2020
Let It Be a Time to Rise…
I wrote this piece a few weeks ago, before George Floyd needlessly lost his life and the whole world got on its feet Crying for justice and meaningful change. I feel hopeful and even more convinced that this year and all it has brought us is adjusting our vision. It has pushed us to our knees in unified prayer and sobriety so we can save our planet and what is left of our humanity.
These are trying but fertile times. I have been roaming the school hallways of the likes of Dr. Wayne Dyer, Thich Nhat Nanh, Marianne Williamson as well as Gabby Bernstein and other beautiful disciples of the greats, meditating my way to peace and contentment. Returning to Love, shedding the scabs of fear and tending to many wounds that still need healing....
The truth is, we are individually responsible for our own healing and must tend to our own gardens. Echoes of our individual healing when multiplied have a great collective, long term impact on healing of the world. Most days, most of the time , this is all I wish to talk about. But not today. We need more than individual spiritual awakening. We need more than individual anything right now and perhaps always have.
One of my favorites, the late Dr. Dyer would say that there is a time for everything that we are going through. A time for sunrise and a time for sunset. A time to meditate and allow and a time to take an inspired action. There is a time to flow with the stream and a time to get in the boat with your neighbors and make it a country-effort to rise.
This moment in time has brought to the surface all the gaping wounds of our world, our society and our neighborhoods. Some have been waiting to be tended to so long, our communities, cities and villages are shaking from pain in blisters. War zones, not in my country. Death and gun violence. Not my race. School shootings…Not my town. How much longer and what do we need to witness to understand — it is all our race, our country and our town? Will an indiscriminate virus do?
Freedom... It is the most profound human need and nowhere is it as loudly and often as casually and misguidedly voiced for as here, in this country.
Let’s be clear. It does not burn within all of us because we came here to acquire and earn it. We came through and took our first breaths exquisitely molded by and to freedom to be. Our deep desire is nothing but a cry to retrieve the bloodline to a sacred purpose, the very breath of our existence. Though integral building block for each and every one of our full expressions and unique manifestations of love and grace, too often freedom materializes as no more than a superficial bumper sticker reality.
Many of us enjoy it casually, unaware, like the air we breathe armored by our light skin and European features... So casually that even so we are fooled daily, losing it inch by inch distracted with toys and false sense of security resting on credit cards and wars fought in distant lands. As false and superficial as it has realized itself, freedom has often come at the expense of too many whose armor is brown, threatening in the truth of their story and power it carries.
There is nothing like an ill intention to create a grotesque caricature out of beautiful ideals crucial for our existence and survival. Until our intentions are adjusted by the trials of our times each and every day hitting closer to home, acquainting us with the suffering of all that part take in breathing and feeding life on this planet, our victories will fall flat. We will continue to lose more of what we claim to be fighting for.
Yes. I have to tend to my own garden and you to yours. Our times however, have strongly illustrated that we also need to look after gardens of others; encourage and bolster the vision today and always that we are all one race, one country and one town.