The Voice From The Back Row

 

There are only five more days until Inauguration Day.  Reactions run from the rejoicing of some, through the apprehension of many, to the determination of others to block anything the president-elect may do.  I think most of us, myself included, are feeling the intense chaos enveloping our world, along with intense discomfort at not only not knowing just what will happen, but also not perceiving how to influence the outcome in any major way.  Apparent helplessness is not a space that most people find very tolerable.

I am one who has difficulty focusing on the small, positive things of the moment.  Admittedly, those small things are of immensely greater value than most people realize.  However, my default stance tends to be to look at what is called “the big picture”, looking for trends and patterns, and trying to figure out just what I can do that will have an effect on these larger things.   I want to do something big that will help to bring about justice, peace, kindness, healing.  I tend to look at those who have achieved success or expertise in such areas, and wish to emulate them.    In the process, it is quite easy to lose awareness of the present moment, and of the small events that constitute life for most of us.   I would also venture to guess that the lives of even the most admirable of achievers are made of the same small moments.

Recently, at least three people, quite unknowingly, have reminded me that the most valuable acts of all are sometimes the smallest.  Extra smiles for strangers, a few hours helping the less fortunate,  focused listening to communications that are entrusted to us, and including someone the group prefers to ignore – all these small things make a difference, often with repercussions that are not visible at the time they are given.   They are the small things, the things of the moment, and  it is only in the moment that we are able to accomplish anything at all.

There is a reason that spiritual teachers emphasize humility. Contrary to popular opinion, the word does not mean self-abasement.  It derives from humus, earth, and is the quality of being firmly grounded to the earth.  It means the opposite of being arrogant, above the mundane and considering oneself more worthy than others.  It means remaining aware of the present moment in which the Earth exists, and aware of the details of each moment.

The Earth includes and is shaped by the energy of all its denizens; to be humble means to acknowledge our connection to the Earth and those who share it with us, as well as to the omnipresent energy of God.  The Earth and that which exists upon it are in time; the worlds of spirit, of the unseen and ineffable, are timeless.  These two polarities exist together; yet it is in time that we who are on Earth can affect the progress of events.   And, the only time we have is the present moment.    Even the largest and most wonderful of visions depends on the minute daily actions of all of us.

In this first month of the year, I must remind myself that being unhappy about all the things I have not accomplished – grand visions or more mundane tasks – is useless.  Nothing is accomplished by being unhappy about its non-accomplishment.   That doesn’t mean giving up the dreams or goals;  they need to continue to be held in mind.  It simply means maintaining awareness that small acts of kindness or justice or peace or healing are valuable in and of themselves; it means refusing to be unhappy because they are not grand ideas.    I understand this lesson, but the application is, for me, difficult.

Let us all, as we adjust to the imminent political changes around us, remember that it is by our small, day-to-day actions that we build our responses.   Let us remain aware that we are interconnected, even with those with whom we disagree or who are doing actions that we reject.  The small actions of each of us, consciously or unconsciously linked, are the bricks from which a new society is built.  Let us, then, construct our bricks well.

Peace,   Diane

 

Open season for medical insurance has come and gone. This year, I participated in the hopes of finding what I want in a medical practice – options other than or in addition to routine test results, computer-assisted diagnosis, pharmaceutical prescriptions (and their side effects), surgery and procedures.  I wanted to find a way of establishing wellness with diet and lifestyle changes, herbology as an addition to pharmacology,  supplemental nutritional information,  and alternative therapies such as music or aromatherapy,  hands on treatments or mind-body practice. I was not interested in discounting the traditional approaches, just supplementing them with other, also valuable, ideas.  What I found is that unless I have a great deal of discretionary money to spend on those things, they are not available to me. I did not find any insurance plan willing to cover anything other than the traditional allopathic practices.  The rest is available, but only for those who can pay out of pocket.

What I gleaned from this experience is that what matters in our society is money.  People may also matter, but only secondarily.  It is money that moves everything, especially in our health care systems.   I am not speaking of individual practitioners – health care providers need to earn a living, too – but of  healthcare systems that creates a monopoly which monetarily excludes a majority of people who may wish to make other choices; it even precludes the least affluent citizens from any healthcare choices at all.

Perhaps the situation is not completely the fault of health care systems; perhaps those systems are just part and parcel of a macrocosm that assumes that money speaks the loudest, and that without money, meaningful life ceases, and troubles proliferate.  A quick look around can verify that this may indeed be so.  Do we not worship in the temples of Amazon.com and the Mall?  Do we not “develop” our open spaces with ever increasing shopping centers?  Does not the command to spend and buy keep dogging us on all our media?  Does not the dream of a more remunerative job claim the time and attention of many?

