Am I safe now?
Are we safe?
Is it safe to listen here?
To speak of over there?
Is Earth safe to sing?
Safe to dance with?
Safe for new birth?
To spin past romance?
Does life matter
if no one’s noticing?
Remembering?
If no one’s vocation
is to sacredly listen?
while all creation refills silent gaps.
Are we safe now?
Reborn silent angels,
angels of light,
pushing back this dark night.
The invitations are already out
for our local community dialogue
without need to shout or pout
about another straight white male monologue.
In fact,
as fiction,
we have taken a nearly unprecedented step
of inviting straight white males
over the maturing age of thirty
to show up in droves
to listen,
and not to speak.
Yes,
you have heard this invitation clearly
discriminating not against Business As Usual
but for Busyness as Listening.
Once we have our multicultural plan in place
for this local health racing space,
we may invite our silent witnesses
to share with us what they
and we, perhaps,
have learned
about wisdom voices of non-elites
fully empowered
while elite over-voiced microphones
remain reverently on mute.
Gratitude’s past grief
brief repast
When re-articulating grief
becomes transparently warm passion,
yet without terrifying overheated anger,
we are together filled with resonantly vulnerable sound
and traumatic sight,
Therein opens new possibilities,
avenues,
tides,
streams,
neurological highways
surfing for resiliently polypathic gratitude,
An experiential reminder,
a virtuous feedback loop,
in which daily reborn life intends love
extends above
down beyond,
deeply rooted within
all Other
awareness;
Grief of anciently fore-shadowed separation
to repair EarthTribe’s loyal gratitude.
Seems like advocates for cooperatively-invested dialogue
are concerned about indoor classroom experiences
that feel a lot more like debate
or merely academic,
detached,
cold analysis of win/lose evolutionary history,
in which might proves rightwing kleptocratic victories
while lefter democratic peace voices
fade into non-violent
non-verbal communications
just among our oh-so-tolerant lefty hugging selves.
I’ve been talking to our Faith Formation Director
about why Unitarian-Universalist Universities
are
and are not
appropriate educational dialogue multicultures
for any faith formation,
active hope reformation,
compassionate therapy development,
climate health rather than more climate pathology.
It seems that good faith formation
precludes bad lack of trust deformation,
disinformation,
egotistic debate cultures
where winners take all
and losers run off in search of some safer classroom.
For me,
outdoor classrooms feel safer
for win/win multicultural dialogue
between nutritionally communicating allies,
consuming and producing healthy natural elements
like richer soil,
cleaner water,
better air,
balanced ego/eco-systemic climates
where distinctions between wealth and health
are held collectively for further refinement,
and not hoarded autonomously
for further isolating definitions
into either-or thinking
without sufficient emotional intelligence
for both health and wealth of feeling.
Outdoor classrooms
endorse dialogue
about how ecology and theology,
like science and sentience
outside and inside,
refine good trusting faith formation together
more left and right hemispheric
rightwing and leftwing heuristic exploration
toward in-between mutually cooperative discovery
uncovery of win/win potentialities,
Rather than all that inside classroom
business as supremely left-hemisphere academic
egocentric
anthropocentric left v right debate
about whose cold calculating weapons
are best for overpowering warm organic tools
of Earth’s most polycultural producing healthy wealth.
Reforming left and right hemispheric dialogue
feels better,
naturally and spiritually,
holistically and holonically;
outside ecological relationships
forming good faith
of and for inside theological compassion.
I’m returning home
from a bag it yourself grocery,
and listening to an African-American novelist
respond to questions,
actual open-ended real NPR questions,
like old school inquisitive journalists once asked
before the polarizing days and nights
of fake right/wrong answer questions
and their concomitant fake avoid entrapment non-responses.
Anyway,
I don’t hear his name,
or the title of his latest published work,
although it may be The Water Dancer
but then again, maybe not.
You would think I would be too embarrassed
to courageously publish
this piece
so carelessly
unsystematically researched.
But, he says,
“We do not do well
to expect courageous behavior
from systems”
or something to that political and economic effect.
Thinking with him about the slavery/property-ownership system,
about capitalization and colonization and commodification systems,
my first response
is to celebrate
this profound and wise soundbite,
both quotable
and true to my own experience
of disempowering monoculturing systems.
