Radical Love

The skies are thick, grey, and unmoving this morning, with the energy of the day being quite still.  The temperature is 67 degrees fahrenheit, warm.  Today is Monday.

Today's news continues to report on the losses in Hawai'i on the island of Lahaina, and the conflict in Ukraine.  Economic hardship and a shifting culture  reveal opportunistic crime being a part of city life, with a smash and grab incident that took place at a high end retail store.  Housing continues to be a problem as southern California prices seem to hover at $1M as the median price to get into the ownership line.  Elderly politicians are in denial about their capacity to continue making decisions on behalf of the nation.  What is happening to the human beings living this experience?

The obvious is that suffering is showing up in many places, in many forms, and is growing, not diminishing.  We are in a time in need of responses that make no sense but are in fact, sensible.  Moving toward stretching capacity to turn toward, not away from, the complexity of today's world is essential.  If that happens, it is quite frightening and, it is necessary to face reality so that the chance to see things clearly is possible.  If one can find the courage to face the reality of our collective loss of awareness and growing insensitivity to the imbalance between nature and human choices, there is a chance that right decisions can be made.  For those who have the capacity to act, a truly radical response is possible.

No one is asking that anyone give up anything, other than their fear and anxiety about the "what if's" that could happen if an act of caring or compassion was to be the result of breaking through the fear.  It is the fear that blocks radical love from emerging in times of radical pain and suffering.  

We are drowning in stories of how our inability to have this breakthrough has created a world in which there are clear and tragic examples of having become numb.  The numbness is the insensitivity to the conditions that are boiling over. We are missing the message that is loud and clear:  it is time to stop the harm we are doing to ourselves.  It's not the others who are hurting, it is ourselves and that is why we carry so much heaviness in our hearts.

How to begin unwinding:  stop, pause, reflect, go silent.  Carefully consider all the ways in which humanity has divided itself:  national identity, political identity, class identity, racial identity, religious identity.  Human beings seem to love relying on artificial indicators of status, whether it is a name or what high school one attended.  Anything to set a group apart. There has been an entire set of narratives that are very detailed and tied to histories, traditions, and customs - all designed to highlight how unique and special is the identity to which one belongs.

What happens when one breaks through all of it, and sees common humanity? Radical breakthrough.  Love. Peace.