Reflections On Meeting These Traumatic Times With Courage, Compassion, Wisdom, Grace, and Love

It is so important to not lose sight of beauty. Photo by Molly

Reflections On Meeting These Traumatic Times With

Courage, Compassion, Wisdom, Grace, and Love

My life is very full. And today has been busy for my husband and myself as we prepare to leave for Oaxaca early tomorrow morning. Still, it's felt important before being gone over the next week to stop and create the time and the space here to once again acknowledge these times that we are living in.

Just over the past couple of days... There has been another horrific mass shooting, marking America's 565th this year — and the deadliest. A tropical storm developed into a monster category five hurricane within hours — pummeling the southern Mexican state of Guerrero, killing at least 27 people, knocking out power, and destroying infrastructure in the city of Acapulco. The latest news from climate scientists is also that it is likely too late to prevent significant melting of Thwaites, the "Doomsday Glacier" — stating that we have "lost control" of the West Antarctic ice shelf melting over the 21st century, and that its melting could cause global sea levels to rise by about 10 feet. The American government is also now day by day being increasingly infiltrated and controlled by extreme right-wing fascists who, if given more control, would halt all efforts to address the human caused catastrophic warming of the planet and other issues critical to the well-being of our nation and to all of life on Earth. And then there's the atrocities and genocide occurring right now being perpetrated on the Palestinian people — the war crimes of which are also being justified and funded by the American President and the American government.

I could go on.

The words "record breaking" and "unprecedented" now seem obsolete. These nightmares are unfolding day in and day out in our families, our communities, our nation and all across the world. They are real. They are heartbreaking and horrifying and relentless. The madness and the great sorrows of our times do not go away or diminish. They are with us.

The question is: How do we cope with so much suffering and violence, cruelty and criminality, ignorance and injustice, destruction and death? How can we stay open rather than stuck in being shut down, walled up, numb, angry, addicted, and/or depressed?

There is obviously no one answer. Each of us will respond in our own unique ways. And we are all on this continuum, I believe, with ignorance on the one end and consciousness on the other. And that, in part, will determine just how much we are capable of letting in without letting it be too much or too little. 

I am aware of the enormity of the struggle that humanity is facing. And, because we are all connected, no one is excluded from the impacts of the traumatic times that we are living in. To be empowered to cultivate the strongest and healthiest coping skills possible to meet these great sorrows, this comes to me as being of critical importance:

• Our experience of community and connection
• Our awareness of beauty and love
• Our spiritual practice, whatever that is for each of us
• Our commitment to our own ongoing healing and transformation
• Our capacity to hold both grief and gratitude
• Our conscious intentions
• The depth and breadth of our circle of caring
• The strength and the tenderness of our hearts
• Our commitment to our ongoing growth and the dismantling of the obstacles to love that we've built within ourselves individually and collectively

It is my lived experience that we are all growing either more expansive or more contracted as we grow older. Unhealed, unaddressed, denied or minimized ancestral and cultural trauma can be a heavy load to carry. And it is very hard if not impossible to embody healthy coping skills to meet the pain of these times if we are ignoring what we carry in our own hearts...

I'm going to be a grandmother again. Our sixth grandchild is due this winter. And all that I know is that I must act in every way possible on his behalf and on behalf of all of our grandchildren and children and all of the children of all of the species on Earth. One of my bumper stickers reads "Our Descendants Are Counting On Us." So true. So true.

We all need each other. We do. Because we are all connected, all related, all family. And each of us has something to add to the higher good of us all. As Bill McKibben has said, "Activism is the antidote to despair." And what activism looks like can vary greatly. 

May more and more of us come together to support ourselves and each other. It is way too painful to try to cope with the deep trauma of our times without support. And it is this path, this path of caring and connection, that helps us grow our hearts stronger and deepens our capacity to meet both the sorrows and the beauty that we are part of with courage, compassion, wisdom, grace, and love.

Bless us all, no exceptions...

