We shall stand for love. Honouring and reflecting on the lessons from a generous life gone too soon
Vale to the beautiful Dorothy Oger.
The best way for me to honour Dorothy is through telling a story.
After she completed the Syntropic Enterprise Masterclass Dorothy enrolled on the Synergistic Accounting class that commenced in late 2021. During this class, participants get to share their Synergistic Audit out loud with their fellow participants. The Audit is an expression, at this moment in time, of a person’s whole life. It begins by asking the question; what do you have the capacity, willingness and desire to bring to this project, community, partnership, team or enterprise? You answer this question considering six domains of value.
Then you are asked to nominate what you expect in return for what you contribute in the same six domains of value.
Many people struggle to name their value to themselves and others. And many, if not more, people struggle to ask for what they want in exchange.
Speaking the Synergistic Audit out loud to strangers is a profoundly vulnerable experience. Those listening are asked to witness the one speaking their Audit with deep respect and an open heart. They, too, get the chance to speak their Audit out loud, and they, too, get to experience the extraordinary alchemy that happens when they do.
Dorothy was a poet. She wrote this poem in response to the death of her friend in the Brussels bombing in 2016.
It has been translated into 75 or more languages.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3vs9NianBT4
Dorothy also ran poetry workshops for Syntropic World, where people without confidence would find themselves writing poetry in under 90 minutes.
After she attended Syntropic World Summit in March 2022 she created this poem.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2AADqpVcnTE
In the Synergistic Accounting Class, without being asked to, Dorothy captured each Audit of each participant in a single poem as a summary and weaving of what she heard while listening to their Audit.
When she read her summary poem, she moved everyone. But especially the person who had just spoken their Audit out loud.
She wrote this poem as her intention poem for the Synergistic Accounting Class.
Predictive, you would say? At the end of this,
I will have fallen in love
With conversations
About value, money
Expressing what I provide
And what I receive.
At the end of this,
I will have been a witness
To you, your balance,
Your sense of value
What you provide to the world
Of our synergy.
At the end of this,
I will have opened the path
Wisely, healthily,
Organically
For all projects to succeed
With care, love and joy.
At the end of this,
Perhaps I will lead the way
Shifting from money
As the sole value
To include in accounting
Poems, play, and fun.
Dorothy16th November 2021
Dorothy offered a gift of such immeasurable dimensions. To be so exquisitely witnessed by Dorothy through the art of words is a memory I am sure each participant will hold as forever dear.
Her generosity soared in every moment of sharing.
We had been figuring out how to have this experience become a part of all of the Synergistic Accounting classes. But alas, that is not to be. At least not Dorothy’s weaving. In honouring her legacy, we can find another way to weave poetically.
Dorothy left us this past week after a heart attack some days before.
Her wisdom and generosity will be missed by her presence on the weekly Syntropic Community calls. Yet her poetry lives on. She planted seeds of love and beauty in almost everyone who met her. Those magic seeds will sprout if they still need to do so.
I know I will be better for a Dorothy magic seed of love and beauty sprouting in my inner being.
Vale Dorothy. Your words have left fingerprints on so many hearts.
Personal reflections of my life inspired by Dorothy
Life is this glorious mishmash of collisions and stumblings, with intermittent skips and dancing heart singing.
In the last few years, I have been blessed by such a volume of joyous collisions, including meeting the love of my life and starting Syntropic World. When I met Tony, and we experienced love and connection beyond anything I thought possible, I was terrified in the early days of his death that would inevitably come one day. I recognised that this kind of fear had a cost on my being able to enjoy the flow and sequence of our beautiful moments together.
I chose instead to live and love every moment with unbridled gratitude for the whole experience.
While we are told that that is the formula for a happy life, when we are caught in the busy rut of families and business and work and exercise and social activities, when our eyes are cast to the future we are building, it is so hard to do. So come back to living this very moment.
After several years of being so thoroughly on my knees — where every belief I held was stripped bare and exposed as a sham — where solid ground was not to be trusted — once I emerged through, I promised myself to turn to the world I knew possible, rather than trying to fix the broken, or get angry by those who profit from keeping it broken.
There is something so liberating from a complete unravelling. Then, at a mature age, we get to begin again.
While it is excruciating to go through this crucible, emergence on the other side makes it very worth it. Hard for someone who is yet to emerge to understand.
Part of my disintegration was to no longer place another charismatic male on a pedestal. I had done this most of my adult life, diminishing myself. Worse, I had believed the BS these people thrived off. The webs of lies. The conspiracies backed by compelling data. I know well the power of data manipulation and spell casting.
JK Rowling said that when we hit rock bottom, the only way is up.
The only way for me then was up, and I had nothing to lose. Nothing at all. Not my pride. Not money. Not my identity. All of these where and still are gone. Well and truly composted.
I was instead starting with what was real and true for me — witnessed by my own eyes — experienced by my senses.
No more pedestals. Not for anyone. Not for me.
