Rachel Naomi Remen: Our Purpose In Life

 The Beautiful Wisdom of Rachel Naomi Remen

Helping, fixing, and serving represent three different ways of seeing life. When you help, you see life as weak. when you fix, you see life as broken. When you serve, you see life as whole. Fixing and helping may be the work of the ego, and service the work of the soul.

There are only two kinds of people in the world. Those who are alive and those who are afraid. 

Wounding and healing are not opposites. They're part of the same thing. It is our wounds that enable us to be compassionate with the wounds of others. It is our limitations that make us kind to the limitations of other people. It is our loneliness that helps us to to find other people or to even know they're alone with an illness. I think I have served people perfectly with parts of myself I used to be ashamed of.

Perhaps the most important thing we bring to another person is the silence in us, not the sort of silence that is filled with unspoken criticism or hard withdrawal. The sort of silence that is a place of refuge, of rest, of acceptance of someone as they are. We are all hungry for this other silence. It is hard to find. In its presence we can remember something beyond the moment, a strength on which to build a life. Silence is a place of great power and healing.

Many times when we help we do not really serve. . . . Serving is also different from fixing. One of the pioneers of the Human Potential Movement, Abraham Maslow, said, "If all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.' Seeing yourself as a fixer may cause you to see brokenness everywhere, to sit in judgment of life itself. When we fix others, we may not see their hidden wholeness or trust the integrity of the life in them. Fixers trust their own expertise. When we serve, we see the unborn wholeness in others; we collaborate with it and strengthen it. Others may then be able to see their wholeness for themselves for the first time.

Everybody is a story. When I was a child, people sat around kitchen tables and told their stories. We don't do that so much anymore. Sitting around the table telling stories is not just a way of passing time. It is the way the wisdom gets passed along. The stuff that helps us to live a life worth remembering.

When we know ourselves to be connected to all others, acting compassionately is simply the natural thing to do.  

Life offers its wisdom generously. Everything teaches. Not everyone learns.

Healing may not be so much about getting better, as about letting go of everything that isn’t you - all of the expectations, all of the beliefs - and becoming who you are.  

Perhaps wisdom is simply a matter of waiting, and healing a question of time. And anything good you've ever been given is yours forever. 

Our purpose in life is to grow in wisdom and in love.

For more, please go here:

http://www.rachelremen.com/ 

 

Nora McInerny: We Don't "Move On" From Grief. We Move Forward With It

The story and wisdom of Nora NcInerny touches my heart so deeply. Tears. There is such deep wisdom, compassion, nourishment, and empathic understanding here. Thank you Nora!

Her story also touches into mine... 

When I was 24 years old and just five months after moving to Oregon, my father died suddenly on November 13th, 1975. He was 60 years old. At that time, I had no understanding of or support for the process of grieving. That night I also believed that I'd lost my whole family ... My father had died. I also knew in my deepest self that my dad had been the only one keeping my brother alive and that my twin would end up committing suicide — which he did just over two years later. And I felt like I'd lost my mentally ill mother forever after she called to say my father was dead and, in the same conversation, bought up everything she deemed horrible and unforgivable in me, refused to have me come home (to Michigan) unless I wore all the "right clothes" and cut my hair, and then slammed the phone down on me. I thought my mother had finally and completely rejected me for good on the same night that I learned of my father's death and realized that my twin brother would end his life sometime sooner than later. I allowed myself to cry that night for the loss of my whole family. Then, in the morning, I thought it was time to "move on."

Of course, nothing could be further than the truth. In our grief phobic or grief impaired culture, it is common for us or for our well meaning friends and family to believe that at a certain point we simply need to move on, let go, focus on the positive, and get on with our lives. This was certainly my belief system for years. However, this TED Talk illuminates what I recognize today to be a much deeper truth and reality — that we do not move on from great losses. However, if we open to the fullness of our grief, in time we experience a process where we are able to move forward.