💗 Molly

Pema Chödrön: Something to Reflect Upon Everyday

Photo by Molly

Something to Reflect 

Upon Everyday

 

Every day we think about the aggression 

in the world. Everybody always strikes out at 

the enemy, and the pain escalates forever. 

We could reflect on this and ask ourselves, 

"Am I going to add to the aggression in the world?" 

Everyday we can ask ourselves, 

"Am I going to practice peace, 

or am I going to war?"

If one wishes for suffering not to happen

to the people and the Earth, 

it begins with a kind heart.

— Pema Chödrön

https://pemachodronfoundation.org/

Arundhati Roy: Anti-Americanism, Nationalism, Capitalism, War, and Our Strategy

First spoken during the horrors of the Bush era and now tragically relevant to the horrors of today. Deepest bow, as always, to Arundhati Roy. 🙏 Molly

Anti-Americanism

Anti-Americanism is in the process of being consecrated into an ideology.

The term 'anti-American' is usually used by the American establishment to discredit and, not falsely -- but shall we say inaccurately -- define its critics. Once someone is branded anti-American, the chances are that he or she will be judged before they're heard and the argument will be lost in the welter of bruised national pride.

What does the term 'anti-American' mean? Does it mean you're anti-jazz? Or that you're opposed to free speech? That you don't delight in Toni Morrison or John Updike? That you have a quarrel with giant sequoias? Does it mean you don't admire the hundreds of thousands of American citizens who marched against nuclear weapons, or the thousands of war resisters who forced their government to withdraw from Vietnam? Does it mean that you hate all Americans? .....

To call someone 'anti-American', indeed, to be anti-American, (or for that matter anti-Indian, or anti- Timbuktuan) is not just racist, it's a failure of the imagination. An inability to see the world in terms other than those that the establishment has set out for you: If you're not a Bushie you're a Taliban. If you don't love us, you hate us. If you're not good you're evil. If you're not with us, you're with the terrorists.

Nationalism

Nationalism of one kind or another was the cause of most of the genocide of the twentieth century. Flags are bits of colored cloth that governments use first to shrink-wrap people's minds and then as ceremonial shrouds to bury the dead.

The Cost of War

Wars are never fought for altruistic reasons. They're usually fought for hegemony, for business. And then of course there's the business of war.

I think it was 50 million people across the world who marched against the war in Iraq. It was perhaps the biggest display of public morality in the world - you know, I mean, before the war happened. Before the war happened, everybody knew that they were being fed lies.

Ever since the Great Depression, we know that one of the key ways in which the US economy has stimulated growth is by manufacturing weapons and exporting war to other countries.

It's odd how those who dismiss the peace movement as utopian, don't hesitate to proffer the most absurdly dreamy reasons for going to war: to stamp out terrorism, install democracy, eliminate fascism, and most entertainingly, to "rid the world of evil-doers."

Never counted in the "costs" of war are the dead birds, the charred animals the murdered fish, incinerated insects, poisoned water sources, destroyed vegetation. Rarely mentioned is the arrogance of the human race toward other living things with which it shares this planet. All these are forgotten in the fight for markets and ideologies. This arrogance will probably be the ultimate undoing of the human species.

Making bombs will only destroy us. It doesn't matter whether we use them or not. They will destroy us either way.

Capitalism

Capitalism’s real “grave-diggers” may end up being its own delusional Cardinals, who have turned ideology into faith. Despite their strategic brilliance, they seem to have trouble grasping a simple fact: Capitalism is destroying the planet. The two old tricks that dug it out of past crises — War and Shopping — simply will not work.

Talk loud enough about human rights and it gives the impression of democracy at work, justice at work. There was a time when the United States waged war to topple democracies, because back then democracy was a threat to the Free Market. Countries were nationalising their resources, protecting their markets.... So then, real democracies were being toppled. They were toppled in Iran, they were toppled all across Latin America, Chile.

