Stirrings from Spirit of Napa Valley

As the Spirit Moves Me
by Pam Burns-Clair

Stirrings from Spirit of Napa Valley

February 11, 2006

Experiencing Michael Dowd, keynote speaker of Spirit of the Napa Valley last Saturday at the incredible Mt. La Salle Christian Brothers Retreat Center in the hills overlooking Napa Valley, reminded me of my reaction the first time I saw the movie “What the Bleep Do We Know”. His keynote address, like his website, was called “The Great Story,” (check out http://thegreatstory.org/what_is.html), followed by his workshop talk called “Beyond Sustainability: An Inspiring Vision of the Next 250 Years.”

Michael and his wife, Connie Barlow, are bridge builders—and gypsies! They live in a van, traveling around the country speaking and networking. They are bridging the gap in the study of evolution vs. creation, speaking to diverse audiences from CA liberals to fundamentalist Christians to Buddhist monks. They are environmentalists on a grand scale—advocating not just immediate measures to reverse short sighted destructive trends, but a vision in the next 250 years in which:

The human population stabilizes
Clean renewable energy replaces toxic energy sources
Something called biomimicry and biocratic revolution occurs…

He refers to the work of William Mcdonough and Christopher Alexander of “eco architecture” and green sustainable design, and to the consciousness work of cosmologist Brian Swimme and cultural historian Thomas Barry.

In his talk on “sacred evolution” he illustrates the distinction between a mechanistic view of the world in which the universe is viewed as a “clockwork universe” in which creativity/the Creator is outside, vs. the perspective of God in sacred evolutionary theory as subjective, much like the perspective of indigenous people, that there is a creative “omnipresence” or “imminence” within and among us and in nature. A perspective that is beyond believability that is simply: “life is”—a totality of reality. “We didn’t come into the world; we grew out of it—like apples grow out of an apple tree.” He objects to the reference to “The Big Bang” as a violent explosion and prefers “The Great Radiance.” He illustrates mysticism with the example that a cell in the body is in communication with other cells, all a part of the whole. In the “God’s eye view—I am that and that is me.”

What I found most profound and useful was an exercise he proposes we partake in:

List on this side of the page:

My Great Joys

(Activities, projects, interests, sources of joy, strengths, talents, etc.) Then list on this side of the page:

The World’s Great Needs as I Feel Them

(That which pains, depresses, angers, hurts me, that which causes heartbreak or brings out my compassion)

Then in the center, connected with the heart,

we explore/meditate on:

Potential Intersections

That which beckons to us, “Soul Food,”

How I can be a blessing or make a difference…being stirred into some expression.

Food for thought, huh?

In our efforts to promote peace, perhaps especially meaningful to those of us who consider ourselves peace activists, Michael proposes we honor those we oppose. He poses, “GW [Bush] is fulfilling his role in the body of life, are you fulfilling yours?” My association with this is the position of the Tibetan Buddhist monks taking refuge outside of their homeland whom I’ve had the good fortune to experience on their tour through Napa and Sonoma several years in a row, who seem to have been able to forgive and honor their Chinese oppressors. Not a small order….