Recognizing and Expressing Your Feelings
Immense sadness at the massive extinction data and the line about how it has not penetrated public awareness. Deeply touched by Joanna Macy’s lines about the reason we feel sadness is love. And that is what will pull us through.
Identify Your Unexamined Assumptions
I believe that every unexamined assumption mentioned so far is something I have consciously examined and rejected.
Describe Feeling Connected. Disconnected– what popped up is in a 3rd or 4th grade classroom a substitute teacher shamed me as I stood at the chalkboard. I don’t remember exactly how, but I remember what I silently said to the substitute with intense anger. “I’ll prove you wrong. You’ll regret this”.
Connected – walking through the meadow after 7 day sesshin at Mountain Center feeling that identifying as a human being would limit the open transparent sense of boundless interbeing. I didn’t have that word then. Felt a lightness, a transparency. The usual overlay of separation concepts was blessedly nonexistent. I knew it and had no desire to add it.
What Gives You Hope? The list of 2 million organizations generated from the work of Paul Hawken gives me hope. Pachamama spreading that list and following it with the statement only one thing is missing, the collective will to change the course of history. I felt in that moment that critical mass is close and attainable.
Describe Your Vision.The first time through I really didn’t see anything. As I started I saw people in general just being kind to each other, with no trace of hidden anger or resentment. I’ll watch Reflection: Envisioning the Future again and hope I see more.
Second time through. My sense is that in the suggested time horizon of 40-50 years I don’t see much progress toward a sustainable, fulfilling, and just world. But I can see a possibility of real movement toward collective global agreement on the new story. My vision is somehow the balance of power has shifted so the underlying assumption that pervades all media is working together to heal the world on all levels rather than maintaining a dysfunctional status quo.
Declare Your Commitment. I am committed to bringing forth an environmentally regenerative, spiritually fulfilling, socially just human presence on this planet.
Ed Levin
09/25/2018
I prefer regenerative to sustainable
What Will You Do? My main activity will be to throw myself into Series 2 of Living the New Story for the next 8 months as the center of gravity of my practice world. My initial stated intention there is to answer the question “What kind of entity could emerge from a group of more than 100 people who ALL embody an ethos of care for all of life?”.
Working toward a shared planetary consciousness that heals the Earth