What would a real and true American Revolution look like today? What exactly would have to happen for the country I live in to rise up and shake off its blindness?
There are a number of conditions.
• It requires leadership at every level that can articulate a vision that speaks to the hearts of all of us, regardless of class, race, age, gender, political persuasion. A vision deep enough that it activates our collective human values and longings.
Do you have a vision you can share? Don’t be shy. Speak it out.
• It requires a hell of a lot of courage. Vision (both from leadership, but more importantly from our own internal longing) inspires courage. And then we have to believe that our voice matters, no matter what our experience might tell us about who is listening or not.
What’s the state of your courage these days? How can you nourish and foster it?
• Another way of articulating the above condition is: what is our relationship with fear? What are our patterns when faced with fear? How can we make distinctions between real danger and perceived danger? How can we see our patterns and interrupt them? Being courageous does not mean we are without fear. It's how we react to fear that matters.
Can you feel fear in the body, the raw sensations without the story? Can you sit with the sensations?
• It requires looking without flinching at the terrible things we have done in the past as a United States of America — slavery and indigenous genocide, for one. Looking without hating ourselves; only opening to and allowing the grief to be felt in our bodies . . . fully. Letting the pain of those whose humanity was trespassed into our collective psyche opens a more clear path to making authentic amends.
This is a community project. Who can you gather with to express and share your grief?
• It requires stretching beyond your boundaries of comfort. This is a creative act that ultimately energizes.
How can you disrupt your own ideas of what is 'right'? How can you expand your own worldview?
• It requires an embodied knowing of our interconnectedness — not only with other human beings, but with trees and grass and sky and bugs and everything in our physical universe. You KNOW this belonging in your bones.
Practice daily stopping and connecting to someone or something. Be still and feel the connection.
• It requires coordinated civic action. Beyond the reach of 'the media,' thousands of gatherings and initiatives are springing up. Everyone can do something, whether it is a listening conversation with someone who holds a different perspective, to sharing memes and information, to donating money, to participating in the many online forums that are erupting ever day.
Know that engagement, no matter how humble, also dissipates despair and isolation.
• It requires Love. The most powerful revolution, as Ghandi and Nelson Mandela and the young hippies of the 60's and the new hippie star children of today know, is one that comes from Love. When you are able to see your greatest enemy (go ahead, yes, him) with love, you know that all your actions are life-sustaining and in right relationship with How Things Work.
How do you make contact with Love? To knowing you are Love?
Are you with me? I'm IN for the revolution. It's time.