"It is not an easy thing to embrace ugliness with the sole motive of hope that in some unknown way a transformation into beauty might occur thereby. But the myth of kissed frogs turning into princes remains." M. Scott Peck, M.D.
Ugliness abounds. There is no paucity of opportunity to embrace it. It dominates our news, nationally and internationally. It presents itself on a personal level in families, in work environments, in casual encounters throughout the day. Ugliness abounds. Or to use its true name - evil abounds.
Embrace it? Ugliness invokes such a current of strong emotions that it puts us in a flight or fight mode. Embrace it? It is counter- intuitive. How exactly does one embrace it? Isn't this "turn-the-other-cheek" stuff usually reserved for the saints? So how are we mere mortals to embrace it when our stomachs churn and we recoil from the perceived danger either to our physical being or most certainly to our sense of self? And just what is the benefit of all of this embracing anyways?
Dante wrote in the "Inferno," "The darkest places in hell are reserved for those who maintain their neutrality in times of moral crisis." So with that as the backdrop, perhaps we need to examine more closely this embracing of evil. Peck in his book, "People of the Lie," outlines human evil as the willful pursuit of one's own personal agenda regardless of the cost to others and even to oneself in the face of knowing that it is wrong to continue to do so. That is a powerful force to try to get one's arms around and hug. How exactly is that done? With an equally strong determination and will to stand in the face of it, look it straight in its beady eyes of horror and intend not to be moved or beguiled by it into retaliation. No small feat.
And just what outcome can be hoped for of mustering such fortitude and courage? Peck, in his book, quotes an old priest, "There are dozens of ways to deal with evil and several ways to conquer it. All of them are facets of the truth that the only ultimate way to conquer evil is to let it be smothered within a willing, living human being. When it is absorbed there....it loses its power and goes no further."
Okay so let's get this straight, we are not to retaliate with like when we are attacked, we are also to embrace the attack and allow this attack to be dissolved in our willing heart. Ouch. Isn't there an easier way of allowing peace and good will towards men to reign? Like what about the other people, can't they just get over their bad selves and leave the rest of us alone? The sad truth is that they are probably saying the same of us. Someone has to purpose to end the cycle of back and forth, parry and thrust.
In the end, each opportunity where we choose to embrace ugliness and not attack affords us another chance to get over our self-constructed sense of self. It frees us from the tyranny of having to protect this false self. There is no denying that it is very difficult to stand in the face of false accusations and absorb them but with each baby step that we make in that direction, we permit another piece of our false perceptual self to shatter. What we are really doing is freeing ourselves. So dearly do we cling to our self-definitions that it takes something of great magnitude and pain to wake us up so that just maybe we might be able to entertain new thoughts and awareness. Leonard Cohen sings "there is a crack in everything. That's how the light gets in." We only crack under tremendous pain and pressure. So instead of putting our energy into defending ourselves or retaliating, we really need to put it into standing still and letting go. Sounds insane, doesn't it? And yet, it is the only way for us to be restored to our true sanity.
Peck concludes his book reflecting on the "mysterious alchemy whereby the victim becomes the victor."
I do not know how this occurs. But I know that
it does. I know that good people can deliberately
allow themselves to be pierced by the evil of others
- to be broken - to even be killed in some sense and
yet still survive and not succumb. Whenever this
happens there is a slight shift in the balance of the
power in the world.
The gift of standing and letting go in the face of evil is freedom from fear. So that the next time and the time after that and after that and after that...it becomes a little easier and the fear a little less heart-throbbing and a little less of a limiting presence in our lives. And with that release comes the ability to truly embrace the heart-breaking beauty of life. Kissing frogs really does free our inner princes and princesses. We truly are royalty. No myth about it.
"People of the Lie," M. Scott Peck, M. D.
"Divine Comedy," Dante Alighieri
"Anthem," Leonard Cohen
Thursday, September 25, 2014
Tuesday, March 25, 2014
A Waffling We Shall Go
"When we are no longer able to change a situation, we are challenged to change ourselves." ~Victor Frankl
Today, March 25, 2014, for whatever reason is Waffle Day. While the word waffle conjures a delightful treat topped with a variety of sweet temptations, it has also come to a have a somewhat derogatory bent in reference to changing one's mind on a situation. I am not so sure that changing one's mind is such a sign of weakness. Perhaps, the change of mind is the result of finally paying attention to the bombardment of lemons and opening yourself to a new idea, a new opportunity, a new perspective or new information that sheds a different understanding on the situation. That takes strength.
While it is vital to have core values, there is also value in being open minded enough to understand that in today's complex world, it is impossible to know or understand all of the nuances of every situation. To me, wisdom stems from knowing what you stand for and being able to adapt that to fit the situation. To rigidly adhere to a position that is not defensible in light of changing information is sheer folly and doomed to total failure. Life hands us opportunities (lemons) to constantly move us beyond our understandings of yesterday. Each time we open ourselves to these new understandings and move beyond our entrenched positionalities, we refine even further our core values and define anew who we are.
Decisions and choices need to be made all the time. To be decisive is a hallmark of leadership. It is important to be able in the moment to synthesize all of the available information and to act using one's best judgement in that moment. It is also important not to become so attached and defensive about that decision if time shows it to not be optimal. Life is a dance. Dance needs flow and movement - freedom. What worked in yesterday's choreography may not be what today's needs. Don't take yourself so seriously that you are unable to adapt and flow with what today's tune is.
There is a difference between being wishy-washy and flexible. Wishy-washy stands for nothing. It comes from fear and avoidance of making a decision because you are afraid you might be wrong. So what? If you have acted from your best intention and find out it is a misstep, shrug it off, chalk it up to learning and get back out on the dance floor. That takes confidence and that is where flexible comes from, knowing what you stand for and being willing to stick your neck out for it. If you are proven wrong, you have enough confidence to have the grace to admit it and step right back into the flow and dance on.
So today, of all days, allow yourself the freedom to waffle. Go have fun and quit taking yourself and the world so seriously. Give us all a break and enjoy some of these scrumptious waffles in the process.
waffle recipes
Check out what research on the ability to change your mind has to say.
changing one's mind
Thursday, September 26, 2013
Mama says NO!
What part of no do you not understand??
The usual format is to begin each blog with a quote. In fishing around for one, I could not come up with any better than the standard one exasperated mothers ask their children, especially teenagers, on a regular basis. No, only two little letters, packs a wallop. Used negatively, it can and does curtail dreams and growth. Unfortunately, that is what is most associated with this word - the thwarting of a desire. It is something that we chafe against. Yet it is a very powerful word. Young children learn it early and use it to assert their independence, separateness from others. No, mine, me all define the self. Here I am. No.
No is empowering when used to set our boundaries. A study out of the Mayo Clinic+ says that no can be a great stress buster. Not only is it not selfish but actually healthy for you to say no to requests that do not serve your best interests. It is not fair to others to always say yes when you are not really committed to what you have just agreed to. It also prevents the best person for the job from stepping into the gap that you are halfheartedly filling. Before saying yes, reflect on what your priorities are, how much effort is this going to require from you or how much you are being motivated by guilt. And then when you mean no, just say it - no thanks - briefly, unapologetically, respectfully, honestly, assertively leaving no doubt in either your mind or the other person's and then move on and be ready to stand on your no. What part of no, do you not understand?
Some nos are just that, a simple no. Some nos are NOS and demand unwavering action. Such is the case with what is happening with the Shuar people in the Morona-Santiago province of Ecuador as they prepare to wage a battle to the death for their ancestral homeland. That is a formidable no. In case, you do not recognize the name Shuar, they are the "head shrinking" Amazon tribe. In addition to their storied reputation, they are the only unconquered tribe in the Americas, never having surrendered or signed a peace treaty. Not that they haven't had the opportunity. The list of would be conquerors includes the Incas, Spaniards as well as the governments of Peru, Ecuador and the United States. With their tradition of severing the heads of their slain opponents, removing the skull and shrinking the head by boiling it to create what they call Tzantza, they are fierce warriors, something on which they pride themselves.
