Dear friends,
This is an open moment for me, with this website successfully announced and underway.
I dedicate myself to harmonic resonance with Gaia.

(But, of course, it’s never simple. [And what follows may not be easy reading.])

I think my next steps are to focus on Quaker Community Forest (but simultaneously I am suspicious of myself).

[Begin digression to some necessary background.]

This layered awareness is characteristic of my life, and I’m going to try to explicate it within our shared awareness:
Making some arbitrary cuts on an infinite continuum, I’d say I experience at least these four different levels of awareness:
Awareness Level 1: Look at that!
At this level of awareness, I assume my point of view is the only one there is.
At the next level of awareness, I no longer assume you and I see the same thing, and so the “that” in the level-one statement, above, must be replaced by something more ambiguous. I will assume that our shared world contains phenomena, even if we perceive them differently [Barfield’s ‘unrepresented’]. Let me experiment here with rephrasing the awareness-level 1 statement above, as:
Awareness Level 2: Look at phen! (one or more phenomena).
At this level of awareness, while I am excitedly calling your attention to something, I know that you may not perceive it as I do. At awareness-level 2, I realize that “phen” may have different qualities for me than it does for you.
Awareness Level 3. At this level of awareness, which I regularly experience, I recognize an inner paradox, a seam in my understanding of reality. I see a phen, but I have two ways of looking at it. That is, within myself, I see it from two points of view and I experience the apparent tension between them. (An example follows shortly, a level-3 conversation.)
Awareness Level 4. I hold the contradictions within a unity. I see this apparently-contending part of my world with a single eye.

[End digression.]

Now that this website is up and running in our shared awareness, I believe my next steps are to return to my neglected work on Quaker Community Forest (QCF).

In the time ahead, as I work on the QCF website, I will be looking in two directions at once. I will be looking back to report our accomplishments over the last six months and over the last nine years, and I will also be looking ahead to two presentations Ralph J. and I will be doing at the FGC 2007 Gathering in River Falls, Wisconsin, during the first week in July.
What I hope to be doing on this website, between now and July, is making the Gaia-connections to our Quaker Community Forest work. I feel these connections strongly, but I have hardly bothered to articulate them, in the QCF context.

[What follows begins with an Awareness-Level-3 conversation.]

3A: I want to write about QCF and its connections to this website.
3B: Any time I hear you talk like that I’m suspicious. When you are planful like that you are in great danger of “not coming under the guidance of spirit,” as some Quakers like to say. How is this different from setting yourself up to develop a Student Grove curriculum, with funding from grants, and then falling flat on your face?
3A: I believe it is different. It has a “rightness” in me, a settledness, that the other did not.
3B: “Right…” sure it does.
3A: No amount of words will get you and me to the same point of view on this. We are having this conversation in public so that our friends can watch over the next months and see who is right.
4A: Yes, because no matter which point of view prevails, with this conversation we open a discussion of character:

* How do we experience guidance?
* How do we hold ourselves ready to receive it?
* And to follow it?
* 3A is saying, “I feel guided in my next steps.”
* 3B says “you love to claim that your intent is in harmony with Gaia’s, but you are operating out of a ‘rationalism’ which is not willing to wait for an unmistakable nudge of guidance from Gaia.”
* And, however the argument between you 3s comes out, we will have a “case in point” which we can talk about, with our friends.

Dear Friends, I’m glad you love me. The above makes sense to me, and it feels necessary to share it in this form. I believe I am working on something important, and that as things develop I will be able to be clearer.
Love,
Richard