Ghandi said “be the change.” Faced with modern global complexities such as climate change, rising class disparity, and social and political instability, what does that really mean?

We are Open Field Awakening .

We are a collective of deep friendships, spiritual and business partners, living and creating together in community. We have a practitioner’s home – where we practice explicitly waking up to and with one another. We employ various somatic, psycho-, and spiritual intelligences, from ancient to emergent.

One of us is quadriplegic. Recently we launched an experiment – transforming acute needs into an opportunity for an entire community to learn more deeply how to care. We discovered that care for one another is not separate from care for ourselves and vice versa. We call this omni-directional care. We are learning that this awakened care – whether for self, other, or the world – is the foundation of beautiful, creative, and fearless life.

We are imbedded in larger communities that touch us and are touched by our practice of willingness, experimentation, wisdom, humility, and compassion. We watch what this practice does in our home, and we notice how its ripples impact others in their homes.

These ripples flow out into the world…

As long as we identify as “I” there is an “other,” to whom we are in relation. Life happens in dyadic relationship. This is a crucial point. We recognize that any group or collective is made up of these dyads. As such, the living quality of any collective – be it a friendship or a global economic system – is the cumulative expression of these relations.

Our global structures are maintained by the little ways in which we encounter one another moment to moment. This means we can nurture a world system right now, right here, with one another. How empowering to awaken these systems in our own home, in our immediate community with friends, colleagues, and family?

You and I right now are enacting a quality of dyadic relationship. — Let’s notice it together. Am I writing compassionately? Are you receiving these words generously? — Next door, two more are enacting the next, and so on. Cumulatively, the quality of these relationships produce the quality of the global system we live in. Our power to affect these systems is only and ever right here. This power is expressed in the way that I am relating to what or whom is before me. We can expect no greater from the world than the quality we offer this moment.

Engaging consciously and explicitly in these dyadic spaces is the place we will actually enact and embody the awakened transformation of the world we yearn to see. This is how we live that transformation into existence.

It is clear that the important large-scale challenges we face are built upon the little moments of our lives.

Along with many others, we find ourselves again and again drawn to challenges largely global in scope. Questions of resource flows within and between individuals and communities seem essential to attend to. Inquiries into how we organize ourselves socially, politically, and creatively swim in our awareness on a daily basis.

It is easy to project our dissatisfaction with the states of these structures as being out, away, and separate from our capacity to engage. As we have seen, however, this is an illusion. In the global together, built upon our sacred dyads, these systems belong to us, respond to us, and express who we are in the little moments of our lives. There is no “out there.” We are out there, out there is us – here, now.

Ghandi, Mother Teresa, Nelson Mandela, Malala Yousafzai – their potency is not in the way they conceived a better world out there. Their potency lies in the way they respond to the people and situations in front of them. Their responses remained consistent with an awakened value; they were as much addressing the world through each person they met, as they were the individual.

Following examples such as these, we are striving to make our lives and work a microcosm and a testing ground for the world we wish to see. We have let go the security of conventional finance, employment, and ownership. In exchange we prototype a moment-to-moment creative engagement that seeks, like life itself, to find the most wholly nourishing path. Like life, this is uncertain, risky, with no security, agile, and filled with vitality.

In contrast to the distanced, disembodied, and disempowered experience of projecting the problem out there, here we find ourselves at one with and living transformation.

Dear reader, thank you for engaging in dyad with this piece. Let us invite you to consider the ripples. What world do you want to create? Who will it touch? How will you meet your next breath?