I co-facilitate many conversations daily with people from diverse backgrounds who share their stories. Not so much what they think this moment means or their sense of it but rather personal stories that reflect the complexity of life. They include life, death, grief, joy, suicide, addiction, birth of children, frustrations with children, overwhelm and more often than not deep collective wisdom. The people sharing stories include hospital workers on the front line of the COVID-19 pandemic, isolated elders, young people travelling the country looking for a home, families together and apart and every space in between. They include as many different versions of reality as you can imagine and more. The whole gamut. Realities that comes from a disparity in experience of the world in all its forms: practices of religion, color of skin, country of origin, gender and sexual orientation, socio-economic status and educational privilege.

We come together simply to listen to each other’s stories and then together we witness and weave those stories. These conversations reach beyond a grand unified narrative or arguments of right and wrong. They put this dilemma of COVID-19 into a frame of reference that not only holds all the complexity and uncertainty, but also brings out a new feeling of being O.K. with it in the context of our shared humanity. There is no feeling of separation because you are family or not, because you’re one color or not, because you’re poor or rich.

The intimacy we reach in these conversations can be a magical experience of seeing and being seen for those who have not experienced this form of intimacy outside of trusted friends, family or loved ones, or even for some at all in their lives. For these circles are not therapy or healing (although they can have that effect), they are held in the context of work. They are a part of We are Open Circle’s mission to support changemakers and organizational groups (whether that organization be corporate, not for profit, political, spiritual, educational or healthcare) to connect, adapt and align to both individual and organizational purpose.

Amidst COVID-19 I have experienced these circles as an elixir to the quick fixes, positive mindset and handy hints for survival. Not that those are not useful. Just that in this time when there is so much insecurity, all those memes seem only to open my door for old feelings of insecurity and inadequacy and seeing myself and my life as something to be fixed or achieved. Sitting in these circles I receive a continual blessing: I am not attempting to be the heroine who comes with the answers. In these circles, the fixing comes from letting myself be moved by the group, witnessing my experience and simply playing my part. This is such a relief after endless years of habitual over-responsibility as a leader that has resulted in cyclical burnout.

Time and time again people email us after these conversations and say that it was magical or something special, something they cannot quite put their finger on, something beyond just listening. Something so simple seems to bring something inexplicable to people. Why?

This experience again and again brings me back to a word that I have struggled with in my personal life and avoided in my professional life for many years: Love.

In this work like no other I can instinctively feel the possibility of living Kahlil Gibran’s poetic promise in “Work is love made visible.”

But what do I mean by love in this context?

So many things in my life have informed me what love is or is meant to be. So many romantic stories, each different versions of the prince rescuing the princess and sweeping her into a life of happiness and satisfaction. Stories that lead me towards this deep lifelong yearning for a fantastical man to come and carry me away on his steed or at least build me a house on a hilltop as an expression of his love for me. Stories that lead me to so much pain when they blocked me from seeing the reality around me, and further pain as I saw the way the stories are still being passed on to my daughters in the shows they watch and in the choices I made.

This pain finally led me to a crisis point: I could no longer choose to run around in circles working to keep up this fantastical vision of my life, all catalogued on social media so I could flip through, receive my validation and escape my reality. Instead I let it all fall apart and, without any certainty, set out to find another way. With great costs in hurt and comfort, I went on the journey of deliberately removing that which had inhibited my ability to listen and be moved by that listening. I sold my corporate business that was supporting me but not effectively helping the organizations it worked with; sold my house and released myself from my debt; left my marriage and the deep loneliness of a partnership where I had lost the ability to feel myself anymore; and began a commitment to service without a grand vision and plan, just taking the next step as it presented itself and following my nose. I went on a rollercoaster ride of acceptance and surrender.

As this journey unfolded, alongside an overriding sense of humility I also discovered a miraculous love with a wild power to move me beyond what makes sense, beyond the boundaries that are deeply embedded in my psyche. And I found myself in the most unlikely of places: sleeping on a couch in San Francisco with no money like I did as a teenager backpacking; sitting with men’s groups and women’s groups across the world that are in a quest for finding deeper meaning; crying and singing in a sweat lodge while a cyclone was howling outside; fasting in deep nature and walking in the mountains for days; or howling at the full moon by a fire in my backyard with my children looking on laughing and bewildered at my strange behavior.

My experience of love as wild in these years has unabashedly laid waste to any definitions of what it is and what it is not.  This experience has constantly been pushing me beyond my knowing, beyond my control, beyond my capacity for pain and heartbreak. And I continue to wonder: what does that say about the nature of love? What does it really mean to love myself and to really feel love for others, not just proclaim it?

I hesitated to bring all this into my professional world, as I didn’t know where this experience of wild poetic love would fit.

Love has been such a contentious word to bring into work. Like it does not belong except maybe when talking about a product someone is sprucing. I remember a conference I had in the Blue Mountains in Sydney; it was just before a company I co-founded, Be Learning, took off on a wild ride of financial success and moral challenge. I remember at this conference a long discussion about love in leadership and debating whether we could add love as one of our values or not. In the end it seemed that love, like politics and religion, was potentially too divisive and dangerous in its wide-reaching implications to name as a value.