I have no doubt that it is because I had cleaned my own house so very thoroughly, I had taken my pen and begun to write this new chapter in my life on my terms and with the central organising principle of what matters to me most — integrity, beauty, justice, dignity — that the magic and miracles of Tony and Syntropic World arriving simultaneously came next.
We have to be ready. If we are a gardener, we have to prepare the soil for the seed. If we care enough about the seeds thriving to become a plant, we prepare the soil with our whole heart, taking all the time needed.
If we want our life to shift from struggle and confusion to clarity and transmission, we must prepare our inner soil. Weed. Add nutrients. Till. Weed again. Compost. Let light and dark have their way with us. Weed again.
Only then might we plant the seeds.
As a result of this I was ready when they arrived in my life. I had stopped seeking. Stopped searching and stopped hoping for answers out there. Stopped wanting to be rescued or even seen. I was enough. Even if I did nothing. I was enough.
Such simple words, yet so powerful. To be enough. Naked. With nothing.
There was a full-bodied letting go of all the beliefs, ideas, thoughts, and emotions that contaminated my being. Many weeds were pulled.
I was good enough. I am more than OK. I need do no-thing.
In 2018 when Syntropic World had arrived in just one hour as an idea, I was smart enough to capture the whole thing in a journal entry.
The first inspired action also arrived in one hit. To hold a live Masterclass — the very first — in March 2019. I had to wait with the Syntropic Source Idea, with infinite patience and love, for this next idea to seize me.
And we continue move, step by step, idea by idea, from there.
At this same time, Tony became a part of my life. This past week we bought a house. My first ever. Our first home owned together. I feel like a twenty-something-year-old with all the ‘grown-up’ things happening. Yet I am so grateful for not being a twenty-something-year-old.
Cheers to being a late bloomer. In every way.
Syntropic World teaches all the elements that I know gave me access to everything happening now in my life. It is the wisdom of many gathered over a lifetime, synthesised through my application and after being thoroughly reduced to zero.
- Kairos time — the clock of the heavens. Nature has her own gestation, and we who believe we can force timing and birth are fools. I had to give up that impulse to impose my timeline on anything. Instead, cultivate my own soil garden.
- Steward leadership — how to hold space and shape for what is being born. And do so with an exquisite light touch, able to be bossy-bossy if needed, but knowing bossy-bossy should be rare in a well-designed enterprise architecture. If the gardener has taken the time to get the soil ecology right, they only need to intervene less when the seeds are planted.
- Communion with the idea you have been gifted to steward. Genuine listening, inquiring and attending to what the beloved idea needs us to do for it to become form.
- We were honouring value in multiple domains, where the domain of our society’s monoculture, money, becomes only one-sixth of how we measure and consider value.
- Synergy — the greatest exponential technology available to humanity — the human mind and heart working together synergistically. How do we create ecologies where synergy happens all the time?
I feel incredibly privileged to be where I am today. Lucky, lucky, lucky. Often speechless. I work daily to stay connected with the awe Tony and I experienced in the early days of our relationship; the astonishment that such a profound connection was possible. I intend to love every moment. It requires attention. Even the ones that are bumpy. Tony and I have created pathways back to our partnering centre if we get lost from each other.
This past week we shared our spoken wills. Trust is our ground.
I reflect on all of these things as I hold the light of Dorothy in my heart.
Precious is life. How easy is it to discount it? Yet the moment we do, we discount and dishonour ourselves. And that is a shit thing to do. We are asking the world to stop doing that. Stop discounting, debasing and exploiting life. Let us set the example by not doing it to ourselves and not being in a rush to get somewhere. Not reducing those in our way to numbers, profit, or an expense on a spreadsheet.
In the crucible of this week in my life as we navigated the crocodile-infested waters of real estate, the owner of the house I currently rent, a place I have called home for ten years and cared for as my own, decided that I was to be reduced to a number on her spreadsheet. In one fell swoop, she dismissed any investment of mine to her ‘asset’. Show me the moneysaid her actions. I care naught about you or that you have been an exemplar of a tenant saving me time, money and energy.
This is the world of business we have celebrated, removing humanity from the relationship and debasing it into arms-length transactions of winners and losers.
It might look like I am the loser now. Yet I know I am the winner by using the Syntropic Principles in this situation and reflecting even as I write this that I intended to create a win-win for her. Perhaps even in the arc of time she, too, will be a winner. Most of us have to learn, through our own arsehole type behaviour, that being an arsehole has a price.
A Syntropic World, where we use a tool such as the Synergistic Audit, would have our balance sheet speak to all investments, not just money. Care, love, support, consideration and thoughtfulness are included, and money no longer has dominion over the value of everything.
Dorothy gave her soaring spirit to the Syntropic Community and the many other circles of her life with such grace. She will be remembered and honoured for the purity of her giving in all of the 12 Degrees of Freedom that are the foundation of Synergistic Accounting.
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Syntropic World is a global education and community of practice applying the organising principles of nature to enterprise design and human coordination. Creating ecologies of trust, ensuring integrity in everything, enabling collective sense making, and organising around a central purpose — how to create a world that works for 100% of humanity without ecological offence or the disadvantage of anyone.
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