Maria Arpa
This week
New Year’s Revolution
Plus…
Maria’s Midweek Mindfulness
and
the Wednesday Whisper
My two-penneth worth
This is my opening statement for 2019.
We need a revolution.
Not the ‘peasants with lighted torches’ burning effigies type.
No, a much more subtle one. It starts with a collective admission that the hierarchical, domination culture system that prizes logical thinking and scientific reductionism just hasn’t worked as well as we would have liked. In almost all aspects of humanity there are major flaws in what we have created that have resulted in many people (and other forms of life on the planet) paying a very high price for a few to reap some short term benefits. I’m not saying it’s all bad, I like that I can take an Ibuprofen to get rid of a headache; I like that I can choose my pillow and other comforts; I like that I can get on a plane; I like that someone with a missing limb can get a really good prosthetic. But when I think about poverty, the destruction of the environment, the poison pretending to be food, the crisis of refugees and so on and so forth (you can fill in more), I feel very uneasy about ‘keeping calm and carrying on’.
You see, once we admit that we have made a bit of a mess we will need to mourn what we have done before we can begin the depth of dialogue that it will take to create real sustainable change. And this will probably take a long time and in that time we may have to sit with the pain of not knowing what the answer is instead of inventing more things to solve problems that just create a different set of problems.
And to have those dialogues we need to throw out the idea of having a logical, evidence based debate. We will need to allow for intuition, mysticism, spirituality and empathy and human connection so that we can be more than the sum of the parts.
Explaining this to someone who has no experience of meditation and mysticism and who is heavily invested in the logical, scientific methods is like trying to explain an orgasm. It requires trusting enough to surrender. This means we need to offer people an experience they want more of. To do that we have to start with ourselves and ‘be the change’.
Maria’s Midweek Mindfulness
Sometimes I’m being the change I want to see in the world. Other times I fall very short. I’m trying to be as aware as I can of the gap.
The Wednesday Whisper
What does it take for you to be the change you want to see in the world?
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