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Creativity, Innovation and Renewal in Northeast Ohio: The Tipping Point NetworkPosted by I-Open Team. |
Chris Reynolds believes in the power of creativity to transform people, their communities and their regions to healthy, sustainable places. He recently submitted the article posted below as a leader in Northeast Ohio's healing community, The Tipping Point Network. Learn more about the Tipping Point Network and its thousands of healers and their communities.
"The Pattern of Renewal: What to Look for and Help Bring
Forth," F. Christopher Reynolds, M.Ed., Berea High School, Ashland University, Angel House Center for Art and Creative Life Change
There is a transformative renewal of our region that has
been going on the past few years.
It is rising up from the grassroots level, is visionary, inspiring and
has been changing persons one at a time. It takes the form of small centers
that focus on creativity, spirituality and healing. They go by names like, Angel
House, Inner Harmony, Creative
Healing Center, Wellness
Evolution, Insight, Spiritual
Quest Foundation, Circle of Light
Integrative Healing and Sacred Arts Center,
and so on. At the heart of each of
the centers are persons who experienced ‘Callings’ with the capital “C” to
bring healing to where they live.
If you listen to the stories of the Callings, in every case, they are
spiritual experiences in the classic sense, including the presence of spiritual
beings, divine guidance, healing and empowerment. These centers have all taken
root with little money and lots of faith. The identifying pattern of this wave
of renewal is that it is holistic, meaning whole in the deepest sense:
physical, psychological, spiritual, ecological and cosmological.
The identifying mark in the general population for those who
are also living this pattern of renewal is that of the “orphan.” By orphan, I certainly mean literally,
but also metaphorically. They are the persons deemed “not good enough to keep”,
the “sick” ones degraded, ignored, out of place, seemingly born at the wrong
time. In the old initiation
stories, which are stories about how individuals transform their cultures, the
heroes are all of this kind, a raggedy boy, a lost girl, a step-child, son or
daughter of a widow.
In our time, the general pattern is that the world, as
perceived by the orphan, is much more expansive, meaningful, loving and merged
with spiritual realities than the “real” world as delineated by the current
family, educational, religious, political, scientific and technological
systems. The resultant isolation
and suffering brings the orphans to a crisis point that many do not survive.
The individuals who do manage to find the healing information for their lives,
usually through a form of death and rebirth experience, are now gathering in
greater numbers at our local creativity and healing centers.
The renewal our region is seeking has already been quietly
underway for some years now. This essay is a Calling in itself to those who
would be leaders to invite those centers and individuals who have been living
in this renewed, holistic manner into public awareness. There is an astounding
amount of wisdom for our times waiting to be welcomed home and permitted to
share what Joseph Campbell in the Hero of a Thousand Faces called, “The Boon”, with the culture at large. Time, money, effort, generosity
invested in the wave of renewal I described opens a better way forward for the
future generations.
F. Christopher Reynolds, M.Ed.
Berea High School
Ashland University
Angel House
440-243-5346
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