Interestingly, they fight to protect peace. To them, war is necessary to ensure that the jungle is a peaceful place for all of it inhabitants - the plants, the animals, the rivers, even the insects. Peace that is not inclusive of all is not true peace. Their latest battle concerns the rich resources on their land to which Ecuador has sold the mining rights to foreign powers. The Shuar people have been on this land since before the time of Christ and see the protection of it as their sacred duty. They are very clear as to what their 'no' is about: the land was not the government's to sell, they will not give up their traditions to work in the mines, they will not let this land be polluted from the results of the mining. For any of this to happen is death anyway; not just for themselves, but for the land that they are charged with protecting as well. And so they will fight to the death to save this forest that has provided for them so well over the centuries using the ancient method of their ancestors - the spear. Not just the men but the women and the children will fight as well for their land and the right to live as they wish.
What is fascinating about this is not just the intensity of their no but how centered it is and how reflective of their culture. Gender roles are very strongly defined and are balanced between the men and the women. The men's role is to cut down trees for boats and houses, hunt animals and kill other men when necessary. Sons leave their homes of origin when they marry and go to the house of their father-in-law and come under his leadership. Women tend the gardens, prepare the food, raise the children. Daughters when they marry stay in their birth home with their families so that the work can be spread among many female hands. While this may sound traditional, here is the key: women have the authority to tell the men to stop - enough trees have been cut, enough animals have been hunted, enough people have been killed - to prevent them from destroying nature. And so these "savages" live in harmony with their land in a sustainable manner, taking only what they need and defending it with warfare only to preserve that harmony.
I pause to let that sink in - the fierceness of their nature to defend and destroy is balanced by the word no that is respected and listened to. Obviously, they do understand all parts of no. How different would the "civilized" world be if we listened to a well reasoned no, enough, stop. I have often wondered how much is enough - is your first billion enough? How about your second? Has enough concrete been laid down for subdivisions? Isn't unregulated growth cancer? What is our definite no, enough is enough? We are unsustainable, out of control and yet we are hell bent on more.
It is time for the older women to step forward and say very firmly - NO! STOP! ENOUGH! - to take a page out of Code Pink co-founder, Medea Benjamin's book. This anti-war group has taken to crashing Congressional hearings to gain attention for their causes. As Benjamin quips, "You can get away with a lot as an older woman."*
And so as someone who has already committed the unpardonable sin of getting older, who lacks the good sense to color my gray hair and to have work done to fix this atrocity, I say NO, ENOUGH to the following:
NO MORE! ENOUGH! CEASE AND DESIST!
*Time Magazine, September 13, 2013, Photo-Bombing for Peace, Alex Altman
+ Mayo Clinic http://www.mayoclinic.com/health/stress-relief/SR00039
** http://worldnews.nbcnews.com/_news/2013/09/22/20638292-pope-attacks-global-economy-for-worshipping-god-of-money?lite
And just for fun to show that we older women still have it, here are some gray hairs that have no intention of going gently into that dark night of old-age fashion: https://www.upworthy.com/what-happens-when-an-old-woman-says-no-to-how-fashion-orders-her-to-be?c=upw1
The usual format is to begin each blog with a quote. In fishing around for one, I could not come up with any better than the standard one exasperated mothers ask their children, especially teenagers, on a regular basis. No, only two little letters, packs a wallop. Used negatively, it can and does curtail dreams and growth. Unfortunately, that is what is most associated with this word - the thwarting of a desire. It is something that we chafe against. Yet it is a very powerful word. Young children learn it early and use it to assert their independence, separateness from others. No, mine, me all define the self. Here I am. No.
No is empowering when used to set our boundaries. A study out of the Mayo Clinic+ says that no can be a great stress buster. Not only is it not selfish but actually healthy for you to say no to requests that do not serve your best interests. It is not fair to others to always say yes when you are not really committed to what you have just agreed to. It also prevents the best person for the job from stepping into the gap that you are halfheartedly filling. Before saying yes, reflect on what your priorities are, how much effort is this going to require from you or how much you are being motivated by guilt. And then when you mean no, just say it - no thanks - briefly, unapologetically, respectfully, honestly, assertively leaving no doubt in either your mind or the other person's and then move on and be ready to stand on your no. What part of no, do you not understand?
Some nos are just that, a simple no. Some nos are NOS and demand unwavering action. Such is the case with what is happening with the Shuar people in the Morona-Santiago province of Ecuador as they prepare to wage a battle to the death for their ancestral homeland. That is a formidable no. In case, you do not recognize the name Shuar, they are the "head shrinking" Amazon tribe. In addition to their storied reputation, they are the only unconquered tribe in the Americas, never having surrendered or signed a peace treaty. Not that they haven't had the opportunity. The list of would be conquerors includes the Incas, Spaniards as well as the governments of Peru, Ecuador and the United States. With their tradition of severing the heads of their slain opponents, removing the skull and shrinking the head by boiling it to create what they call Tzantza, they are fierce warriors, something on which they pride themselves.
Interestingly, they fight to protect peace. To them, war is necessary to ensure that the jungle is a peaceful place for all of it inhabitants - the plants, the animals, the rivers, even the insects. Peace that is not inclusive of all is not true peace. Their latest battle concerns the rich resources on their land to which Ecuador has sold the mining rights to foreign powers. The Shuar people have been on this land since before the time of Christ and see the protection of it as their sacred duty. They are very clear as to what their 'no' is about: the land was not the government's to sell, they will not give up their traditions to work in the mines, they will not let this land be polluted from the results of the mining. For any of this to happen is death anyway; not just for themselves, but for the land that they are charged with protecting as well. And so they will fight to the death to save this forest that has provided for them so well over the centuries using the ancient method of their ancestors - the spear. Not just the men but the women and the children will fight as well for their land and the right to live as they wish.
What is fascinating about this is not just the intensity of their no but how centered it is and how reflective of their culture. Gender roles are very strongly defined and are balanced between the men and the women. The men's role is to cut down trees for boats and houses, hunt animals and kill other men when necessary. Sons leave their homes of origin when they marry and go to the house of their father-in-law and come under his leadership. Women tend the gardens, prepare the food, raise the children. Daughters when they marry stay in their birth home with their families so that the work can be spread among many female hands. While this may sound traditional, here is the key: women have the authority to tell the men to stop - enough trees have been cut, enough animals have been hunted, enough people have been killed - to prevent them from destroying nature. And so these "savages" live in harmony with their land in a sustainable manner, taking only what they need and defending it with warfare only to preserve that harmony.
I pause to let that sink in - the fierceness of their nature to defend and destroy is balanced by the word no that is respected and listened to. Obviously, they do understand all parts of no. How different would the "civilized" world be if we listened to a well reasoned no, enough, stop. I have often wondered how much is enough - is your first billion enough? How about your second? Has enough concrete been laid down for subdivisions? Isn't unregulated growth cancer? What is our definite no, enough is enough? We are unsustainable, out of control and yet we are hell bent on more.
It is time for the older women to step forward and say very firmly - NO! STOP! ENOUGH! - to take a page out of Code Pink co-founder, Medea Benjamin's book. This anti-war group has taken to crashing Congressional hearings to gain attention for their causes. As Benjamin quips, "You can get away with a lot as an older woman."*
And so as someone who has already committed the unpardonable sin of getting older, who lacks the good sense to color my gray hair and to have work done to fix this atrocity, I say NO, ENOUGH to the following:
- War and more dead people and devastated lands. No mother should have to endure what Cindy Sheehan has in believing that her son who was killed in the Iraqi war died for nothing. Her politics aside, what horrified me most about Sarah Palin was her glib off hand remark at the Republican convention where she handed over her bright new penny of son to the horrors of war. If the restraining hands of mothers who have borne the children and nurtured them no longer holds then we are all lost.
