I didn’t want to write this blog, not at first. Writing would mean facing once again what is painful to face. But due to COVID and other factors, here I am.
Last week, I started reading Joanna Macy’s 30th Anniversary update of her book, World As Lover, World As Self that was published earlier this year. I think her book has been living inside me for years, but it is only now that I open it. I deeply appreciate the wisdom and practices shared in this book.
The book talks about the stories we tell ourselves about this moment we’re living. It reveals many aspects of our lives we might have ignored until COVID and a would-be dictator made them abundantly clear.
She uses the image of a mirror, the mirror wisdom of a Buddha which shows us everything just as it is, nothing added or subtracted. And this mirror teaches us how to, “…not look away. Do not avert your eyes. Do not turn aside.” By looking in this mirror we realize the anxiety and fear we feel is the surface layer of our grief for how much of the world is dying. By naming we heal.
By looking away the world itself turns away. By looking in the mirror, we tell and make real the story of how to survive and transform a great turning point in history. We discern the path to creating a life-sustaining society that understands in its marrow “we are all in this together.” By averting our eyes, we surrender; we tell and help create a story of unraveling and collapse.
We have been witnessing lately appalling contradictions. For example, nurses and other health care workers have been at the front lines of the fight against the COVID pandemic. They have been overworked, often under-equipped and under-paid, facing great stress and trauma. They also face an information or media environment filled with purposeful, politically motivated lies.
Many work in crowded nursing homes, or in hospitals where they see a disproportionate rate of suffering from the pandemic amongst Black, Brown, and Indigenous people. Many are themselves people of color who have faced all their lives a system of racism.
So now many health care workers of whatever race do not want to take what could save their lives and protect their patients, because they believe or have been misled to believe they cannot trust it. So, when the state mandated that all health care workers be vaccinated, they declined, even as that led to them losing their jobs, and we losing their support.
Joanna Macy makes clear that we as a society have been ignoring or not seeing clearly how other, crowded work environments like meat-packing-plants are dangerous to workers, cruel to animals, and costly to the climate.
We have also been ignoring the dangers while glorifying in and feasting on the advantages of artificial intelligence and social media. Our society has not put in the time or money to protect us either from cyberattacks, or the misinformation and disinformation from other nations or domestic terrorist groups, or from criminal elements who are increasingly hacking our hospitals, energy grids, and personal savings.
We have recognized but not faced directly enough the consequences of enormous, and growing, concentrations of wealth, made worse by the pandemic, and leading to the corporate undermining of democracy and the rule of law, undermining of public schooling, and the degradation of our natural world, the extinction of many species, and the warming of the planet.
The contradictions are breaking us apart.
The racism and other-isms are breaking us apart. The malignant politics of the corporate and white nationalist GOP are breaking us apart and setting us against one another. Too many GOP don’t care about black, brown, or indigenous people, or anyone but themselves, their power, and those who would bow to them. And instead of trying to restore faith in government, especially democratic government, they work to destroy it, to block legislation that would help our nation. They recently blocked even the ability the government needs to pay its bills. If they continue in this manner, we all will suffer.
But the mirror also shows us that we play a part in creating and thus transforming this situation. That a great turning point is calling out for us; it is not only possible but is happening already. While the GOP do all they can not only to take away voting rights, but control the vote, more and more Americans are taking action, voting (66.8% of eligible voters voted in the 2020 election, the highest since 1992), helping get out the vote, and speaking out, for many issues, like Black Lives Matter and against DT. While many Americans seem to believe in hate, more Americans than ever believe in compassion, love and protecting the rights of all people. The House on February 25th passed The Equality Act to prevent discrimination based on race, sexual orientation and gender identity and a poll by the Public Religion Research Center found that 83% of Americans favored such measures.
What will be the effect on right-wing people who are anti-vax, anti-masks, believers in the disinformation that COVID was a hoax, when so many get sick and die of the disease? What will be the effect of increasing climate disasters and the GOP denial of human caused climate change when so many of us suffer from extreme weather events and 72% of us know we are helping cause the disasters? What will be the effect on voters of the GOP blatant attack not only on women’s right to choose but women’s health care, since (51% of the population are women and) 59% of the population think abortion should remain legal and are willing to demonstrate on the streets (this weekend, for example) for their rights?
We often think we know what will happen. But all we really know is a small part of the state of the world as it is now. All we know is that it is up to us to care for ourselves and others, to look, communicate, and act. As Macy reveals, when we name what is, and we commit to a practice that clears the mirror and reveals the heart, the world can come to us both as lover and as self. Will we do it, look in the mirror and speak up, now?
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This post is republished on Medium.
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