Over the years, moving forward has indeed come to mean living with both sorrow and joy. My heart will always hold deep love, compassion, and grief for the losses of my twin, my father, and my "first mother" (the one who had been so brutal before the partial awakening of my "second mother"). While these losses and others are not as acute as they once were, I am conscious of how grief and joy are my companions in life. They are part of who I am and simply part of the human experience of us all. It is also true that while my losses do not define me, it is also true that all of my life experiences have brought me to this place in my life where I am today — on this amazing journey of ever expanding gratitude and joy, intimacy and deep connections, vulnerability and courage, compassion and empathic awareness, and deepening and abiding love. None of the great gifts that I experience in my life today would be possible had I not broken through "moving on" and embarked on the path of moving forward.

Our wounds are indeed where the light gets in. And joy and sorrow are inseparable — we cannot truly know joy without befriending our grief. Paradoxically, I have found an even greater capacity to be more fully alive after great loss. Such is the potential gift of grief for us all.

With heartfelt compassion and warmest blessings,

Molly 

Please watch the TED talk here:

 We Don't "Move On" From Grief. 

We Move Forward With It.

In a talk that's by turns heartbreaking and hilarious, writer and podcaster Nora McInerny shares her hard-earned wisdom about life and death. Her candid approach to something that will, let's face it, affect us all, is as liberating as it is gut-wrenching. Most powerfully, she encourages us to shift how we approach grief. "A grieving person is going to laugh again and smile again," she says. "They're going to move forward. But that doesn't mean that they've moved on."
 

David Korten: A 21st Century Economics for the People of a Living Earth

This is such an excellent piece. It's hard to describe my respect, gratitude, and love for David Korten, who has long been among my many cherished teachers and inspirations. He is also among the treasured living Elders of our nation and the Earth. For years now I have been reading his books and articles, seeing him speak whenever possible, and absorbing David's wisdom, integrity, courage, truth-telling, consciousness, vision, and love of our Earth and all of life. Another world is truly possible. And the greater our understanding of the problem, the greater our potential to be part of the solution. Through these times of so many challenges, heartbreaks, and horrors, I have found it deeply helpful to turn to those who can gift us with pieces of what our potential is and what it is that we can work together to create. We are all needed in this Great Turning, this Great Awakening we are part of. May we each cultivate and expand on whatever it is that we have come here to do on behalf of ourselves and our loved ones and also to contribute to the greater well-being of the whole of life. — Molly

With David Korten, Green Festival, Seattle, WA

June 19, 2019, Revised Version
(This working paper was written by author, independent scholar, engaged citizen, and former Harvard Business School professor, Dr. David Korten, as a contribution to discussions framing a new economics for the 21st century. It may be freely shared in whole or in part. The first version of this working paper was posted May 23, 2019.)

An economics for the 21^st century will guide us from an economy that empowers corporations in the service of money to an economy that empowers people in the service of life.

Voices from every quarter—from student activists to the Vatican—are stepping forward to call for an economy that serves the well-being of people and Earth. Workers and their unions join in with the wrenching observation that “There are no good jobs on a dead planet.” Pope Francis condemns an economy devoted to the “idolatry of money.” China has amended its constitution to commit to an “ecological civilization.” The Declaration on Climate Change of the Parliament of the World’s Religions embraces a future it also calls an “ecological civilization.”

A global alliance of citizen movements has banded together under the banner of WEALL to work for an economy devoted to the well-being of people and planet. New Zealand has announced a new budget that puts the focus on growing well-being rather than growing GDP. The Club of Rome, a global alliance of new paradigm thought leaders, has launched initiatives on the climate crisis, a new civilization, and reclaiming economics. Rethinking Economics, a global student movement demands reform of economics seminars that rarely mention poverty, climate change, or inequality. A youth-led political movement in the United States calls for a Green New Deal.