- Fracking, the horrible rape and pillaging of our lands and waterways for the hopes of a false economic boom when more sustainable, less damaging to the environment alternative forms of energy are available.
- What Economist John Perkins calls "predatory capitalism" as espoused by Milton Friedman in the notion that the only responsibility of business is to maximize profits without regard for the consequences to either human life or the environment.
- Sexual abuse and the marginalization of any person due to race, gender or creed.
NO MORE! ENOUGH! CEASE AND DESIST!
*Time Magazine, September 13, 2013, Photo-Bombing for Peace, Alex Altman
+ Mayo Clinic http://www.mayoclinic.com/health/stress-relief/SR00039
** http://worldnews.nbcnews.com/_news/2013/09/22/20638292-pope-attacks-global-economy-for-worshipping-god-of-money?lite
And just for fun to show that we older women still have it, here are some gray hairs that have no intention of going gently into that dark night of old-age fashion: https://www.upworthy.com/what-happens-when-an-old-woman-says-no-to-how-fashion-orders-her-to-be?c=upw1
Thursday, September 19, 2013
Suffering Solution: Surrender, Serve, Share
"The greatness of a man's power is the measure of his surrender."
William Booth
To open his novel, A Tale of Two Cities, Charles Dickens in the mid 1800 penned the words:
The recession has hit us hard particularly the middle class. The average American household has recovered only 45% of the wealth that was eroded with the recession.* While the middle class struggles, the elites have gained ground setting the stage for Spengler's prophesy to come true. Many feel that there is no real hope for the middle class especially following the dim statistics coming out of the U. S. Census Bureau: the nation's real median household income was unchanged in 2012 at $51,017 compared to $51,100 in 2011, adjusting for inflation. All indications show that Americans at the income midpoint are not doing as well as they were in 2007 before the decline.
Mirroring these dismal statistics is the increasing number of working mothers who are burning out according to Katrina Alcorn's book, Maxed Out: American Moms on the Brink. So if dual incomes are not a viable answer to this dilemma of vanishing wealth, then how do we regain a more equitable footing for all? I think the optimal word in that last sentence is the word "wealth." I purposefully selected that word instead of money or income because wealth encompasses so much more than just our finances. Wealth of life is something that is available to all of us and a gift that we allow ourselves regardless of where our finances happen to be at any given moment. The abundance and joy of life lies within each of us. By getting over our "woe is me" and our entitlement expectations that cause us to look outside ourselves for the answer, then we can begin to empower ourselves. I believe that is the reason for all the lemons that are cropping up. It is a huge collective wake-up call to quit our whining and to take a serious look at where we are and how we got here.
The path that we were on was totally unsustainable. The system is broken and only we can fix it, one person at a time. So let the elites and the government stagnate in their muddling around at "fixing" the economy, which in reality results in the haves getting more at the expense of the majority. Because let's face it, in today's world big business and government are one and the same, just look at the revolving door between Washington and corporate offices. In fact D.C. tops Silicon Valley with the highest per capita income. Lobbying is a major industry in and of itself with twice the amount of money involved than 15 years ago. So you are dreaming if you think any kind of real fix is coming from that arena. As long as we sit helplessly on the sidelines, then the inevitable is that we will have more of the same where money does buy our government and laws. Goodbye, democracy and hello plutocracy.
By doing something radical like finding one aspect of our lives everyday that we can truly be grateful for, then we begin to break the downward shrinking cycle of less and less for ourselves. In practicing gratitude, ( Blog posted 1/24/13, Gratitude - the Sweetener of Life) we open ourselves up to expansion of abundance because we change our focus from I need to we have. The Course in Miracles states, "Lack implies that you would be better off in a state somehow different from the one you are in." By choosing gratitude, we break our "poor me - if only" thinking.
I am willing to bet that as each of us starts the practice of gratitude that the things in our lives that we select to be most grateful for are not going to be monetary in value - health, family, friends, pets, sunshine.... Make your own list. Regardless of where you find yourself at this moment in life, there is one thing, no matter how small or insignificant, that you can be thankful for. Start there and make the conscious decision to practice gratitude. Note how that makes you feel as opposed to sitting around moping and whining and suffering about all the things that you don't have or think that you need. And all the ways that the system, your job or lack thereof, your boss, or your whatever is failing you.
I will tell you a secret, life gives you what you need, not what you want. So if there are lots of lemons at this moment, then you need the bitterness of those experiences to cleanse your perspective so that you can see all of what you already have and are not appreciating. These difficulties have arisen because it is time for you to dig deep and empower yourself. You are so much more powerful and creative then you have ever given yourself credit for. Time to awaken to that fact.
Gratitude will make you smile. It will put a spring in your step and cause you to hold your head a little higher when you walk. It will open your eyes to opportunities that are all around you. It will change your focus and your life. In the process, you will begin to surrender your constant emphasis on not enough to one of realizing that in this moment, I have everything that I need to move forward. In surrendering your need to whine and complain and blame others for making you a victim, you will find a new sense of self-respect and resilience. You will begin to define for yourself your real needs and desires and in that process find your own solutions. You will begin to say YES to life. In fact if you just can't be grateful, then at least say yes, yes, yes as many times a day as you want. You will begin to feel lighter, guaranteed. You may even begin to feel a strange tingling of happiness. Practice gratitude long enough and you will begin to notice that you can reach out to others and give them a boost. You are becoming a player in the game of life and having a stake in working towards a more sustainable future for all. From giving to others, you will begin to notice that instead of just a tingle of happiness that you have a whole flood going. Out of this abundance, sharing will flow and in the process create more and more, not just for yourself but for those around you as well. The internet is already creating new communities of people who share resources. For example just the peer-to-peer rental market is worth $26 billion a year. No big companies involved, just people sharing with each other goods and services instead of everyone having to have their own. It's called collaborative consumption. Already this new model is making regulators and companies nervous. Truly the time is ripe for sharing and caring. It is powerful. Focus on abundance and it flows; focus on scarcity and it prevails. Your choice.
I have no clue how this works; I just know that it does. I think it has to do with grace. (Blog posted 2/5/13, Secret Agent Grace) When we make the conscious choice to get over our self inflicted victimhood, then we allow in the flow of grace. The key to opening that door is gratitude. I urge each of us to take the 30 day gratitude challenge - each day for 30 days find one thing that you can be grateful for regardless of how small and say out loud, I am grateful for _______, thank you. Even if you are skeptical at first, just do it. And then for that day, every time, you find yourself beginning to feel sorry for yourself because of whatever or you begin to whine, stop yourself and practice your gratitude instead. At the end of 30 days, take stock and see where you are. Just think if enough of us seriously do this for 30 days what we can collectively create - a true plutocracy, where we govern and live from the wealth of our hearts.
Tired of suffering? Give it up through the three Ss of surrender, serving and sharing. There is more than enough to go around. That is something for which to be truly grateful.
*"Economy" by Christopher Matthews, Time Magazine, June 17, 2013
http://usnews.nbcnews.com/_news/2013/06/16/18989165-when-hate-mongers-give-you-lemons-set-up-a-lemonade-stand?lite=
William Booth
To open his novel, A Tale of Two Cities, Charles Dickens in the mid 1800 penned the words:
It was the best of times, it was the
worst of times,it was the age of wisdom,
it was the age of foolishment, it was the
epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity,
it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope,
it was the winter of despair...
