What is your true purpose?
Only you can ultimately answer this question. Nobody knows better than you who you are, where you've been, or what feels important to you.
"We are all here to contribute our gifts toward something greater than ourselves, and will never be content unless we are."
-Charles Eisenstein
A person's gift makes room for them.
-Proverbs
We have just held our first true, in person meeting of the Guilds of Requiem. Whether it was a success depends on what you deem a success. The skype portion was wrought with technical problems. One active member had the flu and couldn't come, another had labored all day and was visibly fatigued, another is buried under household issues. Robin and I didn't have the house, dinner, and ourselves ready in time. We missed including newcomers...it was all a little too big of a bite. Really, the only ones that pulled through were my son and daughter who did their first day of full work to help clear the house that had become a wreck from trying to keep up with getting the guilds off the ground these past several months. That made daddy proud.
There was another individual who came, however. A young man whom has impressed us with his ambition, open mindedness, hopefulness, and curiosity about what we are saying and doing here. He wants to be involved, we want him involved. The only question is HOW will he be involved. This isn't the first time this has come before us with someone. I, myself, have been horrible with dealing with this. When trying to explain Guilds of Requiem, I end up feeling like a grunting ape-man. It is so opposed to the prevailing paradigm of organizing human beings that you usually get caught up talking about what's wrong with humanity as a whole. The other snag is that Guilds of Requiem uses nothing new or completely radical as far as methodology. Once someone starts to get it, the feeling that our current social systems resemble a ball of yarn a housecat has been tangling all day comes across their face. Lol, I have come to think of it as "the requiem expression". I know what I just said was probably confusing as all get-out. It's like I said, I'm just a grunting ape-man.
This morning, as I recollected and gathered my thoughts over coffee, I have arrived upon a thought stream that I seem to keep crossing. Individual purpose. The young man I mentioned is just an example of what we all experience. Personal freedom that does not impose on the freedom of others has become very core to the Guilds of Requiem. Once you start to impose your views on another, you either succeed or you drive them away. Both outcomes are failures. Requiem is restful peace, not death of the self. I know this morning that for us to proceed with what this needs to become, we have to make the facilitation of individual guild members finding their purpose a priority. We each have to discover our gift to share and exchange with the others so that they can do the same and reciprocate. The guild structure we have envisioned can do this beautifully. Conventionally, the current bureaucratic, rationalistic label for this is "vocational advisement and training". With us, however, it has to be a little deeper... a little more exentential.
A community outperforms an individual. It is formed and held together by individuals sharing and exchanging talents with others who reciprocate the exchange. Each individual needs to contribute the correct gift, the talents they are best at for there to be maximum synergy. The talents must be allowed to be diverse for the structure to be sustainable. Diversity is how nature allows life to persist. The weakest eventually becomes the strongest in the expression of talents for survival. That vestigial nub at the end of your spine is there in case your descendants will need a tail.
Guilds of Requiem needs to be a group of individuals in order to thrive. The discovery of members' true purpose, that they "know" is their gift to give, their own piece to the puzzle needs to be core to our practices. We have to merge mentorship of skills and disciplines with individual freedom here at Guilds of Requiem. Knowledge has to be passed so we don't lose the past. Individual freedom must be preserved so we don't lose the future.
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