Now we're in a situation where democracy has been taken into the workshop and fixed, remodeled to be market-friendly. So now the United States is fighting wars to instal democracies. First it was topple them, now it's instal them, right? And this whole rise of corporate-funded NGOs in the modern world, this notion of CSR, corporate social responsibility - it's all part of a New Managed Democracy. In that sense, it's all part of the same machine.

Colorful demonstrations and weekend marches are vital but alone are not powerful enough to stop wars. Wars will be stopped only when soldiers refuse to fight, when workers refuse to load weapons onto ships and aircraft, when people boycott the economic outposts of Empire that are strung across the globe.

Our Strategy 

Our strategy should be not only to confront empire, but to lay siege to it. To deprive it of oxygen. To shame it. To mock it. With our art, our music, our literature, our stubbornness, our joy, our brilliance, our sheer relentlessness – and our ability to tell our own stories. Stories that are different from the ones we’re being brainwashed to believe.

The corporate revolution will collapse if we refuse to buy what they are selling – their ideas, their version of history, their wars, their weapons, their notion of inevitability.

Remember this: We be many and they be few. They need us more than we need them.

Another world is not only possible, she is on her way. On a quiet day, I can hear her breathing.

— Arundhati Roy

Quotes from War Talk

and from

Ordinary Person's Guide to Empire

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.: We As a Nation Must Undergo a Radical Revolution of Values

 Worth posting again. 

And again and again. — Molly

Martin Luther King, Jr.1967 "Radical revolution of values"

We As a Nation Must Undergo a 

Radical Revolution of Values

I am convinced that if we are to get on the right side of the world revolution, we as a nation must undergo a radical revolution of values. We must rapidly begin—we must rapidly begin the shift from a thing-oriented society to a person-oriented society. When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, extreme materialism and militarism are incapable of being conquered.

A true revolution of values will soon cause us to question the fairness and justice of many of our past and present policies. On the one hand, we are called to play the Good Samaritan on life’s roadside, but that will be only an initial act. One day we must come to see that the whole Jericho road must be transformed so that men and women will not be constantly beaten and robbed as they make their journey on life’s highway. True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar. It comes to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring.

A true revolution of values will soon look uneasily on the glaring contrast of poverty and wealth with righteous indignation. It will look across the seas and see individual capitalists of the West investing huge sums of money in Asia, Africa and South America, only to take the profits out with no concern for the social betterment of the countries, and say, "This is not just." It will look at our alliance with the landed gentry of South America and say, "This is not just." The Western arrogance of feeling that it has everything to teach others and nothing to learn from them is not just.

A true revolution of values will lay a hand on the world order and say of war, "This way of settling differences is not just." This business of burning human beings with napalm, of filling our nation’s homes with orphans and widows, of injecting poisonous drugs of hate into the veins of peoples normally humane, of sending men home from dark and bloody battlefields physically handicapped and psychologically deranged, cannot be reconciled with wisdom, justice and love. A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.

America, the richest and most powerful nation in the world, can well lead the way in this revolution of values. There is nothing, except a tragic death wish, to prevent us from reordering our priorities, so that the pursuit of peace will take precedence over the pursuit of war.

― Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

Israel is a Racist, Supremacist State

This is so disturbing and heartbreaking and so incredibly important to know. In posting this, I am definitely not saying that this includes all Israelis any more than all Americans are aligned with the sociopathic-narcissistic-fascist-wannabe-dictator Trump. And, that said, too many are in support of apartheid and the world's largest open-air prison which Palestinians have long lived and suffered under with extreme ongoing trauma.

Tragically, I am also moved to add and own that my government in the United States — whose founding is rooted slavery and the genocide of the First Peoples, the impacts of which very much continue today — has long mirrored the horrors and heartbreaks of colonialism, racism, dehumanization, oppression, endless war, and other faces of violence, trauma, and heartlessness. By no means is it just Israel.

There can be no solution for that which is denied or minimized. Humankind has a long ways to go to truly open our hearts and learn how to live consistently embodying values rooted in being both humane and kind. — Molly

Israel is one of the most racist countries in the world.

While Israel works hard to play the victim, it’s actually a racist, Jewish supremacist state that’s been trying to ethnically cleanse Palestine for decades.