But, then I think of several exceptions
to the cowardice incentivizing rule
of authoritarian systems,
Like wildly robust cooperative ecosystems
and even vulnerable volunteer ego-systems,
biosystems zealously loyal to win/win compassionate outcomes
without which we would have no language systems
or experience of courage
or cowardice,
integrity or fragmenting mendacity.
Yet, why does he so boldly say,
and why do I so instinctively and enthusiastically agree,
that systems produce win/lose compromising
servile
bureaucratic timid behavior?
Too often hidden shadows
lurking behind deliberate non-communication.
This free and brave individual
competing against an unhealthy craven society
is a plot line
that seems to go back to Adam and Eve
playing blame and shame
with their Great Systemic Gardener.
Then I realize
it’s not that organic systems are unsupportive of co-invested courage,
it is corporate systems,
monetized systems,
colonizing systems
extractive technocratic systems
producing commodification of secularized values,
reduced from sacred courage and integrity and health
Rather than inviting wealthy health values
into our responsive compassionate selves
working and playing in cooperatively owned
and managed,
responsible and authoritative,
nutritious and nurturing,
courageous and curious
flow systems of commonly-held ergodic energy
good healthy humor
vocations positive,
Invocations wealthy and robust
with co-inspiring witness
courage
listening and speaking unflinching compassion,
candor for self and other mutual health care
embodying interdependent Golden Rules
and zero ego/eco-ratio zones of co-acclimation.
Destroying curious and stressed systems
demands bad humored win/lose bullies
detached
careless
mindless
broken.
Creating resilient robust systems
invites good humored win/win courage
commitment
constantly changing curiosity.
As I write this, thousands of people are gathering to listen with each other, to sing, perhaps to dance more than walk in striking solidarity for climate health. I have been thinking of this moment, this event, this day, this strike on this sacred Earth all week. And, each time this gathering comes to mind, so does Cassandra Batie and Jennifer Decilveo’s 2016 anthem, “Rise Up.”
This variation on Batie and Decilveo’s lyrics I sing in tears of joy and deep sorrow with those who are on their way, drawing near toward the sound and sight of each others’ voices. I would love to join you in person, but old bones and heart and mind have learned that my climate anxiety flares into manic hope at such events, and then I pay the suicidal ideation price on my way home, feeling alone, hopeless.
I believe for every face and voice seen and heard at a Climate Strike gathering around the world today, there is at least another, and probably several others, with you in swelling heart, in passionate mind, in loving soul, but, like me, have learned that our Great Transition role, however resonant, will best remain resilient as we Rise Up on our front porches and back yards, in our forests and ocean shores, on our rivers and lakes, to sing to Earth’s tired trees, to dance to aching birdsong, to remember when we were young, more hopeful, more proud of what we can yet accomplish within Earth’s sacred solidarity.
Humbled now, this is dedicated to those more visible, to know we are millions already belonging together within this shared Great Transition, Great Turning, Great Reweaving with you; and with gratitude to Cassandra Batie and Jennifer Decilveo for Rise Up, embodied and well-sung hope.
I have been your living Earth;
I will live and die through you.
I will be your blood born sap;
You will live and die with me.
This Great Transition
into owning competitive responsibility
for climates of pathology and health,
inward and outward,
composed of all past energies,
small co-arising transitions
reweavings
regenerations
now contained in Earth’s soil,
Her rebirthing baptismal waters,
Her buoyant air,
Her fertile winds
and purging fires.
Earth’s broken down
and tired
of living love
on this unmerry-go-round,
And I can’t see Her lovers
but I hear life in you
so we gon’ rise Earth up,
Move mountains,
we gon’ walk love out
and heal oceans.
And we’ll rise up,
We’ll rise each Earth’s day,
We’ll rise up,
We’ll rise unafraid,
We’ll rise up
and we’ll love life a thousand times again;
And we’ll rise up
high like Earth’s waves,
We’ll rise up
in spite of life’s ache,
We’ll rise up
and give love a million times again,
For Earth,
For you,
Earth, for you;
When our silence isn’t quiet
and it feels like we’re growing hard to breathe
and we know Earth feels like dying,
Then I promise we’ll raise the Earth to Her feet,
Heal forests,
Bring Earth’s tribes to our feet
and move mountains.