His novel concerned the French Revolution, which deposed the French monarchy leading to the establishment of a radical secular democratic republic. How appropriate those words are today as we witness the crumbling of another democratic republic. Whether we here in the United States are able to avert the decay and death of civilizations that underpin German historian Oswald Spengler's belief that democracies eventually morph into plutocracies depends upon how willing we are to get over our victimhood and our national pastime of suffering. Yes, we the people do have the power BUT only if we have the willpower to move beyond our love of suffering whether it be physical, mental or psychic. We find it so much easier to blame someone else or the government for our shortcomings and pain than to take the responsibility for ourselves and to get on with it. Yes, I hear you whining - how am I one small person suppose to change the government. It is not about changing anything other than yourself. While in the long run that will require harder work than changing the government, the ramifications are more far reaching and effective in establishing a sustainable status quo for all and in that process gaining happiness for you.The recession has hit us hard particularly the middle class. The average American household has recovered only 45% of the wealth that was eroded with the recession.* While the middle class struggles, the elites have gained ground setting the stage for Spengler's prophesy to come true. Many feel that there is no real hope for the middle class especially following the dim statistics coming out of the U. S. Census Bureau: the nation's real median household income was unchanged in 2012 at $51,017 compared to $51,100 in 2011, adjusting for inflation. All indications show that Americans at the income midpoint are not doing as well as they were in 2007 before the decline.
Mirroring these dismal statistics is the increasing number of working mothers who are burning out according to Katrina Alcorn's book, Maxed Out: American Moms on the Brink. So if dual incomes are not a viable answer to this dilemma of vanishing wealth, then how do we regain a more equitable footing for all? I think the optimal word in that last sentence is the word "wealth." I purposefully selected that word instead of money or income because wealth encompasses so much more than just our finances. Wealth of life is something that is available to all of us and a gift that we allow ourselves regardless of where our finances happen to be at any given moment. The abundance and joy of life lies within each of us. By getting over our "woe is me" and our entitlement expectations that cause us to look outside ourselves for the answer, then we can begin to empower ourselves. I believe that is the reason for all the lemons that are cropping up. It is a huge collective wake-up call to quit our whining and to take a serious look at where we are and how we got here.
The path that we were on was totally unsustainable. The system is broken and only we can fix it, one person at a time. So let the elites and the government stagnate in their muddling around at "fixing" the economy, which in reality results in the haves getting more at the expense of the majority. Because let's face it, in today's world big business and government are one and the same, just look at the revolving door between Washington and corporate offices. In fact D.C. tops Silicon Valley with the highest per capita income. Lobbying is a major industry in and of itself with twice the amount of money involved than 15 years ago. So you are dreaming if you think any kind of real fix is coming from that arena. As long as we sit helplessly on the sidelines, then the inevitable is that we will have more of the same where money does buy our government and laws. Goodbye, democracy and hello plutocracy.
By doing something radical like finding one aspect of our lives everyday that we can truly be grateful for, then we begin to break the downward shrinking cycle of less and less for ourselves. In practicing gratitude, ( Blog posted 1/24/13, Gratitude - the Sweetener of Life) we open ourselves up to expansion of abundance because we change our focus from I need to we have. The Course in Miracles states, "Lack implies that you would be better off in a state somehow different from the one you are in." By choosing gratitude, we break our "poor me - if only" thinking.
I am willing to bet that as each of us starts the practice of gratitude that the things in our lives that we select to be most grateful for are not going to be monetary in value - health, family, friends, pets, sunshine.... Make your own list. Regardless of where you find yourself at this moment in life, there is one thing, no matter how small or insignificant, that you can be thankful for. Start there and make the conscious decision to practice gratitude. Note how that makes you feel as opposed to sitting around moping and whining and suffering about all the things that you don't have or think that you need. And all the ways that the system, your job or lack thereof, your boss, or your whatever is failing you.
I will tell you a secret, life gives you what you need, not what you want. So if there are lots of lemons at this moment, then you need the bitterness of those experiences to cleanse your perspective so that you can see all of what you already have and are not appreciating. These difficulties have arisen because it is time for you to dig deep and empower yourself. You are so much more powerful and creative then you have ever given yourself credit for. Time to awaken to that fact.
Gratitude will make you smile. It will put a spring in your step and cause you to hold your head a little higher when you walk. It will open your eyes to opportunities that are all around you. It will change your focus and your life. In the process, you will begin to surrender your constant emphasis on not enough to one of realizing that in this moment, I have everything that I need to move forward. In surrendering your need to whine and complain and blame others for making you a victim, you will find a new sense of self-respect and resilience. You will begin to define for yourself your real needs and desires and in that process find your own solutions. You will begin to say YES to life. In fact if you just can't be grateful, then at least say yes, yes, yes as many times a day as you want. You will begin to feel lighter, guaranteed. You may even begin to feel a strange tingling of happiness. Practice gratitude long enough and you will begin to notice that you can reach out to others and give them a boost. You are becoming a player in the game of life and having a stake in working towards a more sustainable future for all. From giving to others, you will begin to notice that instead of just a tingle of happiness that you have a whole flood going. Out of this abundance, sharing will flow and in the process create more and more, not just for yourself but for those around you as well. The internet is already creating new communities of people who share resources. For example just the peer-to-peer rental market is worth $26 billion a year. No big companies involved, just people sharing with each other goods and services instead of everyone having to have their own. It's called collaborative consumption. Already this new model is making regulators and companies nervous. Truly the time is ripe for sharing and caring. It is powerful. Focus on abundance and it flows; focus on scarcity and it prevails. Your choice.
I have no clue how this works; I just know that it does. I think it has to do with grace. (Blog posted 2/5/13, Secret Agent Grace) When we make the conscious choice to get over our self inflicted victimhood, then we allow in the flow of grace. The key to opening that door is gratitude. I urge each of us to take the 30 day gratitude challenge - each day for 30 days find one thing that you can be grateful for regardless of how small and say out loud, I am grateful for _______, thank you. Even if you are skeptical at first, just do it. And then for that day, every time, you find yourself beginning to feel sorry for yourself because of whatever or you begin to whine, stop yourself and practice your gratitude instead. At the end of 30 days, take stock and see where you are. Just think if enough of us seriously do this for 30 days what we can collectively create - a true plutocracy, where we govern and live from the wealth of our hearts.
Tired of suffering? Give it up through the three Ss of surrender, serving and sharing. There is more than enough to go around. That is something for which to be truly grateful.
*"Economy" by Christopher Matthews, Time Magazine, June 17, 2013
http://usnews.nbcnews.com/_news/2013/06/16/18989165-when-hate-mongers-give-you-lemons-set-up-a-lemonade-stand?lite=
Sunday, July 14, 2013
Ding Dong! The King Is Dead!
"But we have to verify it legally to see...If "he" is morally, ethic'lly, spiritually, physically, positively, absolutely, undeniably and reliably dead." Wizard of Oz, Munchkins
(My apologies to lyricist, Harold Arlen, for altering the "she" to "he" but it is hard to improve on perfection when extrapolating the wicked witch's death in the Wizard of Oz and relating it to what is happening on today's world political, economic front.)
This song has been running in my head ever since the stalemate 2000 U.S. presidential election of Gore vs. Bush. That is a long time to have an "earworm" but it was apparent to me as I sat glued to the TV watching all the players act their parts that what was really at stake was not who was to preside over the United States for the next four years but whether or not the prevailing paradigm of the old white king was to survive. I watched the opening act of the staggering death scene as the old white courtiers, James Baker and Warren Christopher, presented the case for their respective candidate and realized that regardless of the issues, they both served the old white king model that the world has languished under for way too long. While the rhetoric varied, the power structure was the same - the ruling elites would continue to gain and the rest of us would continue to serve. This time however during the courtly proceedings, I noticed that the majesty of the court was tawdry and thread worn and we, the people, were weary of the same old, same old. The fact that this scene was being played out in the first presidential election of the new century made it all the more significant to me. A new day was dawning.