BT’s Kei Pritsker explains how racism is the core of Israel’s national identity.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5JzGzyaUnz0

Brian Doyle: The Best Poem Ever

Photo by Molly

The Best Poem Ever

What if, says a small child to me this afternoon,

We made a poem without using any words at all?

Wouldn’t that be cool? You could use long twigs,

And feathers, or spider strands, and arrange them

So that people imagine what words could be there.

Wouldn’t that be cool? So there’s a different poem

For each reader. That would be the best poem ever.

The poem wouldn’t be on the page, right? It would

Be in the air, sort of. It would be between the twigs

And the person’s eyes, or behind the person’s eyes,

After the person saw whatever poem he or she saw.

Maybe there are a lot of poems that you can’t write

Down. Couldn’t that be? But they’re still there even

If no one can write them down, right? Poems in

Books are only a little bit of all the poems there are.

Those are only the poems someone found words for.

— Brian Doyle 

David Steindl-Rast: Prayer For Unity

Photo by Molly

Prayer For Unity

You, the One

From whom on different paths

all of us have come,

To whom on different paths

All of us are going.

Make strong in our hearts what unites us.

Build bridges across all that divides us;

United make us rejoice in our diversity.

At one in our witness to your peace,

A rainbow to your glory.

Amen.

— Br. David Steindl-Rast

Shane Claiborne: A Revolution of Love

Photo by Molly

 A Revolution of Love

Peacemaking doesn't mean passivity.

It is the act of interrupting injustice

without mirroring injustice,

the act of disarming evil

without destroying the evildoer,

the act of finding a third way

that is neither fight nor flight

but the careful arduous pursuit

of reconciliation and justice.

It is about a revolution of love that is

 big enough to set  both the oppressed 

and the oppressors free.

— Shane Claiborne

From Common Prayer: A Liturgy 

for Ordinary Radicals

Andrew Boyd: Compassion Hurts

Compassion hurts.

When you feel connected to everything,

you also feel responsible for everything.

And you cannot turn away.

Your destiny is bound with the destinies of others.

You must either learn to carry the Universe

or be crushed by it.

You must grow strong enough

to love the world,

yet empty enough to sit down at

the same table with its worst horrors.

— Andrew Boyd

Bill McKibben: Energy from Heaven

Once a golf course, now a solar farm supplying tens of thousands of homes in Japan

 Energy from Heaven

and not from Hell/Exxon

By BILL MCKIBBEN

Amid the torrent of hideous news last week, one item might have skipped your notice: Exxon announced the acquisition—its biggest since picking up Mobil a quarter century ago—of one of the largest fracking operators in the world. As the AP reported, “including debt, Exxon is committing about $64.5 billion to the acquisition, leaving no doubt of the Texas energy company’s commitment to fossil fuels.” In fact, it’s the declaration of conviction that they think they have enough political juice to keep us hooked on oil and gas for a few more decades, even in the face of the highest temperatures in 125,000 years.

Our job is to stop them (see, for instance, the gathering fight to block new export terminals for LNG).

And one way to do that is to point out, over and over, the sheer wonder of the replacements we have on hand. Which is to say, the sun, and also the wind that the sun produces by heating the earth more in some spots than others, creating the breezes that turn the turbines. I wrote last week that we were now adding a gigawatt of solar power daily around the planet, most of it in China. That’s great, but we need more and we need it fast—and so let’s just concentrate for a moment on the almost absurd beauty of the idea that we have learned to power the things we need from the rays of a burning orb that lies 93 million miles distant across the vastness of space. Let me provide just a few facts about where we lie right now with that transition.

#Every week new data emerges about the rapid fall in the price of solar, which as PV magazine reported this week seems to have “no end in sight.” This is incredibly good news for the poorest people on the planet, almost all of whom live in places with abundant sunlight, and where they are currently shipping huge amounts of money off to the US, Russia, Saudi Arabia and other hydrocarbon exporters: something like 80% of humans live in countries that have to import fossil fuels. The sun, by contrast, delivers its rays for free each morning.

