Clarissa Pinkola Estés: We Are Like the Starry Night

With the wild nature as ally and teacher we see not through 

two eyes but through the many eyes of intuition. With intuition 

we are like the starry night, we gaze at the world 

through a thousand eyes. The wild woman is fluent in the 

language of dreams, images, passion, and poetry.

 

- Clarissa Pinkola Estés

 

Clarissa Pinkola Estés: We Were Made For These Times

“Do Not Lose Heart, We Were Made for These Times: Letter to a Young Activist During Troubled Times”

My friends, do not lose heart. We were made for these times. I have heard from so many recently who are deeply and properly bewildered. They are concerned about the state of affairs in our world now. Ours is a time of almost daily astonishment and often righteous rage over the latest degradations of what matters most to civilized, visionary people.

You are right in your assessments. The lustre and hubris some have aspired to while endorsing acts so heinous against children, elders, everyday people, the poor, the unguarded, the helpless, is breathtaking. Yet, I urge you, ask you, gentle you, to please not spend your spirit dry by bewailing these difficult times. Especially do not lose hope. Most particularly because, the fact is that we were made for these times. Yes. For years, we have been learning, practicing, been in training for and just waiting to meet on this exact plain of engagement.

I grew up on the Great Lakes and recognize a seaworthy vessel when I see one. Regarding awakened souls, there have never been more able vessels in the waters than there are right now across the world. And they are fully provisioned and able to signal one another as never before in the history of humankind.

Look out over the prow; there are millions of boats of righteous souls on the waters with you. Even though your veneers may shiver from every wave in this stormy roil, I assure you that the long timbers composing your prow and rudder come from a greater forest. That long-grained lumber is known to withstand storms, to hold together, to hold its own, and to advance, regardless.

In any dark time, there is a tendency to veer toward fainting over how much is wrong or unmended in the world. Do not focus on that. There is a tendency, too, to fall into being weakened by dwelling on what is outside your reach, by what cannot yet be. Do not focus there. That is spending the wind without raising the sails.

We are needed, that is all we can know. And though we meet resistance, we more so will meet great souls who will hail us, love us and guide us, and we will know them when they appear. Didn’t you say you were a believer? Didn’t you say you pledged to listen to a voice greater? Didn’t you ask for grace? Don’t you remember that to be in grace means to submit to the voice greater?

Ours is not the task of fixing the entire world all at once, but of stretching out to mend the part of the world that is within our reach. Any small, calm thing that one soul can do to help another soul, to assist some portion of this poor suffering world, will help immensely. It is not given to us to know which acts or by whom, will cause the critical mass to tip toward an enduring good.

What is needed for dramatic change is an accumulation of acts, adding, adding to, adding more, continuing. We know that it does not take everyone on Earth to bring justice and peace, but only a small, determined group who will not give up during the first, second, or hundredth gale.

One of the most calming and powerful actions you can do to intervene in a stormy world is to stand up and show your soul. Soul on deck shines like gold in dark times. The light of the soul throws sparks, can send up flares, builds signal fires, causes proper matters to catch fire. To display the lantern of soul in shadowy times like these – to be fierce and to show mercy toward others; both are acts of immense bravery and greatest necessity.

Struggling souls catch light from other souls who are fully lit and willing to show it. If you would help to calm the tumult, this is one of the strongest things you can do.

There will always be times when you feel discouraged. I too have felt despair many times in my life, but I do not keep a chair for it. I will not entertain it. It is not allowed to eat from my plate.

The reason is this: In my uttermost bones I know something, as do you. It is that there can be no despair when you remember why you came to Earth, who you serve, and who sent you here. The good words we say and the good deeds we do are not ours. They are the words and deeds of the One who brought us here. In that spirit, I hope you will write this on your wall: When a great ship is in harbor and moored, it is safe, there can be no doubt. But that is not what great ships are built for.

- Clarissa Pinkola Estés

Clarissa Pinkola Estes is an American poet, post-trauma specialist and Jungian psychoanalyst, and author of Women Who Run With the Wolves.

Please go here for the original article: http://newstoryhub.com/2016/01/we-were-made-for-these-times-by-clarissa-pinkola-estes/

John O'Donohue: For Freedom

For Freedom

 

As a bird soars high
In the free holding of the wind,
Clear of the certainty of ground,
Opening the imagination of wings
Into the grace of emptiness
To fulfill new voyagings,
May your life awaken
To the call of its freedom.

 

As the ocean absolves itself
Of the expectation of land,
Approaching only
In the form of waves
That fill and pleat and fall
With such gradual elegance
As to make of the limit
A sonorous threshold
Whose music echoes back among
The give and strain of memory,
Thus may your heart know the patience
That can draw infinity from limitation.