In the thirteen years since that election, I have seen only evidence that confirms my original assessment. After King George ruled for 8 years, an African American king ascended the throne. While still a male, the white part of the equation had finally shattered. One more fatal blow to the old king. Economic upheavals, wars and meltdowns have occurred as the king continues to stagger mortally wounded across the stage relying on old parlor tricks to keep us distracted as our country and the rest of the world falters under a system that no longer works. For it is not just the gender or ethnicity of the king that is in rigor mortis but the entire system that he presides over: a system that uses might as right; a system that exists to serve the elites at the expense of the rest of humanity; a system that exploits the environment for temporary financial gain; a system that promotes "phantom wealth - money disconnected from the production or possession of anything of real power" over "real wealth from real resources to meet real needs."* It is broken; it does not work; it is not sustainable. unstable economy
"Wake up - sleepy head, rub your eyes, get out of bed,"*** Munchkin land, the wicked king is dead! The illusion that has kept this system in play for so long has been exposed. Scarcity is not the problem; greed is. And our fear keeps us marching in place. Truly, there is enough to go around if we all decide to move beyond our fear, and decide to connect, cooperate, collaborate AND SHARE. "For what shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?"** So rejoice Munchkin land: "This is a day of independence for all the Munchkins and their descendants."***The wicked old king is dead and is soon to make an exit. And you thought as you watched the 4th of July fireworks that Independence Day had happened in 1776.
As with all deaths, there is messy scary stuff that lies ahead and needs to be cleaned up before we can move forward unencumbered by the old model. That brings up yet another "earworm" of mine. "If there is somethin' strange in your neighborhood, Who you gonna call (ghostbusters.) If it's something weird and it don't look good, Who you gonna call (ghostbusters)"**** (Love this connection - the movie, Ghostbusters was released in 1984 and George Orwell's book of the same name is one of the hottest reads around now that Edward Snowden has confirmed that Big Brother really does listen in.) So, who are we really gonna call to clean up this mess? Bill Murray, Dan Aykroyd and Harold Ramis in their hazmat suits with their flamethrowers to get rid of the ghosts that continue to haunt us? Or is it time that we don our own hazmat suits and dig deeply into our own psyches to rid ourselves of the ghosts of systems of thinking past and our ungrounded fear in the boogie man? By this time in reading these blogs, you know where to find your fears - they are where the lemons occur in your life.
The old king is mortally wounded like the Fisher King; he cannot and will not recover. To continue with the old system of "Empire" thinking (bigger is better, Wall Street generated pseudo wealth) rather than a sustainable Earth Community (smaller, localized Main Street real-wealth economy)* will not revive the king. He is dead. We need to evolve past that paradigm. It no longer works and to continue avoiding that fact will guarantee total collapse.
The future lies in such radical thinking as producing only environmentally friendly products and services that serve actual real needs instead of wasting our precious resources on artificially contrived wants. It is time to return to Adam Smith's vision "of local-market economies populated by small entrepreneurs, artisans, and family farmers with strong community roots, engaged in producing and exchanging goods and services to meet the needs of themselves and their neighbors."* Interestingly, the "father of modern economics" would not find pleasure in having his name attached to this modern form of capitalism. He was opposed to "corporate monopolies and those who use their wealth and power in ways that harm others."*
In 2004 as the old king lay mortally wounded, Mark Kurlansky's book, 1968: The Year That Rocked the World, was published. He provides detailed accounts of the various dissident movements around the world that happened that year from the Chicago riots at the Democratic National Convention to the Paris riots, the Tet Offensive, the Prague spring and the assassinations of Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King. In this global conflagration, the people of the world were fed up with the established order and disgusted with authoritarianism. They were tired of the old white king and in riots all over the globe were serving him notice. It was the year that the world sounded his death knell. Kurlansky writes, this was the year that Walter Cronkite, the white TV grandfather, came to understand that "television was playing an important part not only in reporting of events, but in the shaping of them. Increasingly, around the world, public demonstrations were being staged...for television." Danny Cohn-Bendit of France said of these times: "We met through television, seeing pictures of each other on television. We did not have a relationship with each other, but we had a relationship with what our imagination produced from seeing pictures of each other."
In the years that have followed since the beginning of the tolling of the bell, the world stage has hosted a parade of conservative leaders who have tried without success to take us back to the nostalgic world of pre-1968 revolutions, where "Leave it to Beaver" skipped to school knowing that Ward was industriously at work and June was at home in her pearls simonizing everything in sight. It has not worked, nor should it have. We cannot go back; we must go forward. What happened in 1968 as Kurlansky postulates is that a global village was born - one where everyone gets to be heard and seen. Television was the medium to birth it but not sustain it because of the nature of its transitory flickering images and its limited ability to truly connect people. As Cohn-Bendit said, "We did not have a relationship with each other." Today, the technology that brings the world to each of our doorsteps does connect us instantly. It is time to recapture the "sense of hope" that was Kurlansky's objective in writing of that pivotal year. He postulates that the idealism that marked 1968 lives on today: "all over the world people know that they are not powerless..."
The question for each of us is "Has the answer blown away in the wind?" or are we at a point of history where we are ready to take the responsibility for ourselves and move beyond the old paradigm of the court of power, elites and toadyism that has kept us enslaved for so long. For you see, we are our own jailers and the key that keeps us locked up is our fear.
To those who were born in the optimism of post WWII and who came of age during the turbulent 60s, I say put on your hazmat suits for we are the toxic waste generation. The task of cleaning up the spoils of the old court age falls to us. Why else would Mother Nature have made sure there was such a glut of us born during those years but to ensure that there would be enough of us left at this stage to move forward? We have the vision of where we have been, who we are at this point and where we need to go.
The answer, my friend has not blown away in the wind. Ironically, it was given to us at the end of that year of global unrest - the pictures of Earth from a lunar orbit that were taken in December 1968. Astronaut Michael Collins put them in perspective for us: "an Earth as it appears: blue and white, not capitalist or Communist; blue and white, not rich or poor; blue and white, not envious or envied."
As catchy as the two "earworms" of the "Wicked Witch is Dead" and the "Ghostbusters" theme are, it is time that we all implant a new "earworm" - support local/ Main Street, not Wall Street - in our brains. It may not be as sexy as the other two but it is essential if we are to survive. In the event, you think I exaggerate, do an Internet search for "devaluation of the dollar" and watch some of the YouTubes that come up. The party is over and as is the case with all good parties, it is now time to clean up.
Ding Dong! the King is Dead! That system is broken. Local Lives! Together, we can build strong inclusive communities for all.
In case you need an example of the old white king mentality(more for me and less for you):
http://money.msn.com/now/post--charles-koch-dollar34000-puts-you-in-the-top-1percent
*Agenda for a New Economy, From Phantom Wealth to Real Wealth, David C. Korten
**Mark 8:36 King James Bible
*** Wizard of Oz
**** Ghostbuster
(My apologies to lyricist, Harold Arlen, for altering the "she" to "he" but it is hard to improve on perfection when extrapolating the wicked witch's death in the Wizard of Oz and relating it to what is happening on today's world political, economic front.)
This song has been running in my head ever since the stalemate 2000 U.S. presidential election of Gore vs. Bush. That is a long time to have an "earworm" but it was apparent to me as I sat glued to the TV watching all the players act their parts that what was really at stake was not who was to preside over the United States for the next four years but whether or not the prevailing paradigm of the old white king was to survive. I watched the opening act of the staggering death scene as the old white courtiers, James Baker and Warren Christopher, presented the case for their respective candidate and realized that regardless of the issues, they both served the old white king model that the world has languished under for way too long. While the rhetoric varied, the power structure was the same - the ruling elites would continue to gain and the rest of us would continue to serve. This time however during the courtly proceedings, I noticed that the majesty of the court was tawdry and thread worn and we, the people, were weary of the same old, same old. The fact that this scene was being played out in the first presidential election of the new century made it all the more significant to me. A new day was dawning.
