I said in my first post on this website

I have learned over the last year that developing and maintaining a website is a bit like getting a pet, it’s an ongoing effort which requires regular attention.

I have been lax. At least nothing died from my neglect.
I’ve been lax with good reason. GaiaVoices.net is one of many things going on, and there are times for it, and times to ignore it. This month, after a year away, its time has come again.

As I try to pick up the neglected strands of conversation, It will help me if I summarize highlights since my last summary here, September of 2007. I was struggling to open myself to “mychrist,” then. It was a time of turmoil both
psychologically/ spiritually because I feared loss of ego-control (partly), and also socially, because I feared the enemies and friends I might make, if I started talking like a Christian.

For me, the personal and the social are two sides of the same coin:

how do we now name and understand what Western Civilization has traditionally called “God’s will” and “God’s guidance?”

Those old names won’t do, for me, but I fear it’s the neglect of the reality behind the names that has gotten industrial civilization into our current mess.
And I believe it’s a return to what I’m calling “guidance from Gaia” that will give us  indications of what we must do as we co-create the new Ecozoic Age on Earth.

Something happened, and I felt changed. Now, in 2011, I can say “for the better.”
The website, and my postings to it, were an important part of that process, especially the support I got from my community, in response to my postings.

I got a clear nudge from the source of my guidance in the spring of 2008, and agreed to become clerk of my Twin Cities Quaker Meeting. This turned out to be quite consuming, with the discovery (surprise!) that we needed a $300,000 rehab of our “sick building.”

I managed to stay present to my inner work, through the external challenges of the clerk role, and my posts through the fall of 2008 reflect the difficulty of that work. (I did have a support committee for this inner side, as well as lots of support for my challenges in the role of clerk.)

Then I discovered the work of Mary Conrow Coelho. I wrote a review of my first encounter, with a group effort rising out of Cambridge, Massachusetts,  Friends Meeting. That led on to Mary’s Awakening Universe, Emerging Personhood: The Power of Contemplation in an Evolving Universe, which has transformed my thinking. I trust this transformation will eventually be evident on this website.

I was having other adventures too, with Process Work and the Quaker meditation form Experiment with Light both of which offered help with my struggle to “accept guidance.” After the burden of Clerk of Meeting was off my shoulders, I offered my TCFM community my synthesis of these elements, at that point, November 2009.

And then, in March, 2010, TRANSITION TOWN! A movement that has resolved to proceed optimistically in the face of the dis-integration of Industrial Civilization which I had been proclaiming for years! My first post of that year reflected my brush with this optimism. Then, over the summer of 2010 I attempted a synthesis of  Transition Town and Mary Coelho, including outlining what I felt were the highlights from each of Mary’s chapters.