What About Life??

I haven't added anything in here in a while, but this evening something grabbed at me and here is the result. I felt it was appropriate to post here as it is my own fiery opinionated view. My passionate grab at what would make for a better world, a wish list that might not be as good as it seems at the time I embrace it, and therefore part of my political and social profile, that part of us that truly shifts with our inner compass, gets tossed about by world winds and events:

Years ago my father repeatedly played a song "Little Boxes" - and I had no idea how much it influenced my life, but its theme recurs at various times again and again and again. (Listen to it here.)

I'll start with a quote from an article in a recent Framingham Patch which prompted this blog - on the revision of the MCCAS and PARCC testing for Massachusetts public school students; one regarding the vote to approve the revision of current standardized testing to a new standardized state assessment system:

“Their vote paves the way to a next-generation assessment that will be a better reflection of student achievement and, at the high school level, of readiness for college and a career.”

College and a career. Here is my shout.

What about life? Life? What in our public school system supports and prepares children to take on their lives? How do they develop the ability to tell when they are on the right track for them? How do they learn to pay attention to their own inner abilities and innate talents? How do they learn to follow their own path and express their own uniquely beautiful contribution into the world? Not from a system designed to produce factory workers. One focused on input and output, societal systems and making the uncomfortable shoe fit. One that says – oh play music alright, but have a career – and to do that, go to college. Congratulations on vomiting out another year of students who will take the next twenty years to discover that the paths they were taught to walk on are not the right paths for them. They are not the paths that lead to listening to their own inner voice and expressing their own gifts and talents into the world that so desperately needs them – they are the paths of … college and a career – something to make money with, not a life. Not a life.

Who teaches them about happiness, inner clarity, being in touch with who they are so in 25 years they will look back and be content, not careered? How many of you out there have changed careers? How many are truly happy with your careers? How many spent time and money pursuing that which is not what their lives are really about? How many have reinvented, and made a new life that works, financially and personally?? How many have paid the price of health and happiness in pursuit of college and career? What are we teaching – that we cannot do what we love and make money doing it? That we cannot be who we want to be, it’s not practical; it won’t guarantee financial success in life and college will? A big LIE.

Standardized tests are like the MDR’s (minimum daily requirements) in the vitamin world. They are the MINIMUM requirements for a pre-package life. They have been determined to be that which is needed to keep their recipients from death in the records, not support them in living. They are designed to make the current school system look like one that works. The only thing we can accomplish with predetermined testing is a child’s ability to fit into the standard “shoe” – absolutely nothing about what the child is capable of, nothing to do with how sensitive the child is to that capability and how supported they are in achieving it. Our system is broken. It makes broken lives. Ones that are ticky-takied onto the outside, harden and crack over time, disintegrating around the core human being inside somewhere down the road, which becomes the time when they really begin to live their own lives – or disintegrate personally trying to do so. Wouldn’t it be nice if we actually nurtured our children so they could navigate their own true course. Gave them skills instead of standards, support and opportunities to be individuals instead of psychotherapy and drugs to enable them to fit in, make the grade, ace the test…

We are in the throes of a generation sold on the marketing principle of the successful life. All god’s children go to school. All god’s children get good grades. All god’s children have careers. That is what parents want. That is what they have been told equals success. And so when the shoe does not fit we cut off a bit of the heel, or a toe….the real tale of Cinderella is how desperate her sisters were to fit into that which was not their shoe. God help us. God help our children, and preserve them from the lies we believe.
 

After the Show

A Thoughtful Recap - Sixteen Months After Ferguson 

I was just reading a thoughtful article about the unrest at Ferguson that referred to Protests as Theater. I love and agree with the idea that often to implement change, attention must be drawn to the need for that change. The world of art is frequently our societal expression for many issues, and honestly, I had never thought of a protest as theater, yet it is. Whether an organized event carefully planned or a momentary reaction that mobilizes a group, protest is for show. It broadens the sphere of an issue and takes it into the more rapid currents of the public interest from the private heartache of its perpetrators. In that sense conflicts and confrontations - any human eruption - like the volcanic and seismic activities of the planet itself - are about the process of producing change. Human nature is very much in sync with the rhythms of nature's nature. When forces build up beneath the surface, eruptions follow, re-shaping the landscape into a new format for sustaining the inner needs of both the planet and its humans. Destruction and reconstruction occur. The article goes on to state that the real work of change will now begin as the tumult of the past few weeks subsides. Once the show has been staged, the ground opened for new seed, the work of change will happen more slowly and substantially over time. Political processes will change. Accountabilities will change. Attitudes and tolerability will change. Behavior will change and so will the rules, spoken and unspoken. And there seem to be tides in human affairs as well. Ebbs and flows. Places where we are moving forward with new life and abundance, and places where life and abundance seem to be sucked out of the very land and people, by the changes brought on through our human eruptions.

