Yesterday I caught up with a friend of twenty years. She asked me how I was doing. “Honestly,” I said, “really amazing, 2020 was one of the best years ever!”
“You’re like…THE ONLY ONE I’ve heard say that,” she said, a tone of incredulity underpinning her giggle. She went on to tell me of her difficulties of last year, her feelings of isolation, and struggles of mental health—A shared experience of so many of my friends in the “Northlands.”
I do tune into the collective. And I do feel the pain of it. And I endeavor to open myself to my own healing and the collective healing. But I remind myself not to take onboard pain that doesn’t belong to me and that pitying others is disempowering to them.
You can’t get around what you gotta go through. The only way to find the light within is to wander bravely through the darkest corners of your consciousness.
So why was 2020 such a beautiful year for me?
Personally, I feel it’s a testament to a path of grateful acceptance life has placed me on.
On my path, and in my personal practices, I’ve come to strive to not look outside for my fulfillment. I’ve learned that taking care of yourself is important and that this is only meaningful when you do it with the intention of using your fulfilled self to be of service to help others.
The Dalai Lama said, “It’s when we don’t have someone to care for that we truly sink into our own personal misery.”
Even before Corona, we were a country on the edge, the next big problem poised to push us over. Nearly 20% of people have it so bad that their doctor has placed them on psychiatric medication.
The Corona virus was and is a huge problem, but it was not The Problem. It was the fact of how we collectively responded to it. And this comes from who we are, how we think, and how we live.
As a collective we feel alone and as individuals we’ve been told it’s a good thing to go it alone, to be “self-reliant.” It is a good thing—but this sentiment needs an asterisk and a wise understanding or it will lead us charging into a brick wall. We cannot be a healthy community on that on our own. It takes a village to raise a village.
American Roots, International Wings
As an American who’s spent most of the last 14 years out of the country, I’ve come to on very rare occasions, and only after 11pm, call my homeland “the land of the angry opinions.”
It’s just that–well we call no but don’t really talk about it—People are so tightly wound here in the red, white, and blue. People hella stressed up in here. It’s palpable–in the air we forgot we were breathing.
As a people, we have more wealth and prosperity than any people have ever had. And with that advantage we overeat, we zone out in front of our TVs, we get offended by small things, we use sacred religion as a wedge to separate others as less than us, we mock others and call it humor, and we spend enough on makeup to solve world hunger and children dying from curable disease. We are at such “dis-ease” in our minds, we need a constant consumption of distractions.
We’ve developed our minds to a level of great sophistication, but lost our hearts. Where I’m from, herds of millions of bison have been reduced to herds of a few hundred, protected in fenced lands–
no longer free. The prairies I grew up on have little left of what once was just 100 years ago—bears, antelope, moose, elk, black footed ferrets, and wolves—all gone.
Now we have whitetail deer, whose populations become too great without human help. This is what we are doing to our world because collectively we are not at peace.
And any culture that causes this is not one I will call my own. I’m of it, but will not buy into it. I was born into it, but I do my utmost to opt out of the personal worldviews and ways of living that collectively amounts to destruction of the earth due to the diseases of our minds.
The Key to our Collective Healing
And here’s the key—to our individual healing and collective healing—if we only see the tragic dynamics play out in our world without recognizing how we unconsciously play into it, we will never have the real story—we will feel as victims without a way to save ourselves. But we are in charge of what’s inside and are the only ones who can decide to re-pattern our mind to create a more peaceful way of being.
What Is Broken Within Us
If we begin to see clearly how unconsciously humanity currently inhabits the world, if we can identify what is broken within and work to remedy from there, this is how the world changes, when we change ourselves. Take heart that you are not alone. Together alone, alone together, is where we need to do this work.
Waking up and Reaching In
Adyashanti writes, “Spirituality is about waking up, reaching in, finding, and identifying the things that are unconscious within you—things that you don’t want to see or deal with.”
So that’s where the real work begins. Inside. And that’s where it ends. And that’s where your peace will be found. We cannot change the world, but we can change our view of it. We can alter our course within it. We can walk more gracefully, more gratefully, more gladly through it.
The Wolves Will Return
The “wolves returning” is an evocative motif invoked within present day North American Native People. Evocative because when we capture the metaphor we not only feel it, but we believe it, we see a pack of wolves racing through the woods to reclaim their homelands.
Within the wolves returning is this: The belief that one day we the humans will live in such a way that the environment will return to the way it was set up to be. The wolves will return and their howls will reclaim the starlit nights.
Braiding Sweet Grass Together
Robin Wall Kimmerer in her must-read book Braiding Sweetgrass writes, “We make a grave error if we try to separate individual well-being from the health of the whole.”
So that’s one of the ways we’ve gone astray, this incessant “self-grasping” as the Buddhists call it—holding onto our lives and what we want as if these lives were lasting. All that rings eternal to me in this life are the kind,
loving, greater-than-self acts we preform.
If we want to feel at home on earth, we will need to treat it like a loving home.
Kimmerer writes, “Becoming indigenous to a place means living as if your children’s future mattered, to take care of the land as if our lives, both material and spiritual mattered.”
She continues to say, “It’s not just the land that is broken, but more importantly our relationship to land.”
So we have some tweaks to make on the societal level. Individually we need to all figure out this job/money/no-time-to-vacation-and-drink-tea-and-watch-the-damn-sunset situation and collectively we need to figure out this killing the earth, self-interested elites ruling over us, and everyone having nuclear weapons pointed at one another situation.
It might mean simpler living. Maybe taking less pay and having more time. Maybe figuring out who we need to forgive and endeavoring to bring that forgiveness into fullness in the heart. Maybe it’s time to start gardening as a way to connect with the earth. It might mean less time on screens and more time looking up at the stars. The greater simplicity in life, the greater we delight in small things. If you’re wondering where to begin, you already have.
When the World Changes, Change with It
I had extensive travel plans for 2020, and what a relief I found in relinquishing them. Having my own property to develop, I found life was placing me in a place I hadn’t put myself in a decade—staying still, planting gardens, making space to inhale life at a slowler pace. Still setting my eyes to the horizon, but delighting in each step of the way. Part of this journey is about choosing joy in spite of whatever reasons the mind manufactures to feel fractured. It doesn’t matter what anyone has done to you, it matters that you can find the peace of forgiveness in the face of it.
Count me Amongst the Believers
Count me amongst the believers that together we can remake our lives and transform the world. Why not believe that this is just a horrible stage we’re all going through as a humanity? Why not choose hope in the face of a future we don’t know.
We have the solutions and clearly the desire. The wolves returning are both emblematic of the shift and ominous of it.
The scope of our issue may seem the size of an island of garbage the size of Texas floating in the ocean, but we are still a young culture coming to terms with the destruction our collective drives have done. I believe in us and you because I believe in myself. As an African proverb has it, “I am I because we are we.”
Whatever this thing called life really is, we are in it together. May we support each other on these journeys back home to the heart.
*** Hi friend—Thank you for stopping by my blog. You can support me and my writing my checking out my latest book “All the Beloved Known Things“ Or check out my book of non-fiction travel adventures, “The Nomad’s Nomad“
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