PlaNetweaving Toward Pangea Day

Pangea Day May 10 is upon us... I'm experiencing a distinct PlaNetweaving surge in the Global Village. Synapses firing, new neural pathways (forging)... it is the most scintillating thing to suddenly have these far-flung luminaries linking up...

Is it 10 years ago that I first heard David Whyte giving the keynote address at Natural Products Expo West.. '98 maybe? "Life, Work and the Poetic Imagination"; I was enthralled.

He coached us not to applaud after each poem he delivered but to just take it in... and each poem, he spoke it through a second time, even as we were sitting enrapt in the electric stillness of the first rendering. Now I know, this is David Whyte's hallmark. I brought home a recording of that first presentation and never tired of listening.

"What do you do when your lost in the forest" was on this first recording I ever had and I will forever link it with David Whyte's inspired delivery to a sea of owner/managers in the natural food industry, as he spoke to the challenge of sustaining the authenticity of their story in their work-life and love-life and life-life as they grew and adapted and responded to the vageries of the marketplace...

What do you do when you're Lost in the Forest?

What do you do when you're lost in the forest?

Standstill, the trees ahead and the bushes beside you
Are not lost. Wherever you are is called Here,
And you must treat it as a powerful stranger,
Must ask permission to know it and be known.
The forest breathes. Listen. It answers,
I have made this place around you.
If you leave it, you may come back again, saying Here.
No two trees are the same to Raven.
No two branches the same to Wren.
If what a tree or a branch does is lost on you,
You are surely lost. Stand still. The forest knows
Where you are. You must let it find you.*
*~*

Then, towards the end of the 10 weeks series, Oprah announces that Jill Bolte Taylor, author of 'Stroke of Insight' and presenter at TED, will be her first guest on her Soul Series the week after she completes with Eckhart Tolle. Jill's TED Talk was a web phenomenon in itself, whipping round networks so fast I learned that I was not alone in my experience of receiving it simultaneously via email from friends in my extended network who do not move in the same circles. Reminded me of Bioneers phrase "It's all alive, it's all intelligent, it's all connected, it's all relatives.." www.bioneers.org

*Lost in the forest poem: by David Wagoner: from Traveling Light Collected and New Poems,  University of Illinois Press, Urbana and Chicago.