 

As the embrace of the earth
Welcomes all we call death,
Taking deep into itself
The right solitude of a seed,
Allowing it time
To shed the grip of former form
And give way to a deeper generosity
That will one day send it forth,
A tree into springtime,
May all that holds you
Fall from its hungry ledge
Into the fecund surge of your heart.

 

- John O'Donohue,

 To Bless the Space Between Us

 

What the Mainstream Doesn’t Get About Bernie Sanders

It just might be that the nation's electoral dropouts have found a candidate they can believe in. If so, that changes everything.

by

John Atcheson

 

Published on

Sunday, January 24, 2016

by

Common Dreams

Democratic Presidential Candidate Sen. Bernie Sanders visits Birmingham for a rally at Boutwell Auditorium Sunday January 18, 2016. So many supporters showed up that an overflow area was set up in Linn Park. Sanders took time to visit Sixteenth Street Baptist Church and the Civil Rights Institute. (Photo: Joe Songer/AI.com)

The normally perspicacious Paul Krugman wrote a column on Friday entitled “How Change Happens.”

The last paragraph sums up his argument nicely:

         Sorry, but there’s nothing noble about seeing your values defeated because you preferred happy dreams to hard thinking about means and ends. Don’t let idealism veer into destructive self-indulgence.

Krugman seems to think that Sanders’ idealistic stands are “happy dreams” because change happens from the hard work of compromise and settling for half-loafs.  As a result, he suggests that Hillary Clinton and her pragmatism are the “adult” approach and the strategy most likely to lead to change.

He urges Sanders’ supporters to ask themselves, “When has their theory of change ever worked?”  Interestingly, he leaps immediately to Franklin D. Roosevelt’s transformative presidency and characterizes it as strictly on the side of the pragmatists and compromisers.

In a response published on the Huffington Post, Professor Jedediah Purdy points out the Dr. Krugman’s take on FDR’s presidency misinterprets how FDR accomplished change.  As Purdy points out, compromise was a secondary tactic, usually conducted on FDR’s terms.  The two primary factors that made FDR such an effective change agent were how he wielded power, and the fact that he created a movement, the source of his power.  He didn’t rely on old alliances forged in history, he created new ones.  Purdy’s rebuttal is spot on, but there’s a larger point to be made about change.

Real change, consequential change, is usually the result of Black Swans, “a metaphor that describes an event that comes as a surprise, has a major effect, and is often inappropriately rationalized after the fact with the benefit of hindsight.”

The theory was developed by Nassim Nicholas Taleb to explain:

1. The disproportionate role of high-profile, hard-to-predict, and rare events that are beyond the realm of normal expectations in history, science, finance, and technology.
2. The non-computability of the probability of the consequential rare events using scientific methods (owing to the very nature of small probabilities).
3. The psychological biases that blind people, both individually and collectively, to uncertainty and to a rare event's massive role in historical affairs.

Krugman’s criticism echoes much of what you hear from pundits, the main stream media (MSM), and the political cognoscenti, and it is no surprise that they are missing the prospect of a Black Swan where the Sanders campaign is concerned.  Let’s break down assumptions embraced by conventional wisdom.

Sanders can’t win...

Well, this is pretty easy.  He’s winning.  He’s ahead in Iowa, way ahead in New Hampshire, and rocketing up in the rest of the country.  But because he’s not embracing the traditional PAC and money dominated strategy that is the mainstay of modern American politics, he’s dismissed as not “serious,” not “adult.”

Sanders isn’t electable...

This is one you hear frequently from the Hillary camp and the MSM.  The idea here is that against Republicans, Sanders is doomed. Problem is, he beats leading Republicans by a wider margin than Hillary and she actually loses in some head-to-head races that Sanders wins. 

Krugman suggests that will change in the heat of the campaign.

But the reality...Hillary is a sitting duck 

The majority of voters don’t trust her.  Worse, a review of the history of her favorability numbers shows they go down when she campaigns.  At the moment it’s in negative territory and that would make her extremely vulnerable in a general election – certainly more so than Sanders, who gets stronger the longer he runs. Finally, Hillary’s lukewarm support all but guarantees a low voter turnout, something that proved fatal to Democrats in 2014, and likely would again. So, once again, conventional wisdom has it all wrong.

Please continue this article here: http://www.commondreams.org/views/2016/01/24/what-mainstream-doesnt-get-about-bernie-sanders

Hillary Clinton Seeks Neocon Shelter

Stunned by falling poll numbers, Hillary Clinton is hoping that Democrats will rally to her neocon-oriented foreign policy and break with Bernie Sanders as insufficiently devoted to Israel. But will that hawkish strategy work this time?

by

Robert Parry

Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

In seeking to put Sen. Bernie Sanders on the defensive over his foreign policy positions, ex-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton is embracing a neoconservative stance on the Middle East and gambling that her more hawkish approach will win over Democratic voters.