In the thirteen years since that election, I have seen only evidence that confirms my original assessment. After King George ruled for 8 years, an African American king ascended the throne. While still a male, the white part of the equation had finally shattered. One more fatal blow to the old king. Economic upheavals, wars and meltdowns have occurred as the king continues to stagger mortally wounded across the stage relying on old parlor tricks to keep us distracted as our country and the rest of the world falters under a system that no longer works. For it is not just the gender or ethnicity of the king that is in rigor mortis but the entire system that he presides over: a system that uses might as right; a system that exists to serve the elites at the expense of the rest of humanity; a system that exploits the environment for temporary financial gain; a system that promotes "phantom wealth - money disconnected from the production or possession of anything of real power" over "real wealth from real resources to meet real needs."* It is broken; it does not work; it is not sustainable. unstable economy
"Wake up - sleepy head, rub your eyes, get out of bed,"*** Munchkin land, the wicked king is dead! The illusion that has kept this system in play for so long has been exposed. Scarcity is not the problem; greed is. And our fear keeps us marching in place. Truly, there is enough to go around if we all decide to move beyond our fear, and decide to connect, cooperate, collaborate AND SHARE. "For what shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?"** So rejoice Munchkin land: "This is a day of independence for all the Munchkins and their descendants."***The wicked old king is dead and is soon to make an exit. And you thought as you watched the 4th of July fireworks that Independence Day had happened in 1776.
As with all deaths, there is messy scary stuff that lies ahead and needs to be cleaned up before we can move forward unencumbered by the old model. That brings up yet another "earworm" of mine. "If there is somethin' strange in your neighborhood, Who you gonna call (ghostbusters.) If it's something weird and it don't look good, Who you gonna call (ghostbusters)"**** (Love this connection - the movie, Ghostbusters was released in 1984 and George Orwell's book of the same name is one of the hottest reads around now that Edward Snowden has confirmed that Big Brother really does listen in.) So, who are we really gonna call to clean up this mess? Bill Murray, Dan Aykroyd and Harold Ramis in their hazmat suits with their flamethrowers to get rid of the ghosts that continue to haunt us? Or is it time that we don our own hazmat suits and dig deeply into our own psyches to rid ourselves of the ghosts of systems of thinking past and our ungrounded fear in the boogie man? By this time in reading these blogs, you know where to find your fears - they are where the lemons occur in your life.
The old king is mortally wounded like the Fisher King; he cannot and will not recover. To continue with the old system of "Empire" thinking (bigger is better, Wall Street generated pseudo wealth) rather than a sustainable Earth Community (smaller, localized Main Street real-wealth economy)* will not revive the king. He is dead. We need to evolve past that paradigm. It no longer works and to continue avoiding that fact will guarantee total collapse.
The future lies in such radical thinking as producing only environmentally friendly products and services that serve actual real needs instead of wasting our precious resources on artificially contrived wants. It is time to return to Adam Smith's vision "of local-market economies populated by small entrepreneurs, artisans, and family farmers with strong community roots, engaged in producing and exchanging goods and services to meet the needs of themselves and their neighbors."* Interestingly, the "father of modern economics" would not find pleasure in having his name attached to this modern form of capitalism. He was opposed to "corporate monopolies and those who use their wealth and power in ways that harm others."*
In 2004 as the old king lay mortally wounded, Mark Kurlansky's book, 1968: The Year That Rocked the World, was published. He provides detailed accounts of the various dissident movements around the world that happened that year from the Chicago riots at the Democratic National Convention to the Paris riots, the Tet Offensive, the Prague spring and the assassinations of Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King. In this global conflagration, the people of the world were fed up with the established order and disgusted with authoritarianism. They were tired of the old white king and in riots all over the globe were serving him notice. It was the year that the world sounded his death knell. Kurlansky writes, this was the year that Walter Cronkite, the white TV grandfather, came to understand that "television was playing an important part not only in reporting of events, but in the shaping of them. Increasingly, around the world, public demonstrations were being staged...for television." Danny Cohn-Bendit of France said of these times: "We met through television, seeing pictures of each other on television. We did not have a relationship with each other, but we had a relationship with what our imagination produced from seeing pictures of each other."
In the years that have followed since the beginning of the tolling of the bell, the world stage has hosted a parade of conservative leaders who have tried without success to take us back to the nostalgic world of pre-1968 revolutions, where "Leave it to Beaver" skipped to school knowing that Ward was industriously at work and June was at home in her pearls simonizing everything in sight. It has not worked, nor should it have. We cannot go back; we must go forward. What happened in 1968 as Kurlansky postulates is that a global village was born - one where everyone gets to be heard and seen. Television was the medium to birth it but not sustain it because of the nature of its transitory flickering images and its limited ability to truly connect people. As Cohn-Bendit said, "We did not have a relationship with each other." Today, the technology that brings the world to each of our doorsteps does connect us instantly. It is time to recapture the "sense of hope" that was Kurlansky's objective in writing of that pivotal year. He postulates that the idealism that marked 1968 lives on today: "all over the world people know that they are not powerless..."
The question for each of us is "Has the answer blown away in the wind?" or are we at a point of history where we are ready to take the responsibility for ourselves and move beyond the old paradigm of the court of power, elites and toadyism that has kept us enslaved for so long. For you see, we are our own jailers and the key that keeps us locked up is our fear.
To those who were born in the optimism of post WWII and who came of age during the turbulent 60s, I say put on your hazmat suits for we are the toxic waste generation. The task of cleaning up the spoils of the old court age falls to us. Why else would Mother Nature have made sure there was such a glut of us born during those years but to ensure that there would be enough of us left at this stage to move forward? We have the vision of where we have been, who we are at this point and where we need to go.
The answer, my friend has not blown away in the wind. Ironically, it was given to us at the end of that year of global unrest - the pictures of Earth from a lunar orbit that were taken in December 1968. Astronaut Michael Collins put them in perspective for us: "an Earth as it appears: blue and white, not capitalist or Communist; blue and white, not rich or poor; blue and white, not envious or envied."
As catchy as the two "earworms" of the "Wicked Witch is Dead" and the "Ghostbusters" theme are, it is time that we all implant a new "earworm" - support local/ Main Street, not Wall Street - in our brains. It may not be as sexy as the other two but it is essential if we are to survive. In the event, you think I exaggerate, do an Internet search for "devaluation of the dollar" and watch some of the YouTubes that come up. The party is over and as is the case with all good parties, it is now time to clean up.
Ding Dong! the King is Dead! That system is broken. Local Lives! Together, we can build strong inclusive communities for all.
In case you need an example of the old white king mentality(more for me and less for you):
http://money.msn.com/now/post--charles-koch-dollar34000-puts-you-in-the-top-1percent
*Agenda for a New Economy, From Phantom Wealth to Real Wealth, David C. Korten
**Mark 8:36 King James Bible
*** Wizard of Oz
**** Ghostbuster
Tuesday, June 11, 2013
Goodness Gracious Sakes Alive
"If it isn't good, let it die. If it doesn't die, make it good."
Ajahn Chah
"We are living in a world today where lemonade is made from artificial flavors and furniture polish is made from real lemons."
Alfred E. Neuman
The goodness factor: moral excellence; virtue; kindness; generosity; excellence of quality. What is goodness? While the attributes listed above touch on it, none of them nail it down. Yet, we somehow intuitively know when something is good because it makes us feel happier and lighter inside. It is sort of like the difference between having to take the bitterness of life's lemons straight and being able to add some sweetener. The sweetener makes all the difference turning the unpleasant acrid taste of pure lemons into refreshing lemonade. So how do we apply this sweetener to our culture to mitigate the acridness of our current situation?