In that conversation in the Blue Mountains people wanted to recognize love because it gave heed to this mysterious force that brought us together in the most unusual ways. That made everything somehow seem to fall into place. Even if it was through painful experiences of people who felt like family moving on; or of killing off a beloved idea that had reached its “use by” date; or pulling apart a team who had travelled many roads together.

These things remind me of the way we experience a dance or feel a song or in the poetry of words slung together in unlikely ways. They are the moments that reveal the beauty and mystery in the inexplicable ways we are connected, of the sinews between us and the way change in each of us affects the other. I am coming to understand love as the force that brings us back to this alignment. The felt knowledge, a consciousness of the way we are connected just as an ecosystem is connected. The way the birds and fish swarm, the intricate collective perfection of an ant colony, the migration patterns that both remain and adapt as our world does.

A month ago, Adam (co-founder in We are Open Circle) and I were part of a course on environmental trauma at Pacifica Graduate School. The professor, who was also a scientist, showed the steep upcurve of our collective environmental trauma plotted over the last hundred thousand years (see chart below). Over the past few weeks, as I’ve watched the coronavirus upcurve, I see a strange resemblance to the environmental trauma curve. In the presentation the professor, long exposed to environmental atrocities around the world, admitted that to him, at times, it seemed that we were perhaps entering the end times. It was hard for him as a scientist   to work out how this could be turned around. The solutions were out there but there was not enough social motivation to implement the massive upheaval of our systems it required. The only thing he said that gave him solace was experimenting with a practice of alchemy where he began to experience small inexplicable synchronicities. At the time I thought “Ah here again this wild love,” this mystical force that brings synchronicity to the surface, that brings poetic hope in the face of problems that our rational compartmentalized mind cannot work out.

At the break, Adam pulled me aside and said, “But how can he discount the energy that created this thing is also the energy that will change it in as dramatic a way?” What if Adam had stood up and said that to the class? What if he had proposed that worldwide travel would be brought to a screaming halt within a month? That a virus would turn our systems on their head and force us to reconsider new ways of exchange? And that people around the world would be on pause with schools closed, children sent home and social events cancelled — which leaves room for deep reflection on the way things are and the way we want them to be?  

I have no doubts that five weeks ago people in that class would have said, “Well that’s just fantasy, it’s impossible, it’s a waste of time discussing it.” Yet here we all are. Stopped in this moment by something that is invisible to the human eye in ways we could never have foreseen. Caught in a moment that highlights on a global and shared scale the way none of us can orchestrate or control this rebalancing act. Awed by this mythic moment that I have no doubt people will look back on in a hundred years and see the poetic sense so obviously at work.

Even now I can’t help but remember what preceded this crisis. All the months of children around the world leaving their schools and marching the streets.  Last week when I rode my bike out around town, the busiest hive of activity was not the coffee shop, it was the garden store, hustling and bustling as people and children prepared to plant.

I am also reminded of my daughter and my son who separately over the last weeks have challenged me with the inaction and choices of my generation: “You created this.” When I heard this both times, I all too quickly shouldered the burden of responsibility and vowed to fix it and encouraged other adults around me to do the same.

As I write this, I realize the trap. The trap I continually fall into in my leadership. Of trying to fix and solve that which needs to fall apart. And perhaps that in this letting go, the truth of love —the interconnecting force between us — is exposed and is allowed to take its course to rebalance, heal and move in the way it needs to. Just like the river that finds its way back to the sea and the seasons that move through life and death and rebirth.

Now as we all witness almost every structure in our world being turned on its head, I see a mirror of my internal journey over the last few years. And I wonder if my experiences of the wild power of love — its pain, its discomfort, its loss and the deep joy in its alchemy — are being felt on a global scale.

But what has this to do with business? What has this to do with the important actions and decisions that need to be taken now? With the deaths? With the job losses accompanied as equally by overburdened systems? With the need to pivot and have the courage to look ahead while not comprehending how some of our economies will recover? With the choices faced by some health workers about who to save and who to leave?

A week ago Adam sent me an article from Harvard Business Review advising people on how to maintain their professionalism in online meetings while working from home, and some handy hints. It shamed a CEO who was on a meeting while in his son’s bedroom helping him get dressed. As I read it I got annoyed and thought about my years of working from home and the way I had internalized this attitude, and the many times I placed a hand in front of my child’s face while they tried to interrupt me while I was in some form or other of an important meeting. Or my daughter standing in front me the other night as I shooed her away from my desk, saying, “Mom, I don’t care that you are in a meeting, saying goodbye to me is way more important than that.”

And I felt the need to shout NO to the Harvard article. My daughter is right.

And then the questions came pouring in:

Can I let this disruption be a chance not to resolve back to an outmoded, restrictive idea of what is “proper”? To let go of a schizophrenia that wants to break everything into binary distinctions — right and wrong, good and bad? To give up that part in me that is addicted to fixing things and thinking we are in a race to work everything out? Will I be part of finally stopping the displacement of the mystical and mythical poetic potential of our lives to the side show of entertainment?

And what about all of us here in our work?

Can we let this really move us? Can we dance with change and let this magical quality penetrate our professional lives? Are we courageous enough to let this wild love — the natural sinew that connects us with one another and our path to collective change — take a seat in our boardrooms?

I hope so. I really do.