cooperation – The Voice From The Back Row

Staying the Course

We are in the penitential season of Lent and nearing the purifying practice of fasting during Ramadan. We are engulfed in a huge transition, the end of which we may envision or guess, but cannot yet see with certainty. We are exhausted by restrictions engendered by a worldwide virus, and even with vaccinations available for many, there is no return to “normal”, whatever that may now look like. Our politicians seem to be busier attacking each other than working on cooperative solutions. Economic instability is a looming threat. Many people, including me, are feeling burdened and have ‘had enough, already’. It would be so nice if we could count on Easter, Eid, or Passover, celebrations that they are, to end the chaos around us. It does not seem that it will be so.

The well-known teacher Sandra Ingermann, in one of her workshops, advised those listening to never “sit down during the dark night of the soul.” It is advice that is relevant to the times. I do not think that she means to never relax or have fun; in fact, she encourages people to relax in nature, to let the healing and calming energy of nature enfold them. To not sit down means to not give up, to not let the weight of whatever one is processing cause one to stop engaging with life, to allow an apathy or hindering depression to take over and prompt one to withdraw from the growing and the change.

Change and its seeming disorder are always with us. Change is rarely patterned logically, nor is it predictable to the reasoning mind. Change is kaleidoscopic; the patterns can be beautiful or not, but they fall as they are, responding to a present moment. Sometimes it seems insane, yet, in the long run, change often brings a higher result. Is not spring in the heart of winter? The Chinese symbol shows that Yin is in Yang, and Yang is in Yin – the two are forever joined as one.

The Arctic peoples know well not to lie down in the snow in the dark and cold of winter, no matter the weariness one may feel. Just a few minutes of lying down in the Arctic cold and dark causes an exit from the planet. Similarly, it is when we feel the most burdened and disheartened that we must carry on, walking not as if we were about to fall under the burden, but standing straight, breathing calmly, finding beauty, and expressing kindness to all around. It is also good if we will sing, or dance from time to time. This is how we come through into the light after the dark. It takes discipline. It takes faith.

Part of carrying on through the dark is holding the highest vision we can of an outcome that nurtures the planet and its denizens and our fellow humans. It is not a matter of having our own way only, of power over others. It is not a vision simply of relief from suffering or the weight of our burdens. It is creative, drawn from the love of life we all intrinsically possess, if we are willing to see it. The particulars of individual highest visions may vary, but their ultimate goal is the same, the benefit of all concerned. It is a vision born of love. Such individual visions, combined, cannot but help to bring the highest good to all. It is not always easy to hold the highest vision, but it is the way to what we seek.

With Passover, Easter and Eed upcoming (and yes, St. Patrick’s Day, too), let us set our individual intents to walk our paths with confidence a while longer, and use our celebrations as encouragement along the way.

Peace, Diane

Nature Teaches Community

The other day, I turned on the TV to a relatively slow-moving documentary in hopes of a few minutes of spacing out or relaxing without thinking too much. Flipping through the channels, I chose a nature documentary, as I love nature and relax when I can spend time with it. Then, I got drawn into the program, and emerged sometime later impressed by how in nature, with the exception of a few lone creatures such as some predators, life grows in community, in flocks, hives, herds, packs and, even in the plant kingdom, groves of trees and other plant species. Cooperation and community seem to be one of nature’s imperatives, structures which ensure that various groups of living species can thrive. I had been subliminally aware of this before; now, it impressed me. Perhaps the nature that many of us humans seem intent upon destroying is giving us an insight into how we ourselves may survive.

Much human organization is in large units called countries, states, cities, and the like, but historically and increasingly these huge, organized entities are less and less like a true community, in which the benefit of the smallest member is as important as the benefit of the whole. For the majority, the true organization seems to be separate. Once there were extended families and close neighborhoods. Those morphed into the mobile nuclear family, and then into units of singles or of temporarily allied singles, roommates. At the same time, relationships became more fluid and of shorter duration. All that may have benefited the consumer economy, as multiple units of fewer people each required, for example, each its own vacuum cleaner or dishwasher or clothes dryer. However, it has left the majority of us separated from each other, from nature and from community.