In the simple wisdom of Ajahn Chah, we need to assess whether there is any inherent goodness. If we think not, then we need to be prepared to rid ourselves of it and move on. But if in that moving on, it doesn't die; then, we need to make it good. And herein is the real nubbins of the issue. To make something good that previously may not have been requires effort on our part. It calls us to new thinking and new ways of doing things. In the end, I think it all gets down to intention. Is our intention to make it good for all of us or for just a select few? That subtle shift makes all the difference and determines the goodness quotient of our results - the quality of the lemonade we make.
We have the potential to be so much more than what we have achieved so far. The last few blogs have dealt with our dark sides and how that path is not sustainable for any of us. Today, I wish to celebrate the resourceful cleverness that resides within each of us just waiting to get out. As I write this blog, several hundred creative, resourceful entrepreneurs and business owners are converging on Buffalo, New York for the annual convention of the Business Alliance for Local Living Economies (BALLE). Their mission is a lofty one - "PROSPERITY FOR ALL." I am not sure about you but I want to gather under that banner. Even more idealistic is this statement: "Within a generation, we envision a global system of human-scale, interconnected local economies that function in harmony with local ecosystems to meet the basic needs of all people, support just and democratic societies, and foster joyful community life." I say AMEN! By shifting their focus from all-about-me-and-my-endeavor-in-isolation-and-competition-with- everyone-else to hey-let's-pool-our-resources-and-work-together-for-the-common-good, they are impacting communities and bringing about a social revolution from the ground up. They are not waiting for the "big boys" to get involved; they have rolled up their sleeves and are figuring it out for themselves and luckily for the rest of us as well. My money is on them.
In case you are still waiting for a great leader to emerge and lead us out of this quagmire, here is something to think about: social scientists have observed that once a complex system becomes corrupted, it cannot re-energize itself for self-correction. The best bet is to find a safe creative space outside of the dominant system from which something new can be created from the ground up. Sounds as if BALLE is just such a crucible for birthing an economy that brings true prosperity. Has it ever made any sense that a "healthy" economy is one that is predicated upon people's ability to consume (greed) and is constantly growing with no discernable reason for that growth (cancer)? To paraphrase what Michelle Long, Executive Director of BALLE, said at last year's convention, it's about living life as an experiment, making it up as we go along at the grass roots. Adding my commentary, that really means that in order to do so, we have to be present in each moment and free to respond to what that moment has to offer. Isn't that what the gurus have been preaching all along as the path to happiness and peace?
Here are BALLE's guiding principles:
Hurrah for visionary thinkers and doers who are already hard at work birthing a new paradigm. It is time for all of us to join the movement to support local sustainable communities. And while we are at it, let's put real lemons back into the lemonade as well as in the furniture polish.
Ajahn Chah
"We are living in a world today where lemonade is made from artificial flavors and furniture polish is made from real lemons."
Alfred E. Neuman
The goodness factor: moral excellence; virtue; kindness; generosity; excellence of quality. What is goodness? While the attributes listed above touch on it, none of them nail it down. Yet, we somehow intuitively know when something is good because it makes us feel happier and lighter inside. It is sort of like the difference between having to take the bitterness of life's lemons straight and being able to add some sweetener. The sweetener makes all the difference turning the unpleasant acrid taste of pure lemons into refreshing lemonade. So how do we apply this sweetener to our culture to mitigate the acridness of our current situation?
In the simple wisdom of Ajahn Chah, we need to assess whether there is any inherent goodness. If we think not, then we need to be prepared to rid ourselves of it and move on. But if in that moving on, it doesn't die; then, we need to make it good. And herein is the real nubbins of the issue. To make something good that previously may not have been requires effort on our part. It calls us to new thinking and new ways of doing things. In the end, I think it all gets down to intention. Is our intention to make it good for all of us or for just a select few? That subtle shift makes all the difference and determines the goodness quotient of our results - the quality of the lemonade we make.
We have the potential to be so much more than what we have achieved so far. The last few blogs have dealt with our dark sides and how that path is not sustainable for any of us. Today, I wish to celebrate the resourceful cleverness that resides within each of us just waiting to get out. As I write this blog, several hundred creative, resourceful entrepreneurs and business owners are converging on Buffalo, New York for the annual convention of the Business Alliance for Local Living Economies (BALLE). Their mission is a lofty one - "PROSPERITY FOR ALL." I am not sure about you but I want to gather under that banner. Even more idealistic is this statement: "Within a generation, we envision a global system of human-scale, interconnected local economies that function in harmony with local ecosystems to meet the basic needs of all people, support just and democratic societies, and foster joyful community life." I say AMEN! By shifting their focus from all-about-me-and-my-endeavor-in-isolation-and-competition-with- everyone-else to hey-let's-pool-our-resources-and-work-together-for-the-common-good, they are impacting communities and bringing about a social revolution from the ground up. They are not waiting for the "big boys" to get involved; they have rolled up their sleeves and are figuring it out for themselves and luckily for the rest of us as well. My money is on them.
In case you are still waiting for a great leader to emerge and lead us out of this quagmire, here is something to think about: social scientists have observed that once a complex system becomes corrupted, it cannot re-energize itself for self-correction. The best bet is to find a safe creative space outside of the dominant system from which something new can be created from the ground up. Sounds as if BALLE is just such a crucible for birthing an economy that brings true prosperity. Has it ever made any sense that a "healthy" economy is one that is predicated upon people's ability to consume (greed) and is constantly growing with no discernable reason for that growth (cancer)? To paraphrase what Michelle Long, Executive Director of BALLE, said at last year's convention, it's about living life as an experiment, making it up as we go along at the grass roots. Adding my commentary, that really means that in order to do so, we have to be present in each moment and free to respond to what that moment has to offer. Isn't that what the gurus have been preaching all along as the path to happiness and peace?
Here are BALLE's guiding principles:
- Think Local First - this improves the health of the environment, strengthens community, contributes to functional democracy
- Increase Self-Reliance - this increases local resilience, saves energy and creates a foundation for world peace.
- Share Prosperity - provides living wage jobs, creates opportunities for broad-based business ownership, engages in fair trade, and expects living returns from our capital
- Build Community - collaboration, cooperation, and fair trade between communities for a sustainable global society
- Work with Nature - every decision affects the vitality of our ecosystem
- Celebrate Diversity - increases resilience, propels innovation, cultivates peace and fosters beauty and joy
- Measure What Matters - success by what brings us knowledge, creativity, relationships, health, consciousness and happiness.
Hurrah for visionary thinkers and doers who are already hard at work birthing a new paradigm. It is time for all of us to join the movement to support local sustainable communities. And while we are at it, let's put real lemons back into the lemonade as well as in the furniture polish.
Thursday, June 6, 2013
Crossing the Rubicon
Here we go round the prickly pear
Prickly pear prickly pear
Here we go round the prickly pear
At five o'clock in the morning.
T.S. Eliot, The Hollow Men
In January 49 BC, Julius Caesar made a decision to commit an act of treason by crossing the Rubicon River, which was the barrier between Gaul and Italy proper. There was no turning back. With this act of defiance, he set in motion the events that led to the rise of the Roman Empire and the nascence of modern European culture. History portrays him as the victor.
I started this blog 2 weeks ago and have been trying to get a handle on it ever since. It is not that I lack images - unfortunately there are many all too graphic images: flattened Oklahoma cities, flooded European countries, fires, a German Shepherd K-9 dog pawing the coffin of his dead partner in a final salute: death and destruction spread wide across the earth. My desk is strewn with articles printed off of the internet declaring: "The idea of a totalitarian government monitoring your every move is probably still the stuff of fiction, but that doesn't mean your boss doesn't have a pretty good idea of your workday habits." It continues with, "Experts say an abundance of fast-developing new technology is making it cheaper and easier for employers to read your e-mails, check out what you've been looking at on the Internet, track where you go with a company car or cell phone and find out when and where you were at work."* Another article raises the question: "From invisibility to superhuman strength to telekinesis, a wave of emerging technologies promise to give people powers once reserved for comic-book characters. Which raises an important question: If humans become superhuman, will we turn out to be superheroes - or supervillains?"**
Superheroes or supervillains - which will it be? Seems to me that we have stuffed our noggins so full of information without knowledge; knowledge without wisdom that it is not more information that we need. I do not need superhuman powers to see that we have definitely crossed the Rubicon and there is no turning back. The best that we can do at this point is to slam on the brakes and look at the destruction to the environment, to our civilization, to ourselves that we are leaving in our rearview mirror.
