Early last week Dwight attended the Occupy Sebastopol Town Hall Meeting. As we talked about both The Occupy Movement and his experience with the meeting, I moved to the computer and Dwight in English Prof. mode edited. The below "commentary" will appear in the next issue of The Sonoma West Times and News, without the pictures of course. Your comments, thoughts, feelings are welcome!
And we are reminded of our global connection with Time magazine announcing their chosen Person of the Year: the Protestors from Arab Spring to Athens, from Occupy Wall Street to Moscow. The articles are attribute to awakening. Heartful, certainly, for all of us.
And we are reminded of our global connection with Time magazine announcing their chosen Person of the Year: the Protestors from Arab Spring to Athens, from Occupy Wall Street to Moscow. The articles are attribute to awakening. Heartful, certainly, for all of us.
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| Blooming Christmas cactus |
Each of us has been afforded an opportunity by The Occupy Movement to awaken. There are 9 billion of us on Mother Earth. This is too many with each of us participating in too much consumption/entitlement.
In a recent issue of Sonoma West Times and News Marty Gerber provided an 11 point ‘occupy’ plan, “goals that need to be achieved in order to salvage our nation”.
We live in a country that is chaotic at best, destructive at its worst. We are a very young nation with behaviors often seen in the rebellious teenager. We cannot focus on fixing or salvaging what is irredeemably broken. Like the phoenix arising out of the ashes, awakening and turning our attention to the consequences of our own individual choices fueled by our own attitudes, values and behaviors is essential to finding a way for all living creatures, including humans, to cohabit our planet. Waking up to our every day choices and their consequences will affect the people around us as well as the 1% that now brain wash us to do their bidding.
Rather than remaining on autopilot we can choose to practice “essential living by BEing rooted,” aka awake, and create a conscious connection to where we live, like noticing which native plants grow here providing the basis for a whole healthy, evolving ecology. When we are rooted in our spot on the planet, we become awake to our learned habits, attitudes and behaviors.
Most importantly, BEing rooted/awake allows us to embrace the whole and release our tightly held viewpoints. The Occupy Movement is showing us that we are all in this together. If we choose to face the chaos humans have created on Mother Earth, we can heal ourselves and the planet. Choice opens BEing with the whole rather than accepting the either/or thinking our culture supports. Peace/war, male/female, physical/spiritual, birth/death, health/disease, awake/autopilot are part of the whole. The key to BEing awake is awareness of choice and ensuing consequences. Remember the 1% want us to be asleep victims so their bottom line is unaffected.
LESS is better than more, for us individually and collectively. Choosing less is simple, not easy. Our young dog Rose was diagnosed with a malignant tumor in her left hind knee. In obvious pain with limited mobility she participated in an amputation. Six months later Rose with 3 legs does everything she did with 4.
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| Rose running along the gravel road from Test Station Road to Lee Vining Creek |
Mother Earth has not the resources to allow each of us to continually shop to fuel the economy. So we might, for example:
1. share jobs that are available
2. stop driving everywhere with only one person per vehicle
3. grow some of our own food using GMO free, open pollinated seeds or at the very least buy locally grown organic produce at our nearest Farmers Market
4. stop spraying Roundup and other toxins in our yards and roadsides
5. use less water by taking out our lawns and replanting with drought tolerant natives, installing low flush toilets and eliminating swimming pools
6. buy organic clothes, household goods and cleaning products
8. feed all our children, of course organic food
9. embrace death rather than seeing death as a disease that can be defeated for megabucks
10. take responsibility for our own health instead of waiting until you are sick then seeking quick fixes of the symptoms
11. seek out health promoting practitioners instead of disease care ones
12. choose financial institutions that welcome our money and redeploy it locally instead of diverting it to its top executives
13. support education that prepares our youngsters for everyday life
BEing rooted/awake has an enormous ripple effect. We are filled with gratitude that there are individuals, i.e. The Occupy Movement, who are choosing awake rather than autopilot, benefiting each and every one of us. May more of us make this choice so that being awake predominates in our country.
