After receiving many innovative proposals, Invoking The Pause is pleased to announce its 2012 Grant Partners. We look forward to a fertile relationship and abundant harvest with the following Partners:

We take great pleasure in sharing the stories of our Grant Partners (GPs) and their projects in the Invoking The Pause (ITP) blog posts. What is most rewarding is to hear back that these stories have an impact on you. Libby Modern of the Super Power Magic Motion Machine (SPMM) shared that she found inspiration (and maybe a bit of comfort) reading the recent blog posts about the CityLab7 pop-up mushroom project and its circuitous evolution.

In the past two months we’ve celebrated New Year’s Day (on the Gregorian calendar), Chinese New Year, Lunar New Year, and now at ITP, we’re commemorating our own new beginnings: our 2012 grant cycle.

The 2012 deadline arrived at midnight February 1st, and the results are an incredible range of grant proposals. Teams from as far as Thailand, and diverse as students, professors, artists, scientists, photographers, and journalists have submitted proposals for their creative collaborations on climate change.

“Where Stories Are Remembered”

Kewulay Kamara is a teacher and storyteller in the traditional vein of his native Sierra Leone. His wife Dionne, is a dancer and choreographer from Jamaica. Kewulay was a participant in the 2010 The Cathedral of St. John the Divine grant and attended the Invoking the Pause Convening.

Read Kewulay’s story in The New York Times

After completing the overhaul of the ITP Website and Blog platform this Spring and Summer, I found myself in need of my own “Pause.”

The seemingly endless cascade of technology details, project roadblocks and challenges left me feeling both depleted and overstimulated.

With the start-up phase of the new website completed, we gratefully reached a plateau in our vision. It was time again to let the ground of my being lie fallow. I needed to empty myself to make room for a new phase of life.

And so I traveled to a yoga retreat in Bali.

I took a “Technology Chastity Vow” to go off the grid, including my cell phone, internet and email. This enabled me to have the space to “Drop in, Drop Down, Drop Under, and Drop Through” to a new vision.

These are just some of the mental meanderings from my journey.

Turning to arcs, circles and spirals to find our way home

Nina Simons exemplifies Mahatma Gandhi’s guidance to “Be the change you want to see in the world.” She’s always felt called to transform culture, to make it more inclusive, tolerant and just. And now, decades after a life rich with experience, she is being the change she wants to see by modeling women’s leadership in the world.

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You, the grant partners, keep contributing to the ITP community and carry the dividends back to your own communities. These are just some of your inspiring tales.

by Maggie Kaplan

I would like to share a very personal commitment with you. I have been stepping into my “wise eldership” in the past few months, as I turned 60. I decided to create 60 adventures in this 60th year to celebrate this passage!

The Invoking the Pause Convening was one of the KEYSTONE adventures–as I step into my own “Maggieness” and the woman I want to be in the world. One might expect that this would be a relatively simple task, but opening myself up to expansion at this time in my life has its own set of challenges.

by Maggie Kaplan

In our time together over three days of the 2010 Grant Partner Convening, we sought to invoke a communal pause in a few different formats.  We celebrated together.

We listened to and learned from each other. We reflected.

We were generative AND playful. We focused on cultivating many facets of our Return on Relationships.

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