All we need,
All we need is hope
And for faith we have each other,
And for peace we have each other;
And we will rise
we will rise
we will rise
we will rise,
We’ll rise like Earth’s day
We’ll rise up,
We rise unafraid,
We rise up
and we’ll love life a thousand times again,
And we’ll rise up
high like Earth’s waves,
We rise up
in spite of hate’s ache,
We rise up
and Earth does love a million lives again.
For Earth,
We will rise
we will rise
We will rise
for you,
Earth will rise with you.
Gardens,
like dreams
and other multiculturing complexities,
process
and sometimes progress into becoming ripe,
then unbecoming dormancy,
advent of and for regardening
redreaming seeds
preparing to further process
Perennial primal roots deepening into
new spring’s progressive attachment
network of polycultural dream garden nutrition,
aesthetic nurture,
ethical nature,
animating spirit of Earth’s co-arising life.
Eden’s original rising
and subsequent falling Garden
surrounds our GreenTribal Tree
of Ego/Eco-centering Life and WinterDeath.
The Creator’s forbidden foreshadow Tree
of Good and Evil
is a secondary,
yet divinely co-inspired, Tree
on our LeftBrain monocultural way
toward reducing Life to Good
and seducing Death through Evil–
Dreaming up and down
Win to Lose evolutionary models
and capitalism’s mono-atheistic further investments
in secularizing-commodifying Life
while spiritualizing accommodating Death;
praising win-win peace
while raising lose-lose Falls
re-enacting retributive divine greed,
detached disdaining injustice,
childish, perhaps adolescent at best, pettiness.
Evil, like Death,
is no more original
than the Great Fall and Eternal Winter,
whether we see and hear,
taste and touch
as divine Gardeners
or merely regenesis EarthTribal dreamers
of generic Spring uprisings
and Summer sensory climaxes
for Eden’s Tree of cooperatively original EcoLife,
and secondarily hibernating foreshadows of Ego-Death
Waiting
like an original Falling spring
for our ecofeminist deep green learning RightBrain
Rising Up
like a new spring garden,
like a dreaming root-systemic Tree
of GoodLife win-win cooperative processes
and EvilDeath lose-lose competitive climate pathology
of and for further revolutionary
divinely inspired creations,
re-creations,
evolutions and devolutions
in Eden Gardens,
regenerative and degenerative dreams
co-arising good and evil fruit
absorbed by ecofeminists
and devoured by patriarchs
Together
equally interdependent
in good life
through evil death
EarthTribal loyalty,
interdependent patriotism,
universal solidarity,
compassion,
love
Original humane/divine attachment
and secondary wealth detachment
and tertiary health regenesis.
I would feel our way
toward green restoring justice Earth
Designing integral peace
through Default Mediating Networks
remediating LeftBrain dominant
win/lose thoughts
sniffing toward retribution
before settling into stagnant
self-satisfied
smug silence,
substituting for cooperatively restoring peace.
My resolution opportunities
are as HUGE as my cognitive dissonance stuckness,
What competitive difference could I possibly not make,
pre-structure,
autonomously build,
perennially fight for
and against?
Bicameral Taoists assume
presume
consume
either/or intellectual
and both/and moral commitment,
thought, yet felt,
natural, yet spiritual,
ecological, yet theological,
polypathic, yet polyphonically robust,
most viralish resilient, when also virtuously resonant.
My deep twinned
twining
inter-regenerational natural spirit
demands win/win modeled responses
profoundly left/right bilaterally intersectional.
I find myself
a retributive justice victim
while planning to become
a restorative peace advocate.
My ego has problems
our ecosystem has pathology;
My egosystem finds warm wet wombed resolutions
our economic re-creations would win/win resolve.
My litany of personal care
sacred vocations
siloed intentions
each day
grows longer than
all my competing days
and cooperatively-held nights.
My rainbow communion
has a deliberate monocultural divestment cause,
shaped by centuries of left-brain patriarchal extraction
benefiting producers with greatest capital resources
for purchasing further empowerment.
This is ego-centrism
narcissism
denialism
fundamentalism
dualism
nihilism defined by alienated Other,
and capitalism refined by supremacist We.
My litany of dying places,
formerly sacred spaces,
now objectively and subjectively less healthy wealthed,
less integral,
more win/lose evolving
toward lose/lose devolution,
combine to predict climate failure,
within
as without,
ego-unhealthy
as eco-unwealthy.