The holidays are finished.  What is it that defines the holidays, whether one celebrates Christmas, Hanukkah, Kwanzaa, other religious observances, or simply a secular Solstice?   Private approaches by the few excluded, it is a mass orgy of consumption. It is a race to buy for as many as possible the most expensive gifts possible, and also, for those who can, to host the most sumptuous parties that means allow.   Retailers depend on this surge of spending. Without it, businesses fail, and retailers suffer.  Yet, much of what is purchased is not only not needed by the recipients, but is also wasted,  stored in closets out of sight or discarded after awhile. It adds to the hoard of “stuff” many of us accumulate.  Who has not noticed the child who,  initially delighted on Christmas morning with all the toys, abandon them a week or two later?

Where is the need to receive gifts of substance?   Are there not the homeless, the underemployed, the refugees, people who are sick or incapacitated because their world has been decimated by natural or manmade disasters?  Surely, they do not need toys, the latest devices, the latest fashion, a new luggage set or fancy gadgets.  Valuable as art can be in an increasingly left-brained culture,  are there not people who are not asking for mandalas to color in order to center themselves or for wall décor – they simply want food, medicine, warmth, basic clothing, shelter, dignity and respect.   They are the forgotten of our society.  They neither produce many goods nor consume many goods.   They are tucked away out of sight as proficiently as possible.

Our natural world also suffers the consequences of a money driven society dependent on continued and increased consumption.  We are, in a sense, consuming the world that we inhabit; we are consuming it at a faster rate than it can nurture us.  Often, the first solution offered is to decrease the human population.  Of the ones to save, the dispossessed, the indigent and the unborn are not the ones considered.    It costs too much to save them; it is inconvenient.  They are not formally condemned, of course, just ignored.  In the meantime, we continue to drill, develop, pollute and otherwise destroy our world, ostensibly for our digestion.

Who profits from all this?   Ultimately, no one.   If our planet disappears, so will we all, equally.  In the meantime, it is not difficult to see the imbalance of income in the world. Generally, the very rich continue to grow richer, the very poor continue to grow poorer, and more of those in the middle sink than rise.  Clearly, unless this is a desired situation, something is amiss.   Is this what we all want? Does this benefit all of us?   Does it, ultimately, destroy all of us?

There is a solution, if we have the will to implement it.  We need first to be aware that no Life based tradition requires that we destroy each other and our world.  Then, we need to simplify.   For starters, that means individual simplification, keeping what we need and recycling the “stuff” to other productive uses.  It also means reversing a divisive trend within our social structures, one that over time has broken the extended family to the nuclear family to the single parent family or the uncommitted family, to the non family of temporary sequential relationships, perhaps eventually to simply single individuals.  Smaller units are good for business and for consumption; more units buy more things. Each has to have its own.  However, that is not good for sustainability, or for reducing consumption.  We must enlarge our basic units to about the size of an extended family or a tribe.  Each unit needs to be encouraged to be as self sustaining in basic needs as possible.  The process of this transformation also needs to ensure that the forgotten have the means to sustain themselves, even if that means less profit for the already wealthy.  Plenty of books and resource materials exist on this subject.  These groups would not be isolated.  They would trade, exchange knowledge, cooperate with each other within a larger network.  However, no group would be parasitic on the resources of another.   That is a good beginning.  It is within our collective consciousness if we are willing to access it.

We are all One.   The prosperity of some ultimately depends on the prosperity of all.   In this sense, may there be a prosperous New Year for us all.

 

Peace,  Diane

The winter holiday months are literally the darkest days of the year, and can seem to be dark in other ways as well. The current political situation does little to ameliorate these feelings.  Nature seems to be hibernating, and many of us (myself included) would love the opportunity to do a little hibernating, or at least find time amidst  end of year work expectations and holiday preparations to sleep for a full eight hours.

Yet, these longer nights and shorter days encompass the holidays of light.  In the  western world, the two best known are Christmas and Hanukkah, each in its own way celebrating the return of Light.  Kwanzaa follows, a cultural celebration, again with a focus on light.  The season concludes with New Year,  the ending of the dark and the rebirth of light in a new year, a clean slate.   Historically, this season was known in different forms as Solstice, or the winter equinox, after which the daylight gradually grows longer.  The ancient Celtic celebrations and the old Roman Saturnalia are two of these varying celebrations.  Islamic tradition follows a different calendar which rotates through the seasons, but the month of Ramzan, during which one fasts and prays into the night, is followed by the joyous and often colorful celebration of Eed.  If one broadens the parameters of the season to include November and February, then Diwali and Lunar New Year can be added to celebrations with a focus on light.

