Life is really all about people. We can’t live in a vacuum, or on a lonely island for that matter. We feel an affinity to other people who are similar to us, and thus see reflected back to us how we are already. When we dislike something in another person, it mirrors our shadow side back to us, something we still need to learn or to accept. This means that we define ourselves in comparison to and with the help of others. My meditation teacher Bruce Rubin posted this amazing year-end talk on the human condition and relationships. It’s truly enlightening.
stop and smell the roses
Why do we like stories so much? Steve Almond, author and creative writing professor, says that the narrator “is the guide who makes sense of the story.” We used to TELL stories, then we WROTE stories, now much of our story telling comes in the form of horrific pictures from the media. Storytelling has become fragmented – why? Because our story is changing and we are confused about it. The old stories, such as our Western creation story, are obsolete. Even our president deplored that he might not have narrated a good enough new story to the American people. Of course there are all sorts of stories, local and global. Stories illustrate where we come from, where we might be going, what’s going on around us, and how it all hangs together. But, as Almond writes in his very good story on stories, our present storyline is being overshadowed by “glittering fantasies of violence and fame.” He is wondering whether “…the story of our species…has simply become too enormous, too confused and terrifying, for us to grapple with.”
Stop, and question, and wonder, and discuss, and read, and make up your own mind about our current story. Don't let yourself passively be assaulted by the zillions of fragmented and incoherent pieces of visual and verbal mis- dis- and actual information.
Stop and smell the roses sometime.
photo by Deborah Fitchett
do you see the connection?
Do you see the connection between:
- South Korea electing a woman president
- The recent Brooklyn rabbi conviction in a sexual abuse case of a teenager
- The recent Indian rape protests?
Concurrently in different parts of the world breakthroughs are happening on the women’s rights front. Not that I want our culture to veer in the opposite direction, towards a female domination. No, this time around I believe we are finally headed, slowly but surely, towards cooperation, equality, mutual respect and understanding. Check out Barbara Marx Hubbards’s websites
on our consciousness evolution and what the end of the Mayan calendar is really about –a new consciousness structure, not the end of the world; although I am hoping it will be the end of the world as we know it now: war, environmental destruction, capitalistic exploitation and domination.