THE BEING
I have found that a more equitable, safe, and sustainable world hinges on the interrelationship of personal evolution and ecosocial revolution. In the profound words of Karl Marx (introduced to me by way of Angela Davis), “Radical simply means grasping things at the root.”* To radically shift our systems, we share the duty of investigating our “selves” – our personal (hi)stories, upbringings, positionalities, experiences, and the subtle patterns of attitude, belief, behavior and choice that manifest alongside/within/as awareness.
We must be willing to get to our root – the conditions for our collective liberation rely on systems of domination being dismantled both externally and within the intimate terrains of heart, body, and mind. We deserve and owe one another a planet where we center, support and hold in reverence and love all who have been deliberately isolated from our systems, structures and psyches – be they members of our worldly communities or our inner family. As Glenn E. Martin says, “those closest to the issues are those closest to the solutions,” and this remains true for any inner and outer movement toward freedom.
My intention is to be carried through the many manifestations of Life by compassionate awareness, so that I may practice individual, communal, ecological and spiritual accountability in all of my affairs. I aim to remember (and forget, and remember again) – that is, to re-member: to the thread of intraconnectivity between all that is seen and unseen, known and unknown. Nothing – that is, literally, not one single thing, thought, experience, word, emotion, memory, dream, person, or place – happens without the ripe, formless soil of awareness in abiding symbiosis with these sprouts of expression. Have you also found that those distinctions between “inner” and “outer,” “subject” and “object,” “form” and “formless” get real fuzzy the longer we sit with that strange, haunting mystery of being alive?
And, ultimately, all of (my) language is tangled in the selfing processes of storytelling, ideating, believing, and imagining. Another practice that’s developing is to allow Knowing to deepen into and resource from that which is beyond my mental faculties.