09 Feb What is Co-creation?
What is co-creation?
For us co-creating means including a multitude of seen and unseen team members, forces and intelligences into any creation to get the greatest result for all involved – this can include people, land, place, time, elves and Nature spirits and other factors.
How do we do that?
We create an attunement space where we invite a ‘team’ into a meeting so we can track and receive information and energy for a particular project. This project might be personal, such as something for our bodies or it might be something that more directly includes others in the creating, such as a group project.
The background for this way of working finds itself in the remarkable lives of those who came before us – people such as those who created a garden known as Eden for the Aquarian Age – The Findhorn Community in northern Scotland.n the early nineties we were each introduced to the work of a woman who shaped our lives powerfully through her curiosity and exploration, research and application. Machaelle Small Wright, founder of Perelandra Centre for Nature Research and for more than forty years she has developed a way of working with nature that she named co-creative science.
In her book of the same name she writes ‘Co-creative science is a revolutionary way to address the many serious problems that are mushrooming all around us. Co-Creative Science is a book about nature and the amazing partnership we can forge with nature for working together to successfully address the many problems that face us in our everyday and perelandra-ltd.com But co-creative science isn’t just for addressing problems. It also points the way for us to establish our new partnership with nature so that we can live an environmentally friendly life that will be part of our planet’s solutions and balance, and not part of our planet’s problems and destruction.’So to illustrate this on a very basic level,to create a garden in co-creation we tune in with the over-lighting intelligence or Deva of the land/space and the nature intelligences/spirits of that land and then ask which plants might be in resonance or could be introduced when, where and in which combination and placement to create the greatest health, harmony, balance and wellbeing for all levels of the garden and land Gabriella writes: ‘In my own experience of creating a garden in co-creation with Nature, in 1998 I moved out into the Highlands of Scotland for an adventure of great proportions.
The small retreat house for which I was inspired to create a small vegetable and flower garden was in the middle of wide-open space where herds of 200 deer moved by, coming down from the hills at night to drink from the river. In the summer herds of cows and sheep moved freely through the valley and not to forget the abundance of rabbits…. Upon consideration I thought it wise to create a boundary fence for our garden, within which growing could happen.
When we did our first attunement with the garden and brought the question of the fence into the space, it became clear that we were being asked by Nature – the deva of the garden – to work with and look at our inner fences for a week before attempting to build one on the land.
What a beautiful and enriching experience this was! We spent a whole week tracking our inner fences and barriers – observed fences in the land and their effects on us and the energy of the space…. And in the end of the week when we sensed into building a fence, our relationship to the fence had changed so much, that we realized the fence that would be built now was very different to the one that would have been built a week before.
Had I built a fence to start with it would have been a gesture of ‘keep out’, but after this week of being with the effect of fences, what I was moved to build was an artistic fence with the gesture of creating a space of creation within the larger space of creation.
We have come to see time and time again that any shift we make on the inside or with ourselves has a direct impact upon the wellbeing and the direction of the garden or project that is being co-created.
It is here that we have the opportunity to perceive the effects of our own engagement as playing a part in the health of the whole. The gardener must be healthy and balanced as much as the seeds and soil in the garden!
When we acknowledge and recognise ourselves as co-creators and partners in any project and that directly translates as every being contributing to the greater whole. When taken to the widest levels this becomes a way of approaching anything. We are often stunned to find that the process of crafting a singing bowl can be so immensely transformative for the individual maker.
Through meeting aspects of themselves in the process of forging they are often ‘asked’ to look at something within their own personal process that, when adjusted or given space to readjust to change, will allow the bowl making to come to its greater coherent frequency as well. In this as with the garden or any project we enter into co-creatively, we acknowledge that All of Life contributes. The Universe is filled with energies that may be able to assist and to create the change being asked for.
The question is what question and what invitation would you like to bring towards those energies that would be available and willing to contribute?For more complex examples of how we work with Co-creation to create our lives see Co-creation part 2 The Golden Floes