Losing ground in Iowa and New Hampshire in recent polls, the Clinton campaign has counterattacked against Sanders, targeting his sometimes muddled comments on the Mideast crisis, but Clinton’s attack line suggests that Sanders isn’t adequately committed to the positions of Israel’s right-wing Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his American neocon acolytes.

Clinton’s strategy is to hit Sanders for seeking a gradual normalization of relations with Iran, while Clinton has opted for the neocon position of demonizing Iran and siding withIsrael and its quiet alliance with Saudi Arabia and other Sunni states that share Israel’s animosity toward Shiite-ruled Iran.

By attaching herself to this neocon approach of hyping every conceivable offense by Iran while largely excusing the human rights crimes of Israel, Saudi Arabia and the Sunni-run states, Clinton is betting that most Democratic voters share the neocon-dominated “group think” of Official Washington: “Iran-our-enemy, Israel/Saudi Arabia-our-friends.”

She made similar calculations when she voted for and supported President George W. Bush’s invasion and occupation of Iraq; when she sided with the neocons in pushing President Barack Obama to escalate the war in Afghanistan; and when she instigated “regime change” in Libya – all policies that had dubious and dangerous outcomes. But she seems to still believe that she will benefit politically if she continues siding with the neocons and their “liberal interventionist” side-kicks.

Please continue this article here: http://www.commondreams.org/views/2016/01/24/hillary-clinton-seeks-neocon-shelter

 

The World's Inequality Countdown

The rich can no longer pretend that their wealth benefits the rest of us - the only thing trickling down is inequality

by

Winnie Byanyima

Tondo slum in Manila, Philippines, 2014. (Photo:  Dewald Brand, Miran for Oxfam)

Welcome to the world's inequality countdown. In 2010, some 388 people owned as much wealth as the poorest half of the world's population. Jump to 2014 and that 388 is down to 85 people. In 2015 the figure was 80 and now today Oxfam has revealed that 62 rich individuals own as much wealth as the poorest 3.6 billion people.

If this deeply alarming inequality clock continues to tick as fast, by 2020  a mere 11 people could have the same wealth as half the world. That's not even a dozen.

This extreme inequality is not a sign of a healthy global economy as all the wealth is being sucked up by those at the dizzying top. Trickle-down economics is a fallacy - this is not just Oxfam's view but that of the World Bank also. The rich can no longer pretend their wealth benefits the rest of us. It doesn't: it harms us. The only thing that's "trickling down" is inequality, and powerlessness.

The consequences of this extreme economic inequality are far reaching. If inequality is not dealt with, we could see more social unrest across the world, a brake on growth and all the work that has been done in the last quarter century on poverty halted - potentially reversed.

Unstable unequal world

What this means to you and me is a more unstable, unequal world with fewer people able to escape poverty. The world's most unequal region is still Latin America, despite income inequality there falling in recent years.

In 2014, the richest 10 percent of people in Latin America had amassed 71 percent of the region’s wealth. If this trend continues, according to Oxfam's calculations, in only six years the region's richest 1 percent will have more wealth than the 99 percent.

Meanwhile, inequality in Asia has risen by as much as 18 percent since the mid-1990s. Had this rise not happened, 240 million people across Asia could have escaped poverty.

In Africa, four million children's lives could be saved each year if 30 percent of Africa's wealth was not held in tax havens. This means an estimated $14bn is lost in tax revenues each year, a sum that could pay for life-saving healthcare for African mothers and children, and employ enough teachers to get every African child into school.

Across the world, Oxfam is seeing devastating impacts on the people we work with. But it doesn't have to be this way. Inequality is not inevitable.

Please continue this article here: http://www.commondreams.org/views/2016/01/18/worlds-inequality-countdown

 

Louis Brandeis: Most of the Things Worth Doing

Most of the things worth doing in the world had been 

declared impossible before they were done.

 

- Justice Louis Brandeis

 

Louis Brandeis: We Must Make Our Choice

We must make our choice.

We may have democracy in this country, or we may have 
wealth concentrated in the hands of a few,

but we can't have both.

- Louis Brandeis

 

Howard Zinn: We Can Transform Our World

We don't have to engage in grand, heroic actions to 

participate in the process of change. Small acts, 

when multiplied by millions of people, 

can transform the world.

 

- Howard Zinn

 

Naomi Klein: Our Economy Is At War

Winter Storm Jonas: A View From Space - occurring now.

Our economy is at war with many forms of life on earth, including human life. What the climate needs to avoid collapse is a contraction of humanity's use of resources; what our economic model demands to avoid collapse is unfettered expansion. Only one of these sets of rules can be changed, and it's not the laws of nature.

- Naomi Klein