Title: Master Muse, SynergistiCollaborator

Gender: Female

Age: 45

Sun Sign: Pisces

Chinese Sign: Wood Dragon

Location: Austin, TX

My Websites:

Lively ‘Hoods
http://www.livelyhoods.com

My blog:
Darling Pet Monkey
http://www.darlingpetmonkey.com/

La Luz del Alma Spiritual Science School
 http://www.luzdelalma.com

Nondenominational Weddings by Maggie Duval http://www.nondenominationalweddings.com

Maggiedot.com ~ Creative Internet for Creative People
http://www.maggiedot.com

I am a wizard of connection. I weave the web of connection even as the web is woven in me. I have been gifted with an innate ability to discern seemingly unrelated connections. I can perceive that which does not yet exist and cocreate from essence to form.

My favorite word is “transmute” and I use it often. As long as I can remember, my heroes were alchemists. As a child my inner vision continually presented the image of the alchemical wizard (complete with spider dangling off the pointed hat), playing at transmuting lead to gold – but not in a lab, surrounded by dusty books, rather, out in the world.

I have a close personal relationship with the Magician of the Tarot. His wand of power grasped in his right hand reaches up to higher consciousness as his left points to the lower realms. He is a conduit of energies between macrocosm and microcosm. 

A discussion with my friend Antonio made me realize that I am a world bridger like him, only in a different way. An elder in Oaxacha told him that world bridgers stand astride many worlds, many realities, many points of view. Relating and connecting to all, belonging to none. A liaison.

Liaison. That was a corporate title in one of my past lives, when I was the Pacific Rim liaison for a chip design software company in Berkeley, California. I couldn’t speak Japanese or Korean, Vietnamese or Chinese, but somehow I could understand nuance and body language and “interpret” back and forth between our American executives and engineers and theirs.

I am also an ebullient wizard of catalysis. I possess so much energy that sometimes I feel as if I will explode. Rather than do that and make a big mess, this energy that feeds me also translates into catalysis of others and their ideas and visions. I spark people.

I can’t say then that I want to do one thing in particular, for that is too limiting. However, if I were to pinpoint one thing, it would be to be a laser-focused connector and catalyst in order to hasten the emergence of the new world, or The Great Turning, as author David Korten phrases it. 

I seek to enhance and empower these natural abilities I already possess. I am working to “polish the lens” in order to sharpen and focus my energy and vision so that I can be of greater service to the planet.

The thought has stayed with me for several years after reading Paul Ray and Sherry Anderson’s The Cultural Creatives: How 50 Million People are Changing the World that, “[Cultural Creatives] have little notion that there are 50 million of them. They do not know that they have the potential to shape the life of twenty-first-century America… They have not yet formed a sense of “us” as a collective identity; nor do they have a collective image of themselves. It is as if they have had no mirror large and true enough to show them their own face.” 

My first thought after reading the book was the same as many others, “My God! That’s me! I have found my people!” The second was, “I need to discover new ways to help us find each other and connect – to create that large and true mirror. This is happening all around us in infinite ways - witness Zaadz…

Every since childhood I’ve felt a distinct yearning for connection, but a connection much deeper and broader than simply making friends, getting to know my neighbors, or finding a soul mate. It’s been a drive, a passion and an obsession that has led me on a very interesting life journey full of amazing synchronicities and miraculous meetings.

I possess a long-held fascination for spiders and their awesome power of web weaving (I rescue spiders to the horror of most around me) which led me not to arachnology, but Web design. I was in the right place at the right time to become a Web designer and early exposure to the Internet left me in ecstasy at the thought of connecting with others of like mind in far-flung places.

I know that vibrant, creative, supportive community can exist: I lived it when I resided for many years in the San Francisco Bay Area. II feel it now in Austin. And I feel it as I connect to the world. I felt and still feel a part of some emergent, connective something….

In the early ‘90s I was lucky enough to have access to the Internet – the pre-WWW days - because I worked in sales, marketing and operations for the aforementioned electronic engineering firm whose principals included “brainiacs” from all over the world, and from MIT, Berkeley, Stanford and CIT.

Because it was a Berkeley start-up, we’d sometimes just shut down the office and head out to Stinson Beach or a friendly pub where we shared many a time enthusiastically examining emergent technologies, cutting-edge science, philosophy and spirituality. This dialogue was understood as an excellent method of sparking creativity in engineering and business.

I would come away from these meetings with new ways of thinking, new possibilities, new reality constructs to ponder and move out into my social base. I would enthuse on and on to them about the world-shifting possibilities of the Internet (working at a chip design software company gives one a heads up about what is coming down the pipeline) – and the heretofore unrealized reality of people halfway across the world with similar interests linking up. What a rush.

Then one evening in early ‘94, a friend gathered us around his computer to show us something utterly mind-blowing that I’d heard had been brewing at NCSA. We gathered around his laptop, our faces bathed in an eerie bluish glow, like gathering around a campfire to witness a shaman’s magic. What we were witnessing was the first browser to display inline graphics as well as hypertext – the fledgling user-friendly portal to the World Wide Web. I immediately knew this was the beginning of something huge. I had to be a part of it.

In the midst of this foment that led me to connect to the group that conceived and developed Burning Man. This experiment in community, art and a gift economy also blew my reality wide open. I ended up co-managing media relations for the event in 1996 before heading off to New Mexico to process all this new information and figure out how to bring forth something more tangible than just words using my particular talents and skills.

I retreated from the action for about 8 years taking time to process all the input from my time in Berkeley as well as grow my small Web design “boutique,” get married and have a child. During this period I spent four years of intense study of the Ageless Wisdom and was ordained a minister in 2003. I took some time to follow my interests and let things percolate to the surface.

In 2001, the world turned upside down, not only because of September 11th, but I also lost several loved ones (including my mother) and my marriage fell apart. I took a long hard look at my daughter and the state of the world and figured it was time to get cracking.

With all my senses I experienced a feeling of something amazing trying to emerge from the heaviness. This “something” was asking me to see with new eyes; to put together seemingly unrelated ideas and groups of people into a wholly new vision. So that’s what I did and do. 

I midwife connection daily, whether it’s in weaving websites, joining couples together in marriage, or linking together far-flung contacts in order to maximize their collective potential.

And it comes through spearheading the newly formed Lively ‘Hoods, which envisions beautiful, sustainable, affordable, mixed-use, mixed-income communities in which everyone is engaged in meaningful work and play, created around right livelihood. to further that vision, Lively 'Hoods is committed to presenting and promoting innovative approaches, perspectives and practical tools to help you cocreate your own unique vision of sustainable community from the inside out.

Working in collaborative, synergistic partnership with visionary teachers, healers, artists, creatives and thinkers we offer leading edge, unconventional, transformational and transformative personal mastery workshops, retreats, art happenings, gatherings, conversations, lectures and more with a focus on offering practical tools for achieving inner sustainability and right livelihood.

These links in the web are anchored around ecological, spiritual, and personal growth coursework and mentorship – this to lessen our isolation, pool resources, spring board member vision and realize the dream of creating the “large and true mirror” for us all.

Member Since: Friday, June 30 2006

Last Visit: 437 days ago.

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