Happy Fourth of July all!

May all people everywhere soon celebrate independence and freedom, and may we all make peace. Thomas Berry gives us much reason to hope.

I would suggest that we see these early years of the 21st century as the period when we discover the great community of the Earth, a comprehensive community of all the living and non-living components of the planet. We are just discovering that the human project is itself a component of the Earth project, that our intimacy with the Earth is our way to intimacy with each other. Such are the foundations of our journey into the future.

Yes! Magazine: "A New Culture Emerges"

Happy Fourth of July, Everyone!

Take a stand

Stand on the street corner with a sign that says WAR
Stand on the corner with a sign that says PEACE
Take a stand

Wear a pin on your lapel that says WAR
Wear a pin that says PEACE
Show your heart's desire

When your colleague stabs you in the back, raise your fist and say
This is war!
Hold out your hand, look her in the eye and say, Peace
Act like you mean it

When a driver zooms into the parking spot you've been waiting for
Hold up an ugly sign in red and black and orange that says, WAR
Hold up a happy sign in cheerful blues and teals and yellows that says Peace
Feel the difference

When your child lies down on the playground kicking and screaming that she doesn't want to go and you're worn to a frazzle
Raise your fist to the heavens and say, War!
Sit down and scoop your child into your arms and rock her until she feels peace
Be the world you want your child to know when she grows up

Sit down after work with a beer and the remote and watch three hours of war, violence and murder-as-entertainment
Read a book to your child, take a walk in the cool evening air, share a candlelight dinner with your sweetheart, get out your art supplies and doodle, trim the dead leaves from your plants, paint the bathroom, write three thank you notes, call your best friend, knit a sweater, drink a hot cup of cocoa, go to bed early
Make peace

Making the shift

It's so easy to feel despair at the possibility of achieving peace in our violent world. Have you noticed that the people of the Village of Ordinary never mention peace in the context of violence and war? Rose gives gratitude for many things, but never for the absence of human-on-human hatred and suffering. Many of you tell me you cannot imagine a world like that, but you can, if you stretch a bit. People all over the world imagine it.

And they're doing something about it. Small ways. Bigger ways. Each what they can.

Watch what happens in this video from World Peace Emerging. Feel the shift in your body when the movie shifts.



Did you feel it? Real people, determined in some way to make peace in the corner of the world they live. You recognize some of them. Yes? Others you've never seen before. Isn't it exciting? Millions of us are making the shift, one prayer, one meditation, one kindness, one gift, one letter to our lawmakers, one act of forgiveness, one act of compassion, one moment of choice, one friendly smile at a time.

If all you've got today is a smile, share it. You can't get more Ordinary than that.
 
 

Where I'm going--long term

Before we begin addressing the questions in Where I'm going--short term, it's important to have a sense of the long-term objectives.

The Village of Ordinary began as a need to vision a peaceful world in the face of a warring one.

We must believe that peace is possible. Some have referred to Ordinary as a utopia, but I see it as a perfectly normal existence--if we are willing to give up hating someone, anyone--our neighbor who poisoned the cat, our coworker who never misses a chance to back-stab, our parent who beat us to within an inch of our lives, our lover who done us wrong. (Where would we be without all those songs?) The people who caused 9-11. The people who lied so they could start a war. Tough ones, yes. All of them.

Look at what the Ladakh say when someone behaves badly: "Chi choen?" or "What's the point?" When there is so much to love in life, why waste time spending our energy hating people who hurt us? It doesn't change them (Or does it? Is it true that love can soften the heart of the most evil of evil-doers?), but it may well embitter us. Or worse.

Beyond that, we can begin to view the people who have hurt us with compassion and love. Some believe that love and compassion are the only hope for gaining a peaceful world. This is the grand experiment, isn't it? I'm not the first to propose it, not the first to attempt it. Many have gone before. Ghandi, Martin Luther King, Jesus, Buddha, and countless ordinary people like you and me, living their everyday lives, no big names on billboards or movie screens, choosing to say I love you to the ones who done us wrong.

That's the heart and core of where I'm going. Everything else--living in harmony with Nature and other animals, choosing right livelihood, building sustainably--everything else will come from that simple choice.

I will love.

When I can't love, I will ask Great Spirit to help me to love and to show love where I am yet too weak to do so.

That's where I'm going. What about you? Can you vision it? Can you make a commitment to that choice?

In the face of a world gone haywire (more to come on that) how everyday ordinary can we make love? How much can ordinary love change the world? Try sending love to someone you have hated for one day and tell me what happened. If you can't send love, call on the Higher Power you recognize in your life and ask them to send the love you do not feel. Then return here and tell me what you experienced. I want to know.