What to do when all of this is reported and assaults our senses from every quarter? When the next disastrous happening hits the news and we are all embroiled in the minute to minute happenings of the latest tragedy? How do we handle the onslaught of information and make a positive difference without furthering the angst of the situation? How do we shift the energetic balance from one of negatively charged emotions to one of creative growth?

And here I stopped, stopped by my own question. I think this is one that I have to ask of you. Each of us is personally responsible for how we tip the scales on any issue. Sometimes we are part of the eruption, sometimes part of the reconstruction. In the longer overview, there is no particular good or bad about all this turmoil we experience, there is yin and yang, balancing and rebalancing into a new form, just like the earth that sustains us, the solar system that sustains the earth, the galaxy that sustains the solar system........

Written after the happenings at Ferguson I stumbled upon this unpublished blog tonight - a week after the attacks on our beloved Paris. Once again its message rings true. How we respond and build is our personal choice. May we be healers, restorers, builders. Namaste.

Christopher Columbus!

Well I did some looking around this morning and it seems there is a lot of controversy over the celebration of Columbus Day.

I am not a historian, nor have I studied both sides of this controversy in detail. I am painting with broad brushstrokes here.

There are of course two schools of thought – one says Columbus brought destruction, greed and death, domination and exploitation to the Americas. The other says he was a courageous explorer credited with opening up the Americas. 

Columbus’s dichotomy is a very human story. Five hundred years from now, how will our portraits hold up against the standards of time? Will they be a type of Dorian Gray composition, a dubious life painted over with the bright hopeful colors of what we wished to be, or perhaps the other way, painted as ogre-ish and ugly on the outside by others with no seeing or understanding of the softer truths of the heart inside? We tend to paint a picture of Columbus as evil villain or heroic explorer. Take your pick. Which Columbus would you like for your personal own? And will the real Columbus please stand up? 

The Columbus question can be argued ad nauseum:  his voyages to the Americas resulted in opening up and putting the continent on the map as a place of global interaction. A new set of nations and countries were brought into recorded history and entered the world stage as recognized players.

And in the course of that discovery there is the pure human horror of “man’s inhumanity to man” played out in the ugliness of the cruel exploitation and extermination of the indigenous peoples of the Americas.

This story, our story, the story of the Americas, is not an uncommon or unrepeated one throughout history. But we have highlighted this part of history in our home hemisphere for special treatment and attention. And rightly so. It is our side of the world, our responsibility to look at and learn from. Perhaps our heightening sense of awareness and social consciousness is fomenting the need to take a closer look at our societal behaviors and beginnings.  Countries, peoples and races have been overtaking other countries, peoples and races for all of our known human history. Brutal expungements of entire populations and species have been our unwitting trail of development in the huge panoply of the struggle for survival. Even before recorded history the archeology of a region reveals displacement and usurpment of another’s territory and right to live. Every single human is responsible for every single act, and every single human is part of a larger, societal mindset and force that operates through each of its members to preserve itself. 

Is Columbus a hero or a demon? Or both? Even if he was completely motivated by the lust for gain – remember he was funded to produce that for Spain – somewhere at his heart he had a big vision. And he worked desperately hard to bring it to pass. Winning the support of the monarchy in Spain was his huge break. Everything he had dreamed of and wished for suddenly had financial legs to stand on and wings to fly with. What a word to us who have big dreams, ones that in the depths of our hearts seem lustrous and noble, about the judgment of time and the incalculable effects of momentum and expansion upon a kernel of creative thought when released into the stream of the societal consciousness present at its day. 

Are we responsible for that very societal consciousness? You bet we are. Every tiny kernel of it is a thought, belief or action played out across millions of interactions every day. We are building it all the time, you and I – not our leaders, not our religions, not our economies – us, just us. We are the microcosm of the whole, like the atoms and molecules and cells in a body that determine its health, strength and direction. The whole is a reflection of the individual one. And so it does come down to

Christopher Columbus

Had a dream

All did not come out

As well, it seems

As the dreamer dreamed the dream.

