Capable of miracles

Even a short stay in the kingdom of Monsea puts you at the risk of being in the range of King Leck’s lies—and you don’t have to hear his voice for the lies to take hold in your mind. Contact with someone exposed to him, or even someone exposed to someone else who had contact with him, could affect your sanity—your ability to discern, question, and resist. The lies spread insidiously and virally, and soon, we are all in a state of trance, unable to see things for what they are. We ignore the small animals mysteriously injured and unable to heal. We ignore the indigenous communities, farmers, fishermen, workers, and homeless displaced, forced to migrate, impoverished, criminalized in the name of development. We ignore the deaths and beatings, the abuse and the institutional disrespect. We ignore communities living in fear and mistrust. We ignore the polluted waters and the disappearing species. We ignore the floods and the landslides. We ignore the signs, and we stop hearing and seeing everything that does not fit into the narrative that Leck wants us to hold.

It is easy to want to believe in the goodness and rightness of Leck’s story. For who really wants to hurt others? Who really wants their lives to be built on a foundation of lies?

We want to believe in love and goodness and honesty and fairness and equality—that there is compassion and soft landings and courage and joy and vitality and tenderness in the world. For this is who we are. Deep down inside, this is what matters to us. 

Perhaps this is why, in spite of the trance, it could be that we have slipped back into remembrance, across the always fuzzy borders of stories and consciousness—perhaps someone we love (the earth, ancestors, goddess) has been hurt or is in danger and that has jolted us back to wakefulness—to being able to see beyond Leck’s stories, and the pain in our heart is tremendous. How could we have allowed ourselves to be duped—to be taken over by the lies, illusion, trance—so utterly? What happened to everything that we have held dear about ourselves: our values of love, justice, truth, fairness, mutual respect, empathy, and grace? What happened to who we believe ourselves to be deep down inside—good people, good citizens, courageous humans? 

And what can we do now? What can we do to make sure that we are not pulled back and made instruments of a socio-economic-imaginal-moral order so completely unmitigated and vicious that it sees humans (and, indeed, all of nature) merely as chess pieces to be moved around and—in the name of ‘progress’ and ‘development’—kicked off the board? What can we do to ensure that those we love and care about (all of humanity, all of the earth, all of the cosmos) stay safe, cherished, thriving?

It is clear that those of us who can must continue to remember and speak the new story, birth it into existence, foster its interconnections. We must keep singing the sacred songs and trust that other voices will join us, that someone will hear us across the mountain and be moved or comforted, or lit up or ripped ablaze.

This conviction must be held in the face of all odds. 

It must be held in the face of all doubt, all uncertainty, all fear, because possibilities open up when we are able to stare the impossible in its face. As Marianne Williamson says, “miracles are summoned by conviction. Conviction can be seen as an attitudinal muscle that gives us strength to see beyond appearances and invoke the possibilities that lie there.”

Let us invoke the possibilities.

And one day, the newold story of love—as too the wings of our collective conviction—will become so sturdy, so strong, that together we will be able to lift the hunter’s trap-net with our courage, our love, and fly.    

Spirit of change / on being a gift & a giver

"…each person is the carrier of something that the village desires. The proof of this is in the fact of birth itself. A person’s coming into this world testifies to the fact that one is a giver." - Malidoma Some, The Healing Wisdom of Africa

Dear one,

This time at Auroville, I noticed a growing awareness that the projects and experiments here are no longer always the leaders within India when it comes to creating innovation in practices of sustainability. Which is wonderful, since it means that other parts of the country are beginning to want to participate in creating a systemic change.

Of course, in Auroville the imperatives of social, economic, and ecological change are seen as part of, and tied to, efforts towards the evolution of consciousness. That already makes the qualia of the experiments being carried out here different.

There is something else too. I’ve also heard people say about Auroville (as also about the Bay area) that it is a pity so much good effort and talent is concentrated here; that all this talent, all these gifts should spread out to the rest of the country rather than being amassed here.

But this assumes that only some are gifted while the others are not, that only some can contribute while others cannot.

This is one of humanity’s deepest wounds: the forgetting that we all are bearers of our own unique, individual gifts into this world.

