In India, one of my teachers said once something like this: a man is not a whole human being until he marries his inner woman and a woman is not a whole human being until she marries her inner man. That saying has been serving me for the last 30 years, as a conduit of my observations and deep learning… 

I’ve been yearning for that marriage for many years, imagining it as an “inner wedding”, until I discovered that it’s not one event but a moment-to-moment flow as natural as breathing in and out. (It’s that experience that I tried to capture with “In our every breath… .”) Natural may be, but not without conscious intention.

Remembering to act only from inner silence and deep, generative attention is not yet an automatic groove that appears at the outset of every emerging situation. Yet, I know, that androgynous stage ispossible, and the journey towards it is already richly rewarding.

“The androgynous individual is simply a female or male who has a high degree of both feminine and masculine traits.” Source: Wikipedia

Androgyny is not the blurring of our gender differences but a stage in our development, at which women and men are able to paint with the full palette of feminine/masculine faculties, outside the biological ones.

I knew little about all that during my first ½-year stay in Berkeley, California, in 1978, when I discovered a print shop providing T-shirt printing services. The sign in the window said, “You create it, We print it.” Next day, I returned with my original “artwork,” and the day after I could proudly put on my T-shirt emblazoned with this motto:

I understand the “ugh” because: how could you know the value? You can know the purity and generosity of your heart, the sharpness and agility of your mind, the sense of giving and receiving in your hands, but not their value. Their value can be co-created and known by only who are on the receiving end on your gifts.

If you let your fear make you too concerned about your value for the world, that would keep you in the narrow perspective of the “I.” Who is that, anyway? From its perspective it’s almost impossible to gain actionable clarity aligned with the wisdom that is present in your moments of Open Will. Its antecedent, your Open Heart is the key to the wisdom that you’re seeking. And as you know, “there’s no way to love because love is the way.” I ask myself, do you love enough Evolution/Life/the Spiral, to seek out the opportunities to generate a huge momentum for it and dedicate your talent and full engagement to it? My answer: it seems that is what you are doing...

If so, then use your FlexFlow capacity to integrate “structures, and forms into evolutionary flows” (Don Beck) that will inform your StriveDrive about healthy directions to take for its growth in you. However, when somebody is playing at your stage on the Spiral, FlexFlow cannot manifest its fullness without some guidance from the a WholeView, a communal meme carried by what the “we” is becoming. Keep your eyes on the center of the we, and you will realize the potential of the value that you are bringing to the world.

Who is that we and the We? The We (with capital W) is the millions on the evolutionary movement without realizing it as such. Besides the tip of the wave, they include also the people of HumanBond and StriveDrive. To be a bit more precise: those in HumanBond who, when confronted by chaos and disorder, feel the frustration of not having effective tools/approaches to deal with it, and; those in StriveDrive who, when facing crises, want to exercise their response-ability, with bigger impact.

The we (with lower case w) is those in your environment who are joining forces, combining intentions, synergizing strategies, and creating sustainable containers for cohering action. When you find your tribe don’t just soak in its warmth; clarify roles and offer accountabilities.

Thank you dear friend, for the sincerity and passion of your quest that inspired me to sense into and think through what I’ve just written.