And so we go

Along each day

Thinking we have no power

To sway

The direction of others,

Unknowing along the way

That we have sown the seeds

Of tomorrow today

Building a Case for War

One that is very poor

based on scenes seen before

A sad and paltry place

where words are used to encase

giving an unpleasant taste

to all that's said.

Its specter fills with dread

a place of sanity fled

before the rhetoric of war.

Geneva's conventions are by far

and most, including us, ignored.

Made at conflict's end to ensure

in retrospect, our sanctity of life

idealistic protectionism

sweetened good intentions

salted with hypocrisy

both time and expediency

and war

I cannot listen anymore

to why we should intervene

take upon ourselves another's world scene

Lead the charge of morality

tainted with complacency

giving away what is not ours

the lives of our young to preserve

our sense of dignity.

Let others bear the burden

of democracy themselves

take its reins upon their shoulders

put their youth to its presses

That we stand not alone

and first

in meaningless words

well rehearsed

as we push them off - pawns across the

world of our kingship

Protecting not the purity of life

but the vanity of supremacy

Building a case for war

When there is none.

This was written after President Obama's speech to the nation urging a strike in Syria a few weeks ago - before the budget brouhaha struck - I thought it timely on a Sunday morn of bloodshed overlooking the taking of an ounce of blood for an ounce of blood. When are we justified? What is our justification? Usually a religious source, used to create a sense of the rightness of an action that is essentially wrong. And how do we reconcile these goings on? An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth - all preachers should preach on that one this morning, and help us find a place of comfort in it. May you find peace somewhere today, a little bit of it - not the solace of its placebo, but a true step toward achieving it. 

Dzhokhar: Facing the Enigmatic Truth?

Michael Thurston/Agence France-Presse 

— Getty Images

Okay – I’ve heard about how upset we are at Rolling Stone for putting Dzhokhar Tsarnaev on their cover from every corner. Facebook posts, street protests, news articles and reports, even people actually talking about it!

But here – here! Listen – read – think for a minute about a point of view other than one that agrees with the particular emotional, and understandable, general public reaction. Let’s talk about another emotional reaction we are not as quick to face.

This kid’s face – this kid’s face – could be any of our children’s faces. His is not a hardened, easy-to-hate looking face. He was a student at our own UMass Dartmouth. He could be anybody’s son. That is the corker here.

We have seen countless faces of the victims, honored and mourned the lost, fundraised and supported the recovering. There is a huge effort going on to heal. And it will continue. But part of healing is dealing with the root cause, while healing the resulting damage.

We do not want to take a second look at the face of terrorism. We do not want to see an innocent looking young man’s face, look to see where this madness and pain came from and how it can hide so well behind the mask of normalcy. We do not want to be made to look at causes and roots so that we become more aware and better able to intervene and prevent. We do not want the responsibility of caring for society and our own safety and health by being involved and proactive when and where we are able to see risk. Let the “professionals” do that we say…and yet, the professionals do not walk the streets every day. Change does not come about from professional intervention, it comes from personal recognition. It is when the people on the street wake up and get involved and take responsibility for their future that we as a nation, town or community, change.

And so the need to understand and perceive, to look at this face once again and acknowledge it could be anyone’s child. To become familiar with the story behind the face. To be able to see the disgruntled, the lonely, the overwhelmed, the angry and in pain before they are at the point of explosion; and to be able to bring some healing, relief and help to those in silent screaming need before they seek self-expression and self-destruction through the destruction of others.

Look at his face. Pray for his soul, that it may not leave this earth in the same maniacal torment that expressed itself on April 15^th. And let us learn. Learn how to see lonely, unhappy, overwhelmed people and young people. Learn how to defuse the human bomb before it expresses itself in outward violence, mass shootings, terrorism and murderous hate. We have a lot of societal growing up to do and responsibilities to learn. Let’s not shy away from the reflection needed to assimilate the lessons being taught by these increasing incidents of mass violence. Incident response always includes a review process for the purpose of improved prevention. This is more than friends and relatives shaking their heads and saying they are shocked and don’t understand how this could be the person they knew. It involves the community, not just the family. And the first step is learning to see where we have been blind. Looking at what we don’t want to see; the simple young face of a boy who could be anybody’s son, and yet he killed and maimed many people. We need to be learning the signs and developing ways to defuse wounded souls before they explode, and then be willing, when it is our turn, to use what we have learned to relieve, heal and change the course before harm is done.

