Feeling overwhelmed? Covid gotchu on the Struggle Bus? This Corona Spring continues to be an immense lesson of Mother Earth’s. She reminds us that it is not she who is dying, rather it is we, the most peculiar (in our potential and also blindness) of her children who are not only dying but killing ourselves!
The state of our human world is a reflection of exactly where we are within – confused about Who We Are, distracted. We’ve come to the place that we are, not for lack of practical, easy-to-implement solutions but because spiritually and therefore mentally and physically and therefore socially and politically – we are a mess.
[If these words bring discomfort, please know, for my part, I have no judgement; my pure intention is of compassion and love. In digging to the root of my own discomfort and need to judge, I discovered a deep mistrust of other humans. It is not an original, natural paradigm, rather a great misunderstanding that I’ve since given myself permission to let go of – I trust my brother and sister humans to take their own journey toward healing and Love, as I trust myself to take mine…it is a work in progress!]
We are helped along in this by our exceptional power of rationalization, a gift which was never intended to guide us, rather to support us; as imbalanced individuals we sure can overcomplicate things to the point of paralysis.
This overwhelm cannot be ‘overcome’, rather relaxed into with awareness and healing time – we are what we eat, we are what we buy, we are what we do. We become how we think, we exist as we believe.
He who fights too long against dragons becomes a dragon himself; and if thou gaze too long into the abyss, the abyss will gaze into thee.
Nietzsche
The implications of this are simple because in each of these things We Have the Control [firstly to stop fighting/conquering/’overcoming’ in general, rather relaxing into and healing]…
Undoing the corruption which has infected our democracy, taking power from the Corporations driving ‘the 9 to 5’, ‘data bundles’, ‘cool’, ‘30-year mortgages’, ‘ownership rights’ and ‘costs’ of water, food, shelter, health, ‘retirement’, ‘tax monies’ which ‘fund’ ‘the dark web’ and ‘gun production’, etc. etc. is merely to choose differently.
These are systems, merely systems we created to serve us and which no longer do in many ways, for many people….[and it is critical to distinguish that it is the systems we participate in and perpetuate (right down to something as ubiquitous as a smart phone which carries within precious metals fought and died over as savagely and systemically as blood diamonds) that no longer serve – that is our way forward, rather than fighting (i.e. struggling) some self-sabotaging, endless maze identifying and targeting some ‘inherent evil’ which is rooting, lurking and presenting within some ‘inherently evil human’. It turns out, what I do for/to me is that which I am doing for/to you and …
The way you see people [you] is the way you treat them [you], and the way you treat them [you] is the way they [you] become.
Goethe
So here we are, full circle… I am what I put into my body, I am what I put into my mind and my spirit, I become as I do with my body, mind and spirit. May it be Truth and Beauty then. Love. Thank you Creator for my healing – that I may Love and be Loved!
Of course, doing the work to get to the root of Why we choose to eat poisonous food that is fast and made by Corporations, why we choose to commit entire lifetimes to careers for retirements into death, why we choose to become indebted to a single, built structure of one place at the sacrifice of an entire world of communities which welcome contributing, open-hearted guests, why we choose struggle … is a good bit of hard work. Hard not complicated though, and actually, we quite love and thrive on purpose-driven (…that Truth and Beauty and Love stuff) days of good, hard work!
Divesting then is quite straightforward. Simply divest from the things that no longer serve you, things that no longer bring you joy because they literally harm you or they literally come at the expense of another living being. When it comes down to it, no matter which of the many brilliant lenses you see with: your life is still just made up of many simple choices that You have the say in!
Power to you – in creating the more beautiful world our Hearts Know is possible! (Indeed, yes! It was a choice to use the Vimeo version of this video rather than the YouTube version.)
Resources
The book The More Beautiful World Our Hearts Know Is Possible, by Charles Eisenstein
- Charles on the Coronavirus…The Coronation of this time!
Divesting stuff
- Unbelievably fun ways to divest
- A good written Divesting ‘101’ article
- A short sweet divesting video and list of corps (choosing profit over people/planet) to divest from
‘Divestment’ as an activism strategy has gained strength in recent years particularly to affront the fossil fuel industry (system!), though also the larger toxic aspects of the industrial revolution (system!); however, you remember the good old stories of ‘bus boycotts’ affronting racism (system!), the Underground Railroad affronting slavery (system!), and further back than that, the ‘Boston tea boycotts’ affronting imperialism (system!), similar in another part of the world to Ghandi’s spinning wheel and food fasting for independence from British goods, affronting that same imperialism; all the way back to indigenous warriors affronted with mortality, the strategy of selfish, savage colonization (system!)…
Alas, this has all been a work in progress for many lifetimes now!
Getting to the Roots
Each of these artificial and arbitrary systems required us to change Who We Are to fit into them… we had to learn to choose struggle (“discipline”, “sacrifice”) as the “selfless” path, the “righteous” path, the “practical” path, the “respectable” and “honorable” path, in order to spend entire days/lifetimes running the systems of the industrial revolution – otherwise facing (self)judgements made to be negative, wrong, “evil” such as “lazy”, “selfish”, “savage”, “Godless”, “eccentric”, “crazy”, “idealistic”, “feminine”, “emotional”; similarly, we had to learn mistrust to learn judgement to learn inequality to justify the superiority, ownership, conquering which enabled the systems of racism, slavery, imperialism and colonization.
We are Not evil. Rather, with that precious, unique gift of rationality (that great existential, bitter/sweet, double-edged sword of our human experience) as our (mis)guide we taught ourselves to serve systems.
Going forward, we may give ourselves permission to let go, to pause and get to the root of anything ‘demanding’ our energy and which feels like ‘struggle’, to be aware and scrutinizing, i.e. guided first by spirit (feeling) and then supported by our gift of rationalization: of the things which may be systemic, no longer natural but contrived, and which feel different than love, beauty, courage, compassion, wisdom… Truth and Beauty!