Yes, all of India, the whole world, must shimmer with the beauty that individual and collaborative gifts, efforts, and contributions can bring; and perhaps Auroville is an exemplar, in a very small scale, of how things can be when everyone is seen as bearing a gift and capable of fulfilling a purpose, and allowed to do so.

I’m imagining a thick mycelial network of gift and purpose spreading through our communities, our several homes, in contact and play with the spirits of the place and ancestors.

Love,
M

Book Review: Wild Earth, Wild Soul

In modern culture, when we have forgotten the ways that once the ancients knew, we need books such as Wild Earth, Wild Soul: A Manual for an Ecstatic Culture to help us remember. I am reading this book through a second significant summer spent in India, the land of my birth, and have again and again found myself feeling utterly grateful to have such a wise, clear-eyed companion on my journey, a companion of the sort that urges us to form deeper relationships with all we encounter and with ourselves even as we traverse worlds, landscapes, cultures. It has reminded me that no matter where I am, I am not far from the medicine of Earth. 

Manuals for good living--with their pragmatic approach--make up a distinct genre, pointing to the values that are important for a cultural moment. Bill Pfeiffer's visionary manual is not just a delineation of exercises and activities for an ecstatic culture--although it is that too; rather, it is helping co-create, usher in the very world it is dreaming about. This manual does not want to tie its co-dreamers down to a particular way of doing things; rather, it is an invitation to participate, to play. It is an invitation to acknowledge the tremendous grief that so many of us feel on account of being disconnected from nature, from our indigenous selves. It is an invitation to compost this grief into the possibility of creating a life-sustaining culture.

The Wild Earth Intensives (WEIs) that Pfeiffer has been facilitating over the years model a contemporary rites of passage, and this book is almost an alchemical container where the principles, philosophy, structure, and practices comprising these workshops, which Pfeiffer beautifully elucidates, come together to become a powerful remembering of our interconnectedness with nature and with each other, of the sacrality of nature and of each other. 

This is a book that trusts our innate capacity to co-create with the creative intelligence of the cosmos--it trusts in our capacity to yet transform the stultifying, often violent dominant paradigm with its allegiance to rationalism, mechanism, and global capitalism. I am grateful to Bill Pfeiffer for having written this book--for having enough optimism and faith in human beings to have written this book--and I am grateful to all his teachers, all his communities, all his relations for having accompanied him in all that led to the creation of this book.

We are all cognizant of the urgency. Here are our edges. We need wildness, we need profound love, if we are to continue dancing on this planet. We need guides to help us find our way out of the morass of industrial culture. Here is a guide I will turn to over and over again.

Get it on Amazon

Occupy Consciousness: Essays on the Global Insurrection

Now available to download as an e-book: OCCUPY CONSCIOUSNESS: Essays on the Global Insurrection, an anthology from the Evolver Social Movement.

This visionary anthology, edited by Daniel Pinchbeck and Mitch Mignano, offers a variety of viewpoints on the nascent rebellion from writers such as Doug Rushkoff, David Graeber, Starhawk, and Russell Brand. Together these pieces offer an essential perspective on the true significance of Occupy – not a protest movement essentially, but a harbinger of a new way of being. Included is my essay, "Love as the Force of the Revolution: The Occupy Movement and Beyond" that originally appeared on Reality Sandwich.

Love as the Force of Revolution: The Occupy Movement and Beyond

The essay views the Occupy Movement as emblematic of a collective struggle wherein a paradigm based on fear is giving way to a paradigm based on love, and which has been making itself conscious in both the collective and individual psychic processes. It brings in Rupert Sheldrake's theory of morphic resonance to help us understand the transformations in the collective field, and brings to attention some ways in which love became a driving force within the Occupy movement, and the possibilities it opens up for radical critique.

Here is how I begin: 

Last year in May or June I realized that my political views were not quite what they used to be. It occurred to me that the words "Revolutions + justice" on my facebook profile were no longer adequate to what I felt was my politics. It occurred to me that love was a crucial element of politics, and I proceeded to add "Love" before "revolutions + justice". It felt like a radical act.

Read it here on Reality Sandwich.