Are you here, in this moment?
Be here now.
We must stop running from the chaos of this moment in history, from the collective pain of unsustainable systems breaking apart at their seams. How can we cope with all that is happening? How can we come to terms with the fact that we are destroying our beloved Earth and each day we wait for solutions is another day in which the poorest among us are forced to live with the results? To deal with this, we just have to feel.
Feel the cries of the Earth, the tears of the starving, the hands of the child who made your shirt. Feel them, don’t look away, don’t turn on your t.v. Don’t buy anything. Stand still, hold my hand, reach for each other and comfort each other. Pain ignored will not wilter but manifest into more terrible demons of violence, rage, and retribution. We must listen and in this listening let our hearts break open and expand to the truth of life, that we are all connected, that a strangers pain is your pain, and that we must depend on our Earth Mother to live. Let us love with abandon and feel pain without reservation. Love what we love and let this force guide us. Feel what you feel and do not hestitate to share. In a world in which emotions are degraded and ignored for efficent, material living made easy, the truth softly spoken is more revolutionary then any man made weapon. Please speak your truth, don’t numb yourself. You can not numb yourself without numbing your whole being.
Be here now. In this great adventure of life as it unfolds to a new human chapter. The phrophets say this is the time when we will choose as a species to move towards a life sustaining vision or to crumble from within. Stay awake, feel. Be here, with me.
You will not be alone.
I agree with the spirit of the post, if not the message. Does ‘feeling’ stop the destruction of ecosystems? Can we simply love away all of the problems in the world? I don’t think so. I think that what we feel and love are still important, though, but only inasmuch as they inform our actions. It is action that will save our ‘Earth Mother’, as you put it, not a thought process. Praxis must always follow from theoria. Without that, our feelings, and our words – even if they are ‘truth’ – are nothing more than intangible, transient things, melting into the air.
First and foremorst, do not insult my faith and my spirituality by putting the title Earth Mother in quotes. Second, I appeal for constructive criticism not the arrogant preaching that has torn apart the leftist movement for so long. Constructive critism creates alternative visions and building the world as it can be through action, conversation, and mutual respect. There is nothing constructive about telling another they are wrong nor is there anything constructive about critical thought that ends simply with “I don’t agree.” Fine, but where is your alternative? What world are you creating and how are you creating it? How does someone label a direct call to action (ie, speak your truth) theoritical while using the abstract language of academia and the paradigm of our binary culture that refuses to see the abstract as experiential? These are my experiences, they are not theoritical. I would ask for respect and not assumptions from any following comments. As for the whole post, I appreciate your response but I am unsure you actually understood what I wrote. I would like to know more about your individual perspective and not your assumptions. Explain to me your view not what you think I should think. Thank you.
I put ‘Earth Mother’ in quotes because I’m unsure about assigning that gendered title to the earth – why humanize the earth? Why assign a gender at all? Is the earth not our father as well as our mother? Is our earth not our every relative? I’ve learned to question these types of limiting humanizations, hence the quotes.
‘There is nothing constructive about telling another they are wrong nor is there anything constructive about critical thought that ends simply with “I don’t agree.”’
I think that maybe we are talking past one another. I think that this comment bespeaks of a yearning for mutual understanding, something that I respect, and I agree with this sentiment, to a certain extent. Let me try to explain what I read from your post and why I don’t agree, and maybe we can take it from there.
‘What world are you creating and how are you creating it?’
I would say that I’m creating a world where people don’t simply try to feel their way towards emancipation – I’m trying to create, through discussions such as these, a world where people are actually actively engaged in working towards a world where our social and economic systems are always set within the limits of our ecological foundations. Also, a world where other forms of oppression don’t exist. However, I try to go beyond discussion and put my feelings into action. This is my main point.
If I reversed this question back onto you, what would your answer be? What world are you creating and how are you creating it?
I am sorry for labeling your experiences ‘theoretical’. This demonstrates, as you rightly showed, my immersion in academia for too long, something that I am acutely aware of, and hopefully be free from soon! I don’t apologize for interacting so directly with your text – I thought that I made my view explicit in what I had written. I wasn’t trying to tell you what to think. I was telling you my view (though not as eloquently or poetically as yourself – my writing style is blunt).
Lately I’ve noticed that too many people are waiting too much. They are waiting to organize the perfect coalition in order to further the aims of a world free from oppression. This organizing is called many things – I call it community-building. This is what I understood from your post. However, in my view, this is only half of what we need to do. In light of this, I have a question for you.
At what point do you take a step forward with the community that you have and intervene in all the pain in the world? As you said yourself, we must stop running from the chaos of this world. At what point do we stand and confront it directly?
Now. We Stand up NOW. No waiting, we must take the gift of this moment and use it, channel it, invoke it, walk with it, but never, ever, let it pass without us as we wait for something to happen.
We are the same thing and the world IS changing, with or without us.
Thank you for your response, I enjoyed your thoughts and ideas.
-D.
*I meant to say “we are the SOMETHING…” not “same thing” :)
I think ‘now’ is the time as well. I’ve seen too much waiting around for the perfect coalition, too much analysis (to the point of paralysis) and endless excuses against action. I wonder about this blog. There should be an action portion of it for people to share what they actually DO about stuff. THAT would be interesting.