Bishop-OwensRiver&Range - Lessons from the High Sierras—Taking Stock of 2013I always spend time in the dark of the year thinking through what is lying deep in the soil of my life that will spring forth in the next cycle of the sun. This year I’ve drawn deeply from the lessons I learned as a boy growing up on the East Side of the Sierras in Bishop.

This is a picture of where I grew up, a bit out of town to the north near the Owens River, close to the mesa where I went on my first vision quest in 1986. I know in the very fiber of my being that valleys and mountains are not separate, but completely interdependent ideas. And so are grief and love, freedom and constraint, hope and depression, life and death. This has been the deep lesson of 2013. I’d like to share some of these reflections for those of you who are following my journey.

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LaingWSibbet - New Years Day with My DadMy father, the Reverend Laing Witherspoon Sibbet, passed away this New Year’s Day at Sutter Solano Medical Center, in Vallejo, California. His death, as did his life, touched me deeply, and I’d like to share some of this story. He was 93, and up until his last sermon on Christmas Day in 2008, a full time Congregationalist pastor. I’ll begin at the end, with what I wrote to the family the evening of his passing.

“Dad peacefully left his body tonight at 8:05 when he stopped breathing at the conclusion of a ceremonial last supper we held for him in the hospital. The day was a graceful ballet of our family—gathering and forming a loving container for his passing.

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For months I’d been looking forward to a special meeting in New Mexico at the Village of the Shining Stones near Abiquiu called the First Peace Gathering. It promised to be a very unique and inspiring event, initiated by an organization called Ehama, the teaching vehicle of two traditional elders named Rainbow Hawk and his partner Wind Eagle. They anticipated elders from the Jewish, Catholic, Protestant, Buddhist, and Native traditions plus youth from Europe to explore how their traditions have been evolving toward a common interest in peace. There would be lots of meditation, storytelling, ceremony, and of course eating and social time. This photo, called Skypainting by Sabrina Whitelynx, reflects the beauty of New Mexico that was calling me.

Skypainting - Choices

 

 

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Tom_Atlee - Tom Atlee on Tom Atlee, the creative energy behind the Co-Intelligence Institute, recently wrote Something Bigger Than Life Is Trying To Work Through Us. He says, “I feel called to notice the role of contexts.” His crystal-clear analysis of our current predicament is that we are experiencing the shadow results of our own “enlightened” technologies and practices. The crises we experience will be transformational (or not), and Tom explores how they might be so.

As with any paradigm shifts, the emerging expressions are still being crafted. Tom is one of the shapers I respect. He speaks in poetic language of what it means to wake up to conscious evolution and see ourselves as mirrors of the larger evolutionary pattern.

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