Those of us who will look can see for themselves the effect of the combined lifestyles of the mainstream. Weather has become more destructive and unpredictable. Soils are becoming less fertile as our pesticides destroy them. The rainforest is disappearing. The extinction rate of species has accelerated exponentially. The ocean is acidifying, and parts of it are dying. We ourselves are facing the aesthetic and health impacts of pollution, and – whether we realize it or not – of separation from each other, from nature, and from the creative matrix from which all emerges. It is not only species of our fellow beings here on Earth who are facing extinction, but also we ourselves.

In our state of separation, we seem to have turned to our science and technology to save us from the truth that we are connected not only to each other, but also to the Earth itself and all the species on it in what is often called a web of life. For many of us, the belief that we are masters of all other life, and that we do not have to change our ways because our science and technology will absolve us of consequences and will create habitats for us that are safe and nurturing, despite what happens to everything else. Even though the wisest of scientists understand the connection to nature and that much of scientific progress has been an imitation of nature, many people seem to be unaware that in taking the stance we do, we are destroying ourselves along with the other life that we destroy.

What would it be like if we returned to community and taught ourselves to live sustainably on the Earth? What would it be like if we were to seek out nature, respect nature, and develop ways which were in harmony with nature? What would it be like if we had as much access to trees, soil, clean air and water as we currently have to concrete, cars and pollution? What major changes would we need to make to ourselves to achieve that?

We have models; groups of people have for some time now banded together to create what is called intentional community. Not all of them are the same; many are quite different. In nature, a herd is not the same as a hive or as a flock. Some are urban; many are rural and are learning and practicing sustainable and regenerative agriculture. There are artists and scientists and craftspeople, farmers and businesspeople and educators, and people of different persuasions. People of like mind tend to live together, and each group respects the life and orientation of groups which are different. This is a new system. It does not rely on a large, overseeing government to regulate and provide for us as if we were children who could not do that for ourselves, as if it were OK for us to not think very deeply. It does not rely on what is outside of ourselves, the products of corporations or the results of politics to find and implement the ways in which we need to behave to reverse the process of destroying our Earth, its denizens and ourselves. Community presupposes that we in cooperation with others are responsible for these things.

It is crisis time. We inch closer and closer to an irreversible tipping point. It is time to wake up, to save ourselves from collectively hurling ourselves off a cliff. It is time to transcend our distractions of pandemics, differences (all of us are equally human), wars and internal conflicts that would silence or eliminate whichever group of us “lost” political battles. It is time that we realized that we are all in essence one, coming from the same source, equally valued and equally responsible. It is time we work together and form community – learning from those of us who have begun before us and contributing our own perspectives as we grow. We need the time of cooperation; continued competition and conflict, continued emphasis on “winning over” will succeed only in destroying us all.

Let us all, whatever groups we affiliate with, whatever beliefs we hold, whatever our wounds or state of healing, realize that the other is a sister or brother and come together to create community. Let us learn to work cooperatively together. Our well-being and our survival depend upon it.

Peace, Diane

Dreaming Our New Reality

The old man sat quietly alert on the rock outcropping near the top of the hill. The dry air, warmed by the late morning sunshine, stirred lazily around him, ruffling his white hair, and caressing his closed eyes. Behind him, at the foot of the hill, the tribe patiently continued daily tasks as if nothing were going on. They were awaiting the old man’s return. Before him spread the expanse of grassland. In the distance, a herd of bison nibbled on the sere grass, vainly searching for a few green blades. None of this caught the attention of the old man. His focus was inward, away from the arid, heat-permeated landscape surrounding him. The old man was sensing rain. Within his trance, he could see the dark clouds approach, feel the damp breeze on his skin, notice the slight drop in temperature, smell the droplets of a deluge, hear distant rumbling thunder. The rains were coming. He KNEW that, knowing in a way that belied the logic of drought surrounding him, of grass waiting like tinder to catch the first spark. The old man had been there since dawn, going ever deeper into his trance, sensing ever more strongly the coming of rain.

Towards sunset, the grazing bison looked up. The breeze had stilled for the moment; dark clouds began to form on the horizon. The bison stopped grazing. They began to circle, calves in the middle for shelter. The old man paid no attention. The dark clouds grew, and the wind began to pick up. Lightning split the sky, and thunder rumbled over the bison. Clouds obscured the setting sun as the storm increased its force, soaking the dried grass and the parched earth. The bison lifted their heads in welcome to the rain. Now the wind blew strong over the old man, who was still sitting quietly. A clap of thunder woke him from his trance. A deluge from the sky washed over him as he stood up and began the walk to the encampment. Dancing children approached him, frolicking in the rain. The old man entered among the people. “It rained,” he said.