These voices and more affirm a spreading awareness that humanity is on a path to self-extinction. More and more people are competing for less and less in a world in which power and wealth are increasingly concentrated. A viable human future requires deep transformation of culture, institutions, technology, and infrastructure guided by a new economics grounded in indigenous wisdom, the Earth Charter, Pope Francis’ encyclical Laudato Si’, and the Declaration Toward a Global Ethic of the Parliament of the World’s Religions.

The Imperative

By the estimates of the Global Footprint Network, the human species currently consumes at a rate 1.7 times what Earth’s regenerative systems can sustain. Any level of consumption over 1.0 means we are destroying Earth’s capacity to sustain life—thus putting the human future in peril. Our existence and well-being depend on the systems by which Earth maintains the health of the soils that produce the foods we eat, the waters we drink, the air we breathe, and the stability of the climate that shapes the daily life of every living thing.

As the environmental crisis unfolds, financial wealth and political power become ever more concentrated in the hands of fewer and fewer. Six humans now hold personal financial assets greater than those of the poorest half of humanity. That is 6 individual humans vs. 3.9 billion. In consequence, billions of people face a desperate struggle to meet their daily needs for food, water, and shelter while a few lavishly indulge themselves beyond the dreams of history’s kings and emperors.

Meanwhile, environmental and social breakdown render ever more of Earth’s places uninhabitable and drive growing millions of desperate people to abandon their homes in search of refuge in the world’s remaining livable places. The United States—a desired destination for many—has its own livability problems. For one, with more billionaires than any other nation, its richest 1 percent own substantially more wealth than the bottom 90% and 4 out of 10 adults don’t have enough spare money to cover a $400 emergency.

The deepening contrast between the promise of economic progress and the reality of growing hardship on a dying Earth explains the falling legitimacy of humanity’s most powerful institutions and the widespread appeal of political demagogues to a disillusioned public.

The Failure of Mainstream Economics

The economic theory known as neoliberalism that became the global standard for national and global economic policymaking in the mid-20^th century had a major role in guiding humanity into its current existential crisis. That same theory now poses a major barrier to navigating a global course change.

Economics lost its way as an intellectual discipline in the mid-19^th century when a group of influential economists sought to raise it to a stature comparable to physics. To that end, they borrowed a mathematical model from physics as the foundation of future economic theorizing and chose money as a readily available metric.

Thus emerged a school of economics for which making money is the economy’s defining purpose and GDP growth is the defining measure of economic performance. In the mid-20^th century, this school became mainstream economics.

Unfortunately for people and Earth, its theories were based on assumptions contrary to reality…

Continue reading (and/or download the PDF) HERE… 

Please go here for the original: https://davidkorten.org/a-21st-century-economics-for-the-people-of-a-living-earth/

Here's What Neoliberal Democrats Who View Bernie Sanders as an 'Existential Threat' Have Yet to Realize

An excellent, illuminating, and deeply important article that I hope will be shared far and wide. Let us all work together to change the narrative and reclaim the Democratic Party from the huge financial interests which have overtaken it. Let us think bigger than "anyone but Trump" and instead work together to truly be a government and a nation that is of, by, and for the people and the planet. This is what all of the children everywhere and all of Earth's inhabitants are needing from us, no more and no less. — Molly

 

A centrist candidate—which, let’s be honest, means one who is beholden to the uber rich and corporations—cannot and will not address these truly existential issues.

By

John Atcheson

Over the past few days, the mainstream Democrats’ war on Bernie Sanders has come out of the closet.  Recent articles in Politico and the Guardian, detail how centrist organizations like Third Way have been pushing the narrative that Sanders is unelectable.  The reason, according to Third Way leaders and other neoliberals, is the dreaded label of “socialist.”

There’s two things wrong with this premise.

First, Sanders has been a nationally known figure since 2015, and the label hasn’t hurt him much. He still polls better against Trump than any Democrat except Biden—and they're essentially tied at the moment in a race with Trump. And make no mistake, with Biden’s record of coddling Wall Street and big banks, backing the Iraq War, and a history of racist and sexist remarks, it’s Biden who is frighteningly unelectable.  He’d face the same fate as Hillary Clinton in 2016 if he got the nomination, because the vast majority of voters hold more progressive views and a centrist candidate just can’t generate the turnout Democrats need to win.

