A love and purpose story
Cradled in the voluptuous Dolomiti mountains, where continental plates collide, we find ourselves at the juicy edges.
Gathering
November 2023: We are invited into liminal space, a systemic sensing practice into the potentials for our AR+ organisation. We find ourselves embodying the elemental roles of Mother and Father Earth.1
Our story here describes what we feel and experience, initially as Planet Earth (becoming Mother Earth) and an Unknown Entity (becoming Father Earth). Around us are a number of other people who are participants in the systems sensing practice2.
These practices:
make the invisible and subtle explicit and valued3
and collectively help us to use our multiple intelligences, our perceptual senses for greatly enhanced insight on the purpose and power of our work.4
Mother Earth
I meet the call reluctantly hoping another will take up the challenge before me. And this first fateful step is already discovery. Isn’t this how it so often is:
That the burden feels too great?
And we feel too small, unequal to the task?
Setting familiar human feelings of timidity and imposition aside (who am I to …?), I step into the circle and take up the role of Planet Earth.
Anticipating a vast expansiveness, instead I crumple in upon myself. Hips cleave to the ground, eyes close.
Father Earth
I am enticed into the space, not knowing what I am but feeling that something is missing, something is calling me to be here. I trust this urge, I can just be with the attraction that’s pulling me in.
As I walk in I feel pain. I instantly feel that this should not be, this cannot pass. I stop, stop next to Planet Earth.
More than that. I am wanting to open into this room, into humanity’s and our planet’s wholeness.
Yet, am I here just for purpose? Who am I fooling?
I feel desire, the pull of The Planet, her beauty and brightness alongside the pain. I sit down beside her to silently witness.
Mother Earth
At first as a tiny ball, curled tight in on itself, without language, a solipsistic insularity. No words to describe the immensity of sensation deep within. Only a churning hot dense mass, a centripetal singularity of condensed rage and hurt, too big to hold packed tight in such a frail frame.
Alone, disconnected, aware only of the intolerable depth of pain. No itness to know sadness. No me-ness to understand I-ness. A gulf, as of galaxies and aeons, distant from the fleeting creatures and voices flickering outside itself, fearing being split apart by the size of the pain.
Yet yearning to be seen, witnessed, regarded. Not much. Not a big ask. Not to be coddled as a baby might be (though the inexpressible injustice of separation is baby-like in form), not ogled like a fairground novelty, not feared as a petty tyrant or make obeisance to a retributive god.
Simply to be respected and held within collective awareness as being aware. Seen, and seen to be seeing.
Father Earth
I go deeper. The pain is expanding here and a fire is rising in me that this should not be. There is me and The Planet. Beyond this are many people holding themselves away, hiding with some distance, regardless of whatever is their calling. And soon an anger is rising, a potency of power, all the way to the core of planetary consciousness, mandibles of magma, molten heat suffusing through the whole of me. And this is me too, the planet. I crystallise as Father Earth within my pair, Mother Earth.
I’ll be here for her, for all of the fountains of feeling in her, not to detract from any of it, just to allow all this to be as wisdom emerges.
Lean on me, I feel a little rest on my shoulder, it is light.
I wish to be here for more, I am proud to bear this. And I feel the attraction too, as her shoulder touches mine, a tickling bewitching into me.
Mother Earth
Still, attention out there is fleeting. Unlike the hips, rooted, ancient, like mountains deep into the ground. Unlike the belly that continues to roil. These are not fleeting. And again sadness engulfs.
After epochs and no time at all, an arm touches, encircles, holds. The ball is seen, the grief expressed on its behalf. Words form. And suddenly the inner erupts to the outer. Shaking, tearing. The centre may not hold, cannot hold what dares to rip apart. All the earthquakes and hurricanes, tempests and tsunamis come at once, to rent the sky and ground and sea. Oceans of fury threaten to explode.
Connections
Father Earth
All those around Mother Earth, don’t they see? Don’t they realise? And what of those who think they do see and yet they are holding themselves apart? Caught as inadequate trying to be adequate.