The old man had been dreaming rain. He was the tribal shaman, trained from adolescence in the ability to enter the invisible realms the aborigines call “dreamtime”. From those spaces he would heal, divine, and call to the tribe what was needed. Rain was needed at the moment. He was an expert in these skills.

These skills are not, however, potentially limited to shamans. Each of us possesses the possibility of using our focus, our imaginations, our understanding and creative inner gifts to do, individually or collectively, what the shaman had done. We can create ceremony, sing what we wish to create, draw it, sculpt it, write it, or sit in focused meditation. We can even simply speak the truth we wish to see. We do not need to be trained shamans operating alone. Collectively, our smaller individual acts coalesce into a larger effect.

There are certainly many intertwined issues that face us in this moment. An election is over, but we cannot all sit back and relax and assume that the “old normal” will now return. The “old normal” is gone; what will ensue from the current chaos will be the result of what we collectively dream. We have work to do. What do we wish to see? For example, most of us wish to be free of the coronavirus. Do we wish to see everyone mandated in masks? Do we wish to see everyone required to receive experimental vaccines and tracked to make sure we do? Do we believe that governing from the top to “take care” of everyone, controlling them even as they are relieved of responsibility for addressing things themselves, will be desirable?

One priority is the well-being of our planet. The coronavirus is one virus. Even if it is manmade, as some say, more are in waiting from nature if we do not address the healing of the earth. It is interconnected. I believe we wish to see ourselves, generally, healthy, free to interact with each other, living in cooperation with nature on a healed earth, inhabiting a healed social order in which we can care for and trust one another. I believe we would like an economic order in which everyone can provide for him/herself and his/her family with the work of hands, heart, or mind. If these things are what we wish, we need to envision these things instead of trying to figure out what we need to require others to do and how we will make them do it. We need to cooperatively envision the result, not the means.

There is temptation to turn passive, believing that there is nothing we or anyone can do to affect the present or the outcome of things. Such a stance leads to being taken over as a source of energy for ways which are not ours. There is also temptation to believe that raising anger and marching in the streets, perhaps rioting, will change things in the direction we wish them to go. The fact is that if the negative challenges are met directly, head on, the result will be more of the same, perhaps dressed in different clothes. We must use the indirect way, the way of the old man who “saw” the rain and then it came. Each of us has a piece of the future to imagine. Each of us has a creative way of expressing that (and yes, even cleaning a house can be a creative expression, when it is done with the loving consciousness we envision). What is your thought? How do you wish the world to be? How can you dream that and express your dream? It takes us all.

We live in a world bounded by time. Humans have created this concept and been caught in its web. Time cannot run backwards. We cannot return to the time before COVID-19, or the time before 9/11, or the time our grandmothers tell stories about. We must live in and act in the present, with all its problems that surround us, and also with all the beauty that still exists if we pause and relax long enough to notice it. What our future will be depends on how we orient ourselves now.

May we awaken to the creative power we all embody, and to the focused, reverent application of that ability. May we all dream a world which includes a healed Earth restored to its beauty and harmony, and a social structure which recognizes the full humanity of all of us and supports just, compassionate, and reverent ways of interacting. We are the shamans. It is time we worked.

Peace, Diane

True Restitution

Despite what seem to be deliberate efforts to keep the Covid-19 epidemic foremost in the media, coverage of the many protests over unjust and violent treatment of Black people by police, called Black Lives Matter, is currently more in the forefront of people’s consciousness. The protests continue; most are peaceful, some are violent, all are persisting. We need the protests. They serve to call attention to severe injustice and wrongful attitudes and perceptions that need to be corrected. And they are the tip of a much bigger iceberg beneath the surface.

Although this particular injustice involving the police involves victimizing mainly Black people, it, and other injustices stemming from a common core involve other minority groups as well. Native Americans and Hispanics are among those most commonly noticed, but Asians of various origins, religious groups such as Muslims, immigrants of all kinds, especially newcomers, and the poor whites who live subsistence lives in, say, the coal country of Appalachia are also among them.