Yes, Republicans and a few older folks see the term “socialist” as a non-starter, but more people view capitalism negatively and many young people see socialism as a positive. Sanders himself has done a good job of defining exactly what democratic socialism is, and it lines up well with what voters say they want.

But the second thing that reveals how wrong the centrist neoliberals are, is that, until 2018—when Democrats were more progressive and the Party ran more progressive candidates—they’d been losing ground for nearly five decades. In the 1960’s about half of all voters registered as Democrats—today that number is only about 29 percent.  As recently as 1978, Democrats controlled both legislative branches in thirty-one states, while Republicans had majorities in only eleven.

By 2016 Republicans controlled both legislatures and the governorship in twenty-five states, while Democrats control all three institutions in just six states. Nebraska, which has a unicameral, nonpartisan legislature, isn’t counted in this total.  Meanwhile, thirty-four states have a Republican governor, while only fifteen are headed by a Democrat, and one—Alaska—is headed by an independent.

This losing trend directly parallels the Democratic Party’s drift to the center and then to the right. As groups like the Democratic Leadership Council embraced corporatism, and ran from New Deal and Great Society values, the Party lost ground.

In short, Democrats are on the verge of an existential crisis, but it’s centrism that is causing it.  In fact, in many ways Trump may be saving them.  He is so abhorrent and so manifestly unfit for the job, that enough people may turn out to vote him out to give the Democrats a victory.

But that’s not certain, and it’s far different than winning with a mandate in any case. And the country desperately needs a progressive mandate right now.

We as a country are sleepwalking into Armageddon.  The twin horsemen of the new apocalypse are ignorance and hate.

We are facing a real crisis—perhaps an existential one—in the form of the climate change, and it’s closer and more serious than we’ve been led to believe.

We have a press which thinks that covering both “sides” of a debate is more important than divining the truth behind the debate.  Balance has replaced accuracy, truth, data, and facts as the media’s polestar.  As a result, morons get equal time with sages.

We are seeing economic and political power concentrated into fewer and fewer hands, as corporations merge at a record pace, and wealth and income gets increasingly concentrated at the very top of our society.

Please continue this article here: https://www.commondreams.org/views/2019/06/23/heres-what-neoliberal-democrats-who-view-bernie-sanders-existential-threat-have-yet

The Deep Love and Transformative Wisdom of Grace Lee Boggs

(It is time to share this post from one year ago again...

and again and again...)

I really cannot express how much I love this woman

and how deeply she has inspired me. Her legacy lives on! 

Deep bow of gratitude for Grace Lee Boggs. 

May she inspire us all. — Molly 

"I think people are really looking for some way 

whereby we can grow our souls 

rather than our economy."

You cannot change any society unless you take responsibility for it, unless you see yourself as belonging to it and responsible for changing it. 

I think that deep in our hearts we know that our comforts, our conveniences are at the expense of other people.  

People are aware that they cannot continue in the same old way but are immobilized because they cannot imagine an alternative. We need a vision that recognizes that we are at one of the great turning points in human history when the survival of our planet and the restoration of our humanity require a great sea change in our ecological, economic, political, and spiritual values.

To make a revolution, people must not only struggle against existing institutions. They must make a philosophical and spiritual leap and become more 'human' human beings. In order to change and transform the world, they must change and transform themselves.

We never know how our small activities will affect others through the invisible fabric of our connectedness. In this exquisitely connected world, it's never a question of 'critical mass.' It's always about critical connections.

A revolution that is based on the people exercising their creativity in the midst of devastation is one of the great historical contributions of humankind. 

Love isn't about what we did yesterday; it's about what we do today and tomorrow and the day after. 