Let us look at Dzhokhar’s face once again with sorrow and compassion for the whole of society’s pain, both perpetrator and victims; read the story, search for answers, and make some changes in how we live our daily lives – not those of fear and self-protection – but changes of love and compassion that reach out and prevent the need for violent expression in others. Let us face and deal with the root of these horrible happenings and not turn away so quickly that we do not learn from them anything more than fear. Let’s fight terrorism on two fronts, inward and outward – through protection and prevention for all from any future instances, and by early recognition and compassionate intervention  for those who would be the source.

Mother - Gaia - Earth

As Earth Day dawns, cool and green,                            

with sun's soft sheen, sheets of clouds,
painted scene -
As birds trill softly their morning song
Let us remember times not long gone
of fear and pain and terror then,
soft morning dawns, welcoming again
a day of new beginnings....

Built into our very human nature is the need, once in every twenty-four hours, to go down into darkness and sleep so that we awake and arise again, fresh and renewed. We are creatures of cycles and renewal.

Today, Earth Day, is a day to honor our home, our planet; that space real estate, piece of celestial matter that defines us, literally forms us out of her substance, providing every molecule in our physical bodies and every molecule necessary for its sustenance and existence here.


In the small amount of Shamanic work and spiritual truth I have begun to learn and work with, I am told that Mother Earth, while she cannot take all our physical pollution and garbage and toxic waste, waits and wants to receive and thereby relieve and heal all our emotional garbage and pollution and toxicity.

And so this Earth Day, in honor of Gaia, I propose we release our personal garbage, our emotional pain, our hatreds, fears, anxieties, our negative energies and thoughts, to Mother Earth, who waits patiently for her children to give them to her.

How to do this? One quick and fairly easy way is to stand with your feet on the ground, or sit with your seat grounded and back fairly straight between earth and sky. Breathe in, imagining an opening in the top of your head at your crown chakra and pull in energy. Then flush it through your system, cleansing each energy center, the neural ganglia that physically make up your other chakra centers, by imagining clear light pushing through and out each center as you exhale and then finally pushing all the negative energy right down through your feet or seat and into the ground. Discharging and clearing your negative energies by giving them to Mother Earth today will be the biggest and best healing and present you can give her – and yourself. Once we learn to stop carrying garbage around in ourselves, we may even find a way to clear our physical garbage and release and restore Gaia herself by taking our rightful place in the beautiful order of the chaos of life!

Not sure of where your energy centers are? Check them out here:
http://www.tumblr.com/tagged/third%20eye%20chakra

Have a wonderful day of peace, honoring Mother, honoring your spiritual self, and that marvelous, intricate miraculous physical being comprised of all the wonders of the earth that you are walking around in today, your body. Namaste.

What We Stand For...

(I wrote this after the mid term elections two years ago; it's thoughts and plea stand for today, and tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow....)

One day after mid-term elections GOP announces goal,

Denying re-election.
If the shoe were on the other foot it would read the same way.
What a sad collection
Of oppositional delectation
We have gotten ourselves into

You’d think we could think this through

Beyond something more than next election day.
Maybe we need to go back to school
And re-learn how to play
Not by the rules – those figurehead tools
Of seeming to look correct

But really learning how to get along and share

And work with those who oppose
To bring about a compromise
Inclusive of diversity
Allowing freedom’s choice to be
Someone who thinks differently
Than me.

You’d think we could think this through!

Old Abraham said it best
Who wants a fine house once to build
Must not tear down the rest
Could we just for once instead
Concentrate on curing ills
By finding a way together?

Where is choice A and B without

The shouting match and clout
Of proponents spreading doubt
About the other view,
As if only one will do?

Can we not find our way through

To combining and forming a new
Path, wider than the last
Allowing different stories to exist?

What we stand for counts very much more

Than everything we oppose.
For when all is said and done
The victory’s been won
There’s nothing left to toast it on.

We’re led astray.

Distracted, re-directed

So as never to view clearly
The point we’re working to
But rallied to stand firmly
‘Gainst the one we disagree.

Once finished we’ve lost the sight

Because we never forward looked
Beyond the getting our way.
Victory is for today
The rest of us live tomorrow.
There is a better way.