Wherever on this distressed and yet magnificent Earth you live, this is for you.
Right here, right now: Let’s be open and honest before one another. Please. Look at the world without illusions, without hiding, without trying to escape. Don’t be crippled by confusion or disgust. Don’t allow yourself to lose your natural born goodness and become infected with internal fear and stained by the ooze of external hatred.
Madness spreads in all directions, reaching the places of habitation, touching on, invading, every island and continental shore. Violence accelerates. Violence increases. Ignorance is rampant and raging. Ignorance—our fatally human pandemic—one virus we could cure ourselves of but are failing to do so. Failing to mitigate, to educate against the scourge of contempt, arrogance, false witness, and malicious purpose.
Of late, hasn’t ignorance been politically elevated? Hasn’t the pornography of ignorance been unleashed to spread mayhem and degrade and denigrate the human condition? You and I, and those of kindred sense who know that dignity must have its context and survive, should not get pulled down or swept away into malignant normalcy. Resistance is character. In the mid of trauma, character is defining.
To change direction (survival necessary) requires diligence, maturity, dedication. Requires living in the re-discovery, the recovery, of sanity, in redefining relationships; cultivating eco-self, truth-self, love-self; and growing deep in the soil of nonviolent peace-choice, and with intelligence—thinking, questioning, feeling, and dreaming for the wellbeing of life. The way of recovery—life’s journey on the Red Road of retrieval—to healing, to the status of integrity, needs to be alive in the lives of genuinely developing human beings, real persons. Pursue the art of inner evolution, contribute to the culture of maturity. Learn to be serious without being sanctimoniously solemn. Turn to the Earth, the Great Work of Returning, in repentance, but not without joy, not without natural ecstasy.
Ours is a difficult time. A time of stupendous challenges. A time to test our individual and species worth. This time is our time of determining choices. More difficult, more consequential, determining, and more vitally demanding than any of us has known before. It is the time of a lifetime!
Conditions of our existence, our cultures, our so-called civilization, merge in a temporal context that demands, before hearts, human faces, bodies and aspirations, an authenticating openness, an opening to the changes of authentication. Humility is required, courage is called upon—recognition, mutuality, and compassion are summoned onto the world stage, to again become conditional.
This time, these hours, days, months, year ahead, are our poverty. Our time and we have no other. We are the resource of personal, collective and species response-ability. We are in continuum and what has happened is part of what is happening, what is happening but part of what will happen yet. We are ourselves our wealth and we are ourselves our poverty.
Time for those who have eyes and ears, hearts and mind and soul—not holes, not hollow cavities where shadows contrive false promise, prophecies, and false expectations, conjured out of nothingness and deceit. Time for those who see, who hear, are restless for what is better, what possible in the higher registers of evolution—having eyes instead of holes, ears instead of holes—we to whom the lot has fallen are guides and guardians of the human continuum, and this time that is our time is plunging into an abyss, even as we continue awakening from history, from the nightmare, striving to ascend.
To each of you who feel, in your bones, your hearts, your souls, these living words—this is for you.
Here and now: It is a time to synchronize, to come together, emerge, to grow, learn and relearn in family circles, the value of trust, the eco-sanity of letting go and letting be, and the scared pilgrimage of remembering and moving on . Striving to recover from the mutating isolation that separates from evolutionary diversity and from the biotic loneliness, the stigma of intergenerationally acquiescing to becoming a breed apart.
When we are vulnerable, we are in touch with core humanity. We are sensitive to existence and to what is sanely important. When we are strong, strength roots and flourishes through human bonding. We participate in community, partake in centering, radiate into a communion of light. A communion (even a beatitude) of togetherness, of belonging.
Howsoever you pretend, stop pretending. Howsoever you submit to nihilism, anguish, despair, stop submitting. We live in failing systems that indoctrinate us in betraying ourselves, betraying, often condemning, others, violating diversity, denying the shared necessities of life. Cease from betrayals, whether they are overt or subtle. In every way you can, stop betraying life. Beyond anything you can imagine, stop betraying life. The means of betrayal and undoing creation are complex and convoluted. The way to stop is simple. It requires conviction; it requires trust.
Trust—ragged, contorted, worm-eaten trust! Revive and rehabilitate trust. Trust beyond convenience and false learning, beyond programing, beyond techno-urban dependencies. Gardening is simple engagement, bringing you into contact with soil and season, inviting you to experience natural cycles and the subtle, oft-ignored wonders of botanical growth. Drum circles are nourishing to heart and soul, harmonizing heartbeats with planetary pulsations, introducing rhythms and waves of enlivened rapport into intricate fields of energy. Storytelling as well, and dance groups and moon dancing, gatherings of weavers and spirit-warriors, and fire ring recitations of poetry. You are as old as the first shaman traveling from world to world, as young as the newest innocent midwifed into this living sphere of Earth. Ancient as the primordial dancer and myth singer, new arriving as the latest cosmographer, charting what is unknowable without the contributing uniqueness, the consummation of your presence. Trust!…
Creating forms of respect, working (Earth-walking into) new patterns, redefine us. Democracies of love and peerage bless our presence with Earth-futures, unto our children, potlatch out over generations. But we must each reach out, we must touch, we must dare to trust. Not touching now with our bodies and bodily warmth and our hands, when we are restricted, but with our honesty, our openness, which is without restriction.
Love and respect to you, to all who are here in this moment. You who are breathing. You who are living. You who hold these words as a mirror of acceptance, in meditation, before you.
If what I write here is only puzzling and not yet experientially clear, keep it for reference; now and then look again into the mirror of thought and language. The world is convulsive. Yet there are secrets hidden in plain view for how to survive, finding ways to be renewed, even in the midst and thereafter of a perfect storm. Begin…. And if not you, who? And if not now, when? *
Many blessings.
*Renown maxim attributed to Hillel the Elder.
David Sparenberg is a world citizen, environmental & peace advocate & activist, actor, poet-playwright, storyteller, teacher and author.
6 August, Hiroshima Day, 2020
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