Being a victim of oppression in the United States is not enough to make you revolutionary, just as dropping out of your mother's womb is not enough to make you human. People who are full of hate and anger against their oppressors or who only see Us versus Them can make a rebellion but not a revolution. The oppressed internalize the values of the oppressor. Therefore, any group that achieves power, no matter how oppressed, is not going to act differently from their oppressors as long as they have not confronted the values that they have internalized and consciously adopted different values. 

History is not the past. It is the stories we tell about the past. How we tell these stories ― triumphantly or self-critically, metaphysically or dialectally― has a lot to do with whether we cut short or advance our evolution as human beings.

The natural tendency of children is to solve problems, but we try to indoctrinate them with facts, which they are supposed to feed back, and then we fail them. And that's child abuse. And you should never raise children that way. You should cultivate and encourage their natural tendencies to create solutions to the problems around them. 

How do we redefine education so that 30-50 percent of inner-city children do not drop out of school, thus ensuring that millions will end up in prison? 

We urgently need a paradigm shift in our concept of the purposes and practices of education. We need to leave behind the concept of education as a passport to more money and higher status in the future and replace it with a concept of education as an ongoing process that enlists the tremendous energies and creativity of schoolchildren in rebuilding and respiriting our communities and our cities now, in the present. 

I think we’re not looking sufficiently at what is happening at the grassroots in the country. We have not emphasized sufficiently the cultural revolution that we have to make among ourselves in order to force the government to do differently. Things do not start with governments. 

Keep recognizing that reality is changing and that your ideas have to change. Don’t get stuck in old ideas. 

Rebellions tend to be negative, to denounce and expose the enemy without providing a positive vision of a new future... A revolution is not just for the purpose of correcting past injustices, a revolution involves a projection of man/woman into the future... It begins with projecting the notion of a more human human being, i.e. a human being who is more advanced in the specific qualities which only human beings have - creativity, consciousness and self-consciousness, a sense of political and social responsibility.

Nonviolence is based on recognizing that all of us are human beings. And at a certain point we begin to learn that you don't gather very much by making enemies out of people and not recognizing their humanity. Nonviolence is essentially based on recognizing the humanity in every one one of us. 

Talk and write in a way that encourages the mutual exchange of ideas and acts like a midwife to people birthing their own ideas. 

We urgently need to bring to our communities the limitless capacity to love, serve, and create for and with each other. We urgently need to bring the neighbor back into our hoods, not only in our inner cities but also in our suburbs, our gated communities, on Main Street and Wall Street, and on Ivy League campuses. 

The only way to survive is by taking care of one another.  

We can begin by doing small things at the local level, like planting community gardens or looking out for our neighbors. That is how change takes place in living systems, not from above but from within, from many local actions occurring simultaneously. 

Building community is to the collective as spiritual practice is to the individual. 

When you read Marx (or Jesus) this way, you come to see that real wealth is not material wealth and real poverty is not just the lack of food, shelter, and clothing. Real poverty is the belief that the purpose of life is acquiring wealth and owning things. Real wealth is not the possession of property but the recognition that our deepest need, as human beings, is to keep developing our natural and acquired powers to relate to other human beings. 

I think people are really looking for some way whereby we can grow our souls rather than our economy. I think that at some level, people recognize that growing our economy is destroying us. It's destroying us as human beings, it's destroying our planet. I think there's a great human desire for solutions, for profound solutions ― and that nothing simple will do it. It really requires some very great searching of our souls. 

We're in a very, very profound crisis. It's so obvious that no one in the power structure, either the corporate power structure or the political power structure, knows what to do or is willing to do what's necessary in relationship both to global war and global warming. It's so obvious that conditions are getting worse for the great majority of Americans. It's so obvious also that we face a very serious danger from people who feel, see themselves only as victims. And we have to somehow, in a very loving way, help the American people to recover the best that is in our traditions. 

We need to discern who we are and expand on our humanness and sacredness. That's how we change the world, which happens because WE will be the change. 

 ― Grace Lee Boggs

For more, please go here:

http://americanrevolutionaryfilm.com/