I travel deeply within
uncovering my own complicit
explicit win/lose structures
of left-brain over-power,
self-authorization,
competitive organization
right-brain abusive
and degeneratively fragmenting EarthSoul
within without,
universally unitarian.
With courage
and curiosity
and more cooperative conviction
and commitment to interdependent dignity
equality
multicultural intersectionality,
I remain invincibly invisible
united within
and whereby
Energy’s vast universal democracy.
This story remains unfinished
as do all the best tales told.
Yet I must warn you
it has a happy ending,
not dystopian,
although not a finished
political utopia,
Ever After LoveLife.
Where this story begins
remains a mystery,
like a definition for “Tao”
more obscure than refining Yang
with Yin sublime co-relationship,
Which is, and is not,
equivalent with white and black,
and all curious colors in-between
masculine and feminist,
left-brain dominant strength
and right-brain prominent flow;
liberties egalitarian and freedoms interdependent,
powers and passions,
climates and cultures,
natures and nurtures
secular and sacred,
ego- and eco-systemic
wealth as health,
love as life…
I believe
somehow
this unfinished end
revisits our Green Sanctuary origins,
Earth as Eden,
Humane life as divine love
where Gaia danced with interior/exterior humane voices
long before humanity was a tremor in Her womb
of left-brain dominant verbal becoming retold history.
Whether such a vast stage of DNA origin,
hoary with memoried and imagined Time,
affluently historical
and effluently cultural,
this is,
or hopes to one day become,
The Greatest Story Not Ever Told,
if only because we have been so Business As Usual
win-losing recycling spirals
conjoining Alphas and Omegas,
great transitional beginnings
with endings not yet visible,
or even vicariously heard,
Not ever completing
all Win/Win interdependent co-relationships
TaoTime invites
offers
with compassion,
gratitude,
curious courage,
transparent vulnerability.
But, you were asking about New London
in particular place and time,
a Connecticut town of about 30,000,
home of the Coast Guard
and Pfizer
and a Unitarian-Universalist Center
everybody knows as All Souls
and most every multicultural body repeats
their logo,
“Where all Souls are welcome.”
Strangely enough
I think the GrantWriter
was from out of town,
without any long-term relationships in New London
government
or business
or our eclectic religious sector.
The GrantWriter:
Such profound disconnection
feels uncomfortable
discomforting
not comfitting
inappropriate
for growing deep and wide compassion roots.
So, I did what I do,
I wrote an unfinishable proposal
about how to grow a resiliently healthy love life
in and with and for New London,
about why we each and all need a new win/win cooperative theory
and practice
for regenerative climate development;
so also against degenerative overheated
and frozen anti-health development.
Too much of my own learning experience
emphasized the sterile science
and dyspeptic un-communioned arts
of grief about lose/lose monoculturing climate terror trends,
So what would the opposite polycultural outcomes
of such environmental disaster feel like?
Look like?
Taste like?
Sound like?
How would we reattach to sacred gratitude
as a win/win species?
Now living in side-by-side autocratic/democratic silo communities
wrestling with win/lose economic capital-hoarding competition models
for natural and spiritual and financial survival.
Where are our active gratitude models
for win/win healthy wealth optimization?
One day
listening to Pamela Sparr,
not New London talent,
but encountered in an All Souls reading circle book,
Justice On Earth,
we cooperatively evolved five steps
Out of Our Silos and Selves:
1) Propose a bolder win/win,
left/right,
ego/eco-balancing
prophetic resilient image
of a mutually compassionate ecopolitics.
2) Develop communally incarnated courage
multicultural curiosity
capacity to listen
naturally left and spiritually right
ego-eco-theo-logically taoistic nutritional.
3) Look for win/win gratitude experiences
outside our side by side religious sanctuaries
and inside organic health farms
of resiliently ego-masculine
resonantly eco-feminist communication.
4) Engage with radical outdoor Earth voices
for interdependent co-passion
building up and out
and down and in
multicultural communion.
5) Increase win/win
polycultural gratitude
for health/wealth inspired
co-refining secular/sacred experience
of cognitive/emotive
culture/climate transformation.
Note: First in a series of integral win/win cooperative health system proposals.
gdill52 