I think it is not a coincidence that such a broad base of cultures shares a component that focuses on light.  Humans  intuitively know that light does not mean only the physical aspects of light.  Yes, the sun, the stars, fire and candles are involved.  More than that, however, is the symbology of physical light for both intellectual and spiritual understanding.  Someone who does not understand is “in the dark”;  the depression that sometimes engulfs seekers on a spiritual path is called “the dark night of the soul”. Thoughts and actions which run contrary to life and are devoid of compassion or true creativity are called dark thoughts or actions.  We are aware of dark magic and the outer darkness into which some are believed to be cast. Yet, all of us long for the dispelling of the darkness.   All of us long for Light.   We are diurnal creatures; we are spiritual creatures, seekers of truth, even when we are wandering and seem to be lost.

I think these winter celebrations of light are a recognition of that longing.  We recognize our darkness, and, if we are wise, accept and learn from it.  And we move on, ever forward, each in his or her own way, into the Light.  As this process repeats itself within us, we are healed.

We are living in a time that is incredibly rapid, and which does not on its own simply stop for people to explore the dark and move forward into the Light.  It is easy for people to feel lost and pressured and panicked in such a setting.  It is important for all of us, both as individuals focused on our own growth, and as members of an ever growing and changing species, to take that time to examine our darkness and affirm and rejoice in the coming of the Light.  It is especially important for those who think they cannot do it, and for those who think they do not need to.  It is also essential to realize that the light is always in the background, even when it seems darkest.  We are diurnal creatures, children of Light.  We may experience darkness, but we vector towards the Light, our home.  This is the lesson of the season – the light/Light returns.  It was never really gone.

May the Light be with you, and stay with you.  May you always welcome its presence.

Peace,  Diane

The more I notice how things seem to function, the more I notice the interconnectedness between them.  The economy, technology, the pressures of time,  interpersonal relationships, health – all seem to be related each to the other, each influencing the other.  I observe this especially during this holiday season, when I notice how little time I seem to have to devote to what needs to be done, what it is the season to do, and what I would like to be doing.

I think the understanding that the pace of time has increased has become common knowledge.  Whether one acknowledges that it is running faster, or whether one perceives time to be inflating, the effect is the same.  People are finding less time to sleep or indulge in down time,  and are running ever faster.  What is less often noticed are the interconnected fingers between this phenomenon and  other areas of our lives.

One of my favorite people recently shared with me how difficult it is becoming to stay in touch with friends and family.  To her, it felt as if people were drifting away from each other, connecting briefly with only those people with whom one is working at the time.  I share her feeling.  Most of the time I used to spend in the actual physical presence of those I love has evaporated, to be replaced by interactions with those with whom I work or with computer facilitated communication.   It is a bit less so with family with whom I actually share a residence.    Yes, we have innumerable technological devices with which to stay in touch;  none of those devices actually physically connects people.  It is as if we can no longer relate, unless we do it in cyberspace instead of on Earth.

This increasing immersion in the cyber world continues to pull us in, as inexorably as the quicksand in Pete Seeger’s song, Big Muddy.  We shop in cyberspace, talk in cyberspace, read and research in cyberspace,  receive medical treatment facilitated by cyberspace,  and are excluded from much if we do not actively participate in this transfer of life to cyberspace.  (I notice that I am communicating this in cyberspace.)  A computer is fast.  As we live more and more in cyberspace, we, too, go faster and faster.  The quantity of our interactions increases, while the quality of our relationships is often decreased by the very speed of those interactions.   Some relationships are dropped, as we no longer have time to maintain them.   Other relationships are reduced to quick bits of conversation over text or chat or email.

All this widely touted life in the fast lane, facilitated by the latest devices, has an effect which I think most people did not anticipate would happen.  While appearing to be more connected – to each other, to the marketplace – we have actually become more separated.  Our presentation faces, our “masks,”  are what interact in cyberspace, in our bits of conversation and our business deals.   The real  us, the people who we are inside, are effectively hidden.  That may seem like an advantage in the current atmosphere of apprehension (hmm, that must be related, too), but in actuality it separates us one from another and reduces us to bits and bytes of acceptable sameness.

A tantalizing question is, who profits from all this separation and sameness?

One explanation which I have read, phrased differently in varied sources, is that the more separately we live, the more stuff we buy – we do not share, for example, a vacuum cleaner.  We buy one each..  The shared computer or the shared car or the shared device do not stimulate a consumer economy as much as each person having his or her own. The first time I ran across this idea was in the book The Greening of America by Charles Reich.  However, I have heard it in different ways from many sources.  It seems a reasonable idea – at least reasonable enough to find out about and ponder.

Now that the holiday season is again here (and rushing by), let us all, at least for a few quiet moments, ponder whether all this speed and convenience is worth the price of separation.

Peace,  Diane