with our breath held, our hearts in our throats, ready to put our bodies on the line as our One Government lets individual Republics of imaginary divides decide one-by-one, state-by-state, who freedom means freedom for: our embodiment of a more perfect union catastrophically undone by an unwillingness to recognize our most precious union: the one of the heart.

In an historic constitutional referendum in Bolivia, the voters expressed their more perfect union through the powerful symbolic act of embracing a second official flag: the formerly illegal flag of the indigenous people and of the social movement that brought down the previous corrupt governments.

The seven-color Wiphala flag is arranged as 7×7 colors in a square:

Historically, it is the flag of the Incan territory that spanned Bolivia, Peru, Ecuador, Chile and Argentina.
Culturally, it is the flag of the Aymara-Quechua Andean and Amerindian people.
Politically, it is pan-indigenous, multi-ethnic, cross-class and trans-issue. With it’s similarity to the Gay rainbow flag and use for urban social movements, it is becoming an international symbol for diversity and solidarity, equality and equity, dignity and reciprocity…all coming together.

A celebration of the order of cosmos, symbol of life and fertility, it’s rainbow covers the spectrum of colors and represents the honoring of all that should matter to a society:

• RED for man and the earth
• ORANGE for society and its expression through culture and education
• YELLOW for energy and strength through collectivity
• WHITE for time and community transformation
• GREEN for natural resouces and the land
• BLUE for the heavens and natural phenomena
• Last, most powerfully and sanely, VIOLET for harmonious governance and self-determination of the people.

Taken as a whole and liberated from the neo-colonial closet, it represents that more perfect union that we should all strive for in our quest for a fair and equitable society.

Some worry that Evo Morales, Bolivia’s first indigenous President, may be inadvertently diminishing the symbol, as savvy politicians have been wont to do, putting a cursory end to movements of the people by absorbing their symbols and slogans into government. Our own Civil Rights Movement came to an abrupt, stunted and co-opted halt on Lyndon B. Johnson’s appropriative declaration that “we shall overcome.”

But as powerful as symbols, phrases and slogans are, they only derive their energy from the wellspring of the people they represent. People that don’t just stand in the truth, but express it through the way they live. And just as “words on a parchment would not be enough to deliver slaves from bondage, or provide men and women of every color and creed their full rights” the more perfect union we seek for this country will not arise from a speech, a bailout, or even a healthcare plan.

What it will arise from is the embodiment of that more perfect union by folks that know and act on what’s right: like the whites and blacks that fraternized in backwoods jook joints, using rhythm to find harmony. From learning how to dance together, they eventually found the ability to pray, sit and stand together “always at great risk.”

It will arise from the embodiment of principles in and by the people that show up every day to “narrow the gap” between the hope for our society and “the reality of (our) time.” It will arise through the embodiment of actions that manifest the longing held in our hearts, the vision that we cannot yet see, but can feel the truth of in our very core. Thus with great faith, we reach inward, act outward, and move toward it. Our more perfect union will arise from within the people.

Some think this union will come as the result of the broad view of Analysis: political, social, grounded. Others believe we’ll be brought together by the deep current of Spirit: fundamental, ethical, rooted.

In the end, it will express itself as nothing that we currently know of, but rather as a constellation, integration and distillation of all. It will be individually-particularized, collectively-driven and universally-appealing. It will be a social movement because we are social creatures that can form the shape that expresses what we wish to become. It will be a cultural movement because together we create the conditions in which new ways can thrive. It will be self-determined and other-honoring. It will be systemic, endemic and talismanic. More than anything, it will, because it must, be transformative. Our more perfect union will be neither this nor that. Leaving nothing and none of us behind, it will be WholeBody: a Third Way that embraces and embodies being fully Human: ever-evolutionary, ever-revolutionary, ever-dynamic and always Divine.

From there, state-by-state and heart-by-heart, in our more perfect union, we can get Dick Cheney’s wish granted.

Jai Bhim! We shall overcome…Si, se puede. A Better World is Possible. Venceremos…Yes, we can. By any means necessary: Power to the People. Power by the People. Power FROM the People.

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copyright ©MMXI. angel Kyodo williams
changeangel: all things change. (sm)

angel Kyodo williams is a maverick teacher, author, social visionary and founder of Transformative Change.
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