Today as I surfed the net, I came across the poignant story of a former drone sensor operator . While he sat miles away manipulating his computer, the drones he controlled wrecked unspeakable horror on other human beings. He is haunted by the 1,600 deaths that he and his crew are responsible for. The graphic computer images are seared into his brain. In another story, an Army private is on trial because unable to take the horrors of what he was witnessing, he leaked military secrets in an effort to inform the American public of actions he considered to be inhumane and to spark debate.
The Rubicon is behind us; we have crossed the boundary and are on the road to Rome. Are we the victors or the traitors? And if the traitors, what exactly have we betrayed? I would offer the possibility that just perhaps what we have betrayed is our souls and our own humanity.
How did we arrive at this point? We are better educated, fed - in fact in every measureable way, we are better off than ever before in history. This is true even for the poor because they have resources today that even the very wealthy in the past did not. So, I ask again how did we get to this point? We are the end result of the Age of Enlightenment,which was examined in more detail in The Opening post of this blog. Extreme rationality has resulted in a world unmoored from any human moral judgement. Where is compassion? Where is the understanding that what we do to others, we do to ourselves? Where is wisdom? We have not evolved; we have devolved to our lowest common denominator and it is ugly.
Eliot wrote these lines in the bloody aftermath of World War I, The Great War - you know the one to end all wars. He saw the tenuous thread of hope trying to rise above the destruction that had been Europe. And surely, his poet's soul despaired at the folly that is man and the disastrous results of his unchecked rational brain.
I am thankful that I can only glimpse in those lines the nightmare computer images that are etched into the former drone operator's brain. The horror of what washes over me makes me cry out: how many more do we have to kill; how much more money do we need to satisfy the greed that now replaces our souls? We have crossed the Rubicon.
Life is....what? Thine is the....what? Depending upon how each of us answers these questions and how we choose to deal with the shadow that falls between the true reality of who we are as soul beings and the actuality of who we have allowed ourselves to become as hollow men will determine whether this crossing of the Rubicon is the end or the beginning.
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.***
Only things of substance have a bang.
Are we on the verge of total self-destruction?
*Life Inc. on Today, May 15, 2013 by Allison Lin
**The Quest to Build Better People. Superheroes or Supervillians? Slate, May 3, 2013 by Will Oremus
***T. S. Eliot, The Hollow Men
Prickly pear prickly pear
Here we go round the prickly pear
At five o'clock in the morning.
T.S. Eliot, The Hollow Men
In January 49 BC, Julius Caesar made a decision to commit an act of treason by crossing the Rubicon River, which was the barrier between Gaul and Italy proper. There was no turning back. With this act of defiance, he set in motion the events that led to the rise of the Roman Empire and the nascence of modern European culture. History portrays him as the victor.
I started this blog 2 weeks ago and have been trying to get a handle on it ever since. It is not that I lack images - unfortunately there are many all too graphic images: flattened Oklahoma cities, flooded European countries, fires, a German Shepherd K-9 dog pawing the coffin of his dead partner in a final salute: death and destruction spread wide across the earth. My desk is strewn with articles printed off of the internet declaring: "The idea of a totalitarian government monitoring your every move is probably still the stuff of fiction, but that doesn't mean your boss doesn't have a pretty good idea of your workday habits." It continues with, "Experts say an abundance of fast-developing new technology is making it cheaper and easier for employers to read your e-mails, check out what you've been looking at on the Internet, track where you go with a company car or cell phone and find out when and where you were at work."* Another article raises the question: "From invisibility to superhuman strength to telekinesis, a wave of emerging technologies promise to give people powers once reserved for comic-book characters. Which raises an important question: If humans become superhuman, will we turn out to be superheroes - or supervillains?"**
Superheroes or supervillains - which will it be? Seems to me that we have stuffed our noggins so full of information without knowledge; knowledge without wisdom that it is not more information that we need. I do not need superhuman powers to see that we have definitely crossed the Rubicon and there is no turning back. The best that we can do at this point is to slam on the brakes and look at the destruction to the environment, to our civilization, to ourselves that we are leaving in our rearview mirror.
Today as I surfed the net, I came across the poignant story of a former drone sensor operator . While he sat miles away manipulating his computer, the drones he controlled wrecked unspeakable horror on other human beings. He is haunted by the 1,600 deaths that he and his crew are responsible for. The graphic computer images are seared into his brain. In another story, an Army private is on trial because unable to take the horrors of what he was witnessing, he leaked military secrets in an effort to inform the American public of actions he considered to be inhumane and to spark debate.
The Rubicon is behind us; we have crossed the boundary and are on the road to Rome. Are we the victors or the traitors? And if the traitors, what exactly have we betrayed? I would offer the possibility that just perhaps what we have betrayed is our souls and our own humanity.
How did we arrive at this point? We are better educated, fed - in fact in every measureable way, we are better off than ever before in history. This is true even for the poor because they have resources today that even the very wealthy in the past did not. So, I ask again how did we get to this point? We are the end result of the Age of Enlightenment,which was examined in more detail in The Opening post of this blog. Extreme rationality has resulted in a world unmoored from any human moral judgement. Where is compassion? Where is the understanding that what we do to others, we do to ourselves? Where is wisdom? We have not evolved; we have devolved to our lowest common denominator and it is ugly.
We are the hollow men
We are the stuffed men
Leaning together
Headpiece filled with straw. Alas!
Our dried voices, when
We whisper together
Are quiet and meaningless
As wind in dry grass
Or rats' feet over broken glass
In our dry cellar
Shape without form, shade without colour,
Paralysed force, gesture without motion; ***
Eliot wrote these lines in the bloody aftermath of World War I, The Great War - you know the one to end all wars. He saw the tenuous thread of hope trying to rise above the destruction that had been Europe. And surely, his poet's soul despaired at the folly that is man and the disastrous results of his unchecked rational brain.
This is the dead land
This is the cactus land
Here the stone images
Are raised, here they receive
The supplication of a dead man's hand
Under the twinkle of a fading star.***
I am thankful that I can only glimpse in those lines the nightmare computer images that are etched into the former drone operator's brain. The horror of what washes over me makes me cry out: how many more do we have to kill; how much more money do we need to satisfy the greed that now replaces our souls? We have crossed the Rubicon.
Between the idea
And the reality
Between the motion
And the act
Falls the Shadow
For Thine is the Kingdom
Between the conception
And the creation
Between the emotion
And the response
Falls the Shadow
Life is very long
Between the desire
And the spasm
Between the potency
And the existence
Between the essence
And the descent
Falls the Shadow
For Thine is the Kingdom
For Thine is
Life is
For Thine is the***
Life is....what? Thine is the....what? Depending upon how each of us answers these questions and how we choose to deal with the shadow that falls between the true reality of who we are as soul beings and the actuality of who we have allowed ourselves to become as hollow men will determine whether this crossing of the Rubicon is the end or the beginning.
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.***
Only things of substance have a bang.
Are we on the verge of total self-destruction?
*Life Inc. on Today, May 15, 2013 by Allison Lin
**The Quest to Build Better People. Superheroes or Supervillians? Slate, May 3, 2013 by Will Oremus
***T. S. Eliot, The Hollow Men
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)