The underlying wrong is economic. It is described as capitalism carried to its destructive extreme, but it also uses racism as an effective support for funneling the wealth of the nation to the top, mostly white, international, corporate, and social elite. Racism justifies this action by positing that some human beings are better than and more worthy of wealth and power than other human beings. A bit of thought shows that race is actually a construct – not only because it devalues some at the expense of others, but because it is actually unreal. Think – when one is asked to declare one’s “race” it might be color, language, ancestral birthplace, culture – there is no real definition of race. It seems to mean only “other than myself”. When I was in college, I took an anthropology course that defined race as being of only three types, Caucasoid, Negroid, and Mongloid. However, within those classifications determined by academics, there are black Caucasoids(e.g., on the Indian subcontinent), white Negroids (some African indigenous) and Mongloids who are both tall and short, some with curly hair and who are certainly not yellow. I have never seen a truly yellow person, a truly red person, a truly black (piece of coal color) person or a truly white (sheet of paper) person other than an albino. Race is a highly inefficient attempt to classify people; it contains many exceptions and has no real meaning. In addition, people are so mixed now from intermarriage that the concept is even more illusory. However, it serves the purpose of the elite who wish to retain wealth and power. It helps if the general populace believes in it and are willing to set themselves apart in competitive groups, some with more advantage so that the dissonance persists, and so that attention remains on those divisions instead of on the true movers of radically unequal wealth and power.

As we are taught in school, when our nation declared itself independent, it was led by rich white men separating from the control of Great Britain, where existed more rich white men in power over a poorer populace. Those who could vote at the time of the Constitution were rich white men who owned land or property. No Native Americans, from whom the land had been taken, no Black people, most of whom worked the land for free, no indentured whites, no poor whites, no women – only rich white men. Amendments were later made to the Constitution to purportedly remedy the imbalance of power, but they seem to have had limited value. Women are still paid less for equal work and harassed in the workplace, Blacks are still mostly relegated to low-paying and riskier jobs and poorer housing and often blocked from voting, Native Americans are still discriminated against in mainstream employment and relegated to infertile lands. Their women can be raped without much consequence being placed upon the rapist. The land is still being destroyed, and Black people and poor whites are shunted to toxic locations or unhealthy low-income housing and food deserts. The problem has not been corrected.

I recently read an article which disturbed me in one of the magazines I receive. It includes some very good illustrations of how money has been stolen from Black people by collecting taxes from them and then denying them the benefit of the taxes (equal education, full admission to all State colleges, redlining to exclude them from housing and – not mentioned – blocks against Blacks actually owning the banks). This is something of which we all need to be aware, and which is never taught in economics classes. However, the author calls for restitution in a way with which I disagree. He calls for direct payments to Black families from whites, whom he regards as thieves. “Yes, all white people.” Whites, he says, have benefited from things such as good schools paid for by Black taxes, and as such, all white people need to pay restitution. First, to be a thief requires the intent to steal. Our children and most common white people have no such intent; there is often even no awareness, not through the fault of these people, but through the fault of an accepted system. In addition, even though there is a certain poetic justice in stripping whites of money and benefits and giving those to Blacks, it simply reverses the racism; it does not correct it. The concept of racism still exists, even though the beneficiaries have changed. The concept of reparations also fails to include Native Americans and Hispanics and others who have been stolen from or repressed. The elite on the top still enjoy the wealth and power and still continue to plunder the system.

If we are to correct the system which has deprived many of us of opportunities and the means of healthy existence and the benefits of our labor and creativity, and which has blocked us from effective power to make the rules of the system, then it will take the efforts of all of us – Black and white, Native and Hispanic and Asian and Islamic and every other category into which the system has relegated us. We must work together as allies, not divided and arguing about who owes what to whom. We must put our experiences and intelligences together to create a new system that works for all who will participate, and which also supports the planet on which we live. We need to drop both the concept of race and also the idea that many still harbor that some people are better than other people and that we cannot trust those who are different from ourselves. We must also drop the concept that there is not enough for all and that we must compete, creating haves and have nots. It is a time for coming together and creating the new; it is not enough to attack the top and dismantle it. We must create a new way of being to replace what currently exists. This requires the cooperation of all of us.

Let us all look carefully at the assumptions and emotions that keep us apart, whether those be racism, fear, anger or even greed. Let us recognize these for what they are, lay them aside, and give ourselves fully to acting as a member of the human community. Let us build systems that work for all and hold in respect the Earth on which we live and the denizens with whom we share our lives. Covid-19 is not the real enemy; it is a mighty distraction attempting to protect what is by keeping us from uniting to do what we need to do. We do not have to be distracted.

Peace, Diane