Here in Skyros such remarkable meetings happen. The other night for example, my friend Clare and I met the writer Shelley Weiner and her husband Jack for a drink. It was the first time we had met but there was an immediate connection. It turned out that Shelley went to the same socialist zionist youth organisation as I, she in South Africa and I in Brooklyn(in the days when zionism could be left wing and idealistic) and also that her husband Jack had been the pharmacist of Clare’s mother.
These remarkable meetings are full of depth, serendipity, and the kind of freshness of the imagination that belongs as much to dreams as to everyday life.
This morning, writing my talk for the first community meeting, this came to me:
Skyros dwells in the border between dreams and reality. So often in everyday life our soul is whispering and we do not have the time to listen. So people come to Skyros, whether for personal development or writing, or singing, or windsurfing, and it is a holding place, where you are nourished, loved, seen, taught, and above all laughed with, while your natural transformation just unfolds as it is meant to.
If we leave here different than when we came, and this includes me, the teachers, the permanent staff and of course the participants, it is because of this: that instead of drawing a straight line from now to the future, so that the future is the best we are able to imagine at this moment from our present limited perspective, we have an opportunity to imagine in a fresh and new way. This way is more as our heart and soul would want for us, than as everyday life seems to be demanding.
The gift of soul community is that it begins here. We can reimagine a new way to be together, where the barriers of our everyday roles and limitations fall away, and we can see others and be seen as we are at our best. And from this, just as a child learns first to speak and then can internalise language into thought, so we can take our new imaginings back home into our own life. And if we create soul community around us there, how far and wide can the new imaginings go.
And as we imagine so we can be. Or rather, as we imagine, so we already are. We just haven’t told ourselves yet.