How things have changed in thirty years!
This is a whole generation that we have lived as three sisters in deep engagement with the work of evolving our selves and our society. It feels so close, so present, almost a collapse of time.
In rereading the manuscript I was first of all struck by how coherent it was. I had, as Jean said, memories of a great deal of laughter and friendship. But now I see that we actually were even then seeded with the creative impulse that we each have manifested in the last three decades. We are carriers of “templates” of evolutionary design codes of the emerging human world.
It feels to me as though Jean, Hazel, and myself—along with countless others—are mothering a new world, literally giving it birth by giving our creative lives for its manifestation. In this giving we are deeply rewarded, for we are, through this continuous expression, evolving ourselves into the new humans that we are envisioning and supporting for others. In other words, by giving our gifts we are learning to model and be the change we want to see in the world.
My greatest blessing has been this sense of prime vocation, an innate calling or soul’s code that motivates me to give and express purpose as best I can.
I can see that my two friends felt I was “under the thumb of men” at that time. The fact is that I had never met women who truly inspired me until I met Jean and Hazel. Everyone who had influenced me—Teilhard de Chardin, Sri Aurobindo, Buckminster Fuller, Abraham Maslow, Jonas Salk, and many more—were men. All my creative partners were men. Now of course, I know many remarkable women and work with them, but at the time of the time of our conversation, that had not happened. And on intimate level, after eighteen years with my partner, Sidney Lanier, we have finally learned what we call coequal cocreative partnership. Even though I was a liberated woman in many ways in the 70s, the cultural imprint of feeling that a man would know best was so deep that it has taken a whole lifetime to free myself of that.
On the social front, it seems to me that what we said then has only intensified and become more apparent in these last thirty years, and therefore, we are more called out into the work than ever before.
The breakdown of current social systems and dominant patriarchal structure is more obvious. There is a desperate last-ditch stand of the old power structure to maintain itself. The flaws in the system are more apparent; the violence born of oppression, inequality, and regressive memes are closer to the surface. The failure of war to win anything is becoming clearer. And there is a new uprising of revulsion against war as a way of deciding anything. The failure of unlimited, competitive commercial growth is now obvious as we discover its destruction of community and environment, and its failure to nourish the human spirit. The systemic breakdown of the environment is far more obvious than it was when we met. The threat to our life-support systems is now front-page news.
The time frame for change has shortened. The “macroshift” or bifurcation point where the system either breaks down or breaks through to a higher, more synergistic order is very close, many of us feel. Concurrently with these obvious breakdowns, there has been a rapid acceleration of breakthroughs, of innovations in every field and function. The global civil society is arising as the most potent force on Earth. We have reached “critical mess.” A perfect crisis! It cannot be resolved by doing more of the same.
We are at the stage in the movement for conscious evolution where the nonlinear, exponential interaction of innovating elements is ready to happen. Many networks of networks are now forming, learning to interact with one another as organic new functions in health, education, economics, media, and other arenas. The new social body is taking shape right now, in our midst. It is truly the most exiting time to be alive.
Jean, Hazel, and I are among the many women throughout the world who are now manifesting what I think of as a new feminine archetype: the feminine cocreator. Standing on the shoulder of our sisters who paved the way, we are women who are motivated from within by a process of creativity, a prime vocation that feels as though it comes from the larger design of evolution. It expresses itself in loving action not to be equal to men in a dysfunctional world but to cocreate a new world equal to our spiritual, social, and scientific and technological capacities.
Evolutionary women are on the rise. And we seem to create a new context in which evolutionary men are freer to release themselves from the bonds of patriarchy and join together in new forms of real partnership. We are giving birth to a new human and a new humanity within ourselves. This universal human is connected through the heart to the whole of life, is awakened from within by the desire to create and participate, is expanding toward a more multidimensional consciousness and creativity, and is literally transcending the self-conscious, limited phase of Homo sapiens sapiens.
I am doing many wonderful projects with partners throughout the country and world, among them a DVD series called Humanity Ascending: A New Way through Together. I offer the new worldview of conscious evolution as an explorer on the evolutionary edge. The series is designed to reach as many people as possible, to awaken in people their evolutionary code of self and social evolution. I am in the process of cocreating a “communion of pioneering souls,” who feel this emergence within them. It is a most precious global community upon this Earth, from every race, nation, and religion connected in a morphic or resonant field by attunement to what is emerging within ourselves and the world.
At 76 I am deep into “regenopause.” This is, I believe a new life cycle in the life of a woman. When we enter menopause, and are no longer producing eggs—we ourselves are the “egg.” It is our time to give birth the authentic feminine self and our work in the world. As we have fewer children and live longer lives, this feminine cocreator is arising with up to fifty years of lifetime ahead of her. The evolutionary regenopausal woman is a guide to the younger women as well as to men. She heralds the future of our species and as far as I can tell is the critical community of guidance and leadership to carry us through his transition toward a universal humanity.