I ask myself the same, curiosity and responsibility firmly anchored in me: Father Earth: magma, no mastery need here. I silently feel if ‘more connection’ is welcome. Affirmed, I wrap my arm around Mother Earth.
Apocrine auras now, fragrance entrancing me too. I support her, present with this, while aware I’ll bolster any or all of her, Mother Earth, that wants to be held by me.
Mother Earth
The holding one, unequal to the task, incapable of birthing this inexpressible tide alone, opens its eyes. Feels and leans into the embrace of the Other, looks deep into the Other’s eyes and is divided. This insular singular cell now splits.
Mother and Father Earth separate
… reconnect, entangle.
Grief, rage, sadness pour out. Limbs, tentacles, tendrils reach out to others. Tentatively, exploratively, hungrily…
Father Earth
I hold her gaze. She is held in mine, holds mine. I am her, she is me.
We start to fuse and spiral, I feel the melting, her surrender into my body and on into embrace, full atomic entanglement, a sensually weaving fertility, seminal fluids from which all seeds.
Around us, still removed from Mother and Father Earth, are the humans. They are only a little inquisitive. It’s up to them, they get to choose how they want to be.
Mother Earth
Suddenly it seems they feel it, feel the deep bond to Earth, those other lives flickering around us.
Bonds form with humanity and ecosystem, with trees and community, feeling connection to other. Others, connecting to the ageless and ever-changing life within them, my attention turns outwards, sustained and supported by Father Earth’s loving caress, the potential for carnal encounter too enticing, reaching out tendrils now to connect with other lifes, supported by the holding of Father, feeling expansion outwards front and back, wings growing between forgotten shoulder-blades, unfolding, unfurling, impelled by the growing sense of abundance and fecundity, energy drawn from the enfolding of the Father meeting other energies. Words still fleeting, still powerless to match what demands expression, the awoken sensuous Earth is drawn to the movement, the vibrancy, the dance, oh the dance, of abundant, vigorous life!
A sense of rightness and urgency mounts. This is what is needed. This creative unfolding that weaves sensuous spells, the sways and stamps that speak a timeless universal language of exquisite purpose.
Don’t speak. For god’s sake, for pity’s sake, for Mother and Father Earth’s sake, for all our sakes, for all our children’s sakes. Just stop f**king speaking. And dance.
Fusions
Father Earth
Aromas are melting resistance, uncertainty, a bouquet to savour far more than humanities’ multiple abstractions. They smell it, minds melt, surrender, take their power, breath in deeply the call of collective potency. Agency bursts out, flumes, life.
Mother & Father Earth
Mother Earth and Father Earth, now feeling like luminous beings, burst inwards, humanity and exosystems’ entwining with our potency, penetrating deeply—as us and through us—we’re pulsating. Drawn in, and designing the dance we are in, we are passionate juice. A deep ecstasy multiplying our own once humans have chosen to be with us, chosen to be in their purpose and take their power. A place of creation and synergy.
We dilate, unfold and wrap into love.
It is ravishing, entrancing and bewitching, smashing all over everything…
Photos: Alex Stubbings
This is the love story from Mother and Father Earth’s perspectives as part of the Action Research Plus, AR+ 2023 Gathering. It is from a systemic sensing practice led by Luea Ritter involving the participants at the gathering. The authors are Mother and Father Earth, we stepped into being this, through the Saturday on which we did this constellation practice.
A second substack follows this one. It will touch on some of the other people’s / participants’ experiences and the unfolding realities from our gathering: new frames and formats including those around AR+’s purpose.
A version of this substack was originally published on the AR+ website as A conversation between Mother and Father Earth. We answer the call and unfold into love in Gathering.
The other participants represent different aspects of AR+ including it’s connections, activities and other aspects of our world, ecosystems and broader humanity.
Further activities after the systems sensing crystallise the learnings and action from the story you are reading here.
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