#So far, the suddenly rapid spread of solar has not dramatically cut the use of fossil fuels, but analysts at the Rocky Mountain Institute said last week that that is coming fast. They reminded us to focus on “flows, not stocks.”

It is frequently noted that fossil fuels account for over 80 percent of global primary energy and this number hasn’t budged meaningfully for decades.

Rarely mentioned is the fact that renewables have been taking an increasing share of the growth in energy supply, and all of the growth in 2019-21. Moving the focus from stocks to flows moves the conclusion from no change to radical change. Concentrating on the size of the fossil fuel system today is like focusing on the large number of horses in 1900 — it was as good a guide then as it is now.

By the end of this decade, the core renewable technologies will all dominate sales in their respective areas; solar and wind already make up over 80 percent of the capacity additions in electricity, and by 2030 EVs will be over two-thirds of car sales. Once renewable technologies dominate sales, it is simply a matter of time and depreciation of the old system before they dominate stocks.

+You can see this beginning to emerge already. A report out this week from the climate think tank Ember predicted that “carbon emissions from the global electricity sector may peak this year, after plateauing in the first half of 2023, because of a surge in wind and solar power.” That is remarkably good news: in fact, the “new report on global electricity generation found that the growth of renewables was so rapid that it was close to the incredibly fast rate required if the world is to hit the tripling of capacity by the end of the decade that experts believe is necessary to stay on the 1.5C pathway.” Read that again if you need a shot of anti-despair.

#But of course we need to up that rate, because we have to be able to provide electricity for pretty much everything that currently requires oil and gas: running cars, trucks, buses; cooking dinner; heating and cooling homes. Some of that new capacity can definitely come off rooftops and buildings; in Australia, where a third of homes now have rooftop solar, there was one day last month when grid operators reported an all-time record low demand for their power plants, because so many people were generating power off the tops of their homes.

#It’s true, as the remarkable Sammy Roth showed in the LA Times, that even in sunny parts of the West rooftop solar won’t be able to provide all, or even most, of what we need. But the good news here is that, even when we have to use some agricultural land for solar farms, it’s remarkably efficient. Indeed, check this out: if you took just the farm fields in America currently grown corn used as ethanol and covered them with solar panels, you’d be able to provide all the power America needs. You wouldn’t be cutting into the food supply because it’s not used for food now—you’d just be letting that soil rest, instead of pouring nitrogen on it every growing season. (In addition, as Matthew Eisenson pointed out recently, “recent research has shown that growing crops, such as tomatoes, in between rows of solar panels in hot, dry climates may increase yields by creating shade, which conserves water, increases humidity, and lowers temperatures.”)

#Of course we don’t want to put every solar farm on ag land; there’s scrub forest, and desert, and oh yes, golf courses, which at least in Japan are now being converted in fairly large numbers to solar farms. We’re in an emergency—that makes sense. Even if you have to use forestland, though, the numbers are impressive. Eisenson again: “An acre of solar panels producing zero-emissions electricity saves between 267,526 to 303,513 pounds, or 121 to 138 metric tons, of carbon dioxide per year. By comparison, according to the EPA, the average acre of forest in the United States sequesters 0.84 metric tons of carbon dioxide per year. Thus, an acre of solar panels in Virginia reduces approximately 144 to 166 times more carbon dioxide per year than an acre of forest.”

I give you all these statistics in hopes you’ll make use of them. The fight of our time—the fight of the next five or six years—is to build as much renewable energy as we can, and employ as much energy efficiency and conservation as we can. That’s by far the most important part of reining in temperatures—and reining in the death that comes with breathing the pollution from fossil fuel, and the massive damage caused by mining coal and drilling for oil and gas.

We will move to sun and wind to power this earth, because they are cheap and elegant. The only question is if we’ll make that move before we break the planet, and that is up to us.

Please go here for the original article: https://billmckibben.substack.com/p/energy-from-heaven