Looking at different areas on this planet, a form of abuse occurs everywhere on all scales and life. Rarely have I been in such a location and have become a physical witness of brutality. To be shocked and sad exhibits ignorance to certain extent, however I can only place very little blame here.
The practice of the transmutation of pain to willpower should be encouraged instead. This form of 'healing' should not be underestimated. It drowns those who can feel it (knowing allows for desensitisation and distance) as the pain it creates will ruminate, weaken and destroy. Wallowing gets you nowhere.
Which is almost akin to theorising and conceptualising. I won't dispute its ability to expand ways of seeing and understanding, but now we have reached a point where we have become surrounded by exploitation that now demand action.
I just feel tired and angry of cyclic forms of violence here. I ended up forging interventions in my head against fracking. I began to imagine what it would be like if one day if America woke up to painted oil rigs with an array of protests nationwide like the Dams. Could that spark something? Could that set off a boiling feeling of change? How do we restore our power in this situation? I kept thinking, but everything I desire to do feels far too big and silly.
I need vanguard comrades.
I can only do so little.
Yet to be born in between those who hold the riches and those who fight for everyday survival constitutes a strange luck and perhaps power within the mass of the middle. There are many "lucky" people today but we lack faith. Capitalism deludes us into thinking we have no agency and our voices are phantom.
However, being around a person like Larry who gives and fights into his later years of his life empowering those who cross his path and seeing the hope being filtered down to the next generations who strive to re-establish control to local communities and people. Seeing how much they feel the need for a sense of community to belong to something larger than themselves. I absorbed inspiration from here and collected another reason added to my list. How much more validation do I need.
$ide Thought
Larry's aversion towards theorising and conceptualising is another rarity I witnessed. The demand to speak from heart can appear bizarre, particularly to those who are involved in education. It can be a difficulty, a commonality or a yearning for some to communicate in such manner. I feel that all human being should be experts from speaking from the heart! But it is uncomfortable in most societies today.
After being in the Hogan and asked to speak our stories make me think about the lack of familiar communal space to speak our story and be respected and understood on the basis that this has constituted part of who you are in this space and time should also not be rarity and a difficult experience.
Last Notion, (I have too many)
Participating in the sun rise ceremony yanked me back to my childhood when I kneeled on the side of the sofa to look out of the window at a moody Glaswegian sky with the sun rising and I would sing "Good Morning Mr Sun"
I embedded the feeling of the seemly childish awe and simplicity into my prayer.
No matter which ways of being we have absorbed, there is no harm in greeting the sun when it rises and sets. It reminds us that we are made up of the remnants of exploding stars. This is a perspective we have all become too distracted to see blurring our identification as a mere human being. Could this be a solution?
