THE BEING
It is my deep belief 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 or 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 becoming 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. As Glenn E. Martin says, “those closest to the issues are those closest to the solutions,” and this remains true for any effort towards inner/outer freedom.
My intention is to be carried through the many manifestations of this 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 threads 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 nurturing these sprouts of expression. Have you also found that the borders between “inner” and “outer,” “subject” and “object,” blur the longer we sit with that strange, haunting mystery of being alive?
While much of my language is tangled in stories, ideas, beliefs, and imagination, another practice that’s developed is to let knowing deepen and ground beyond what I can grasp with my mental faculties.