Each person you interact with, is an entire universe unto themselves, a Divine Being, unspeakabley precious.
One of the ways that your project, your personal healing, or your social invention can change the world is through story. But even if no one ever learns of it, even if it is invisible to every human on Earth, it will have no less of an effect.
We sense that ‘normal’ isn’t coming back, that we are being born into a new normal: a new kind of society, a new relationship to the earth, a new experience of being human.
No one’s ever completely broken. It’s just a matter of how much has to fall apart before the ember of life is exposed to air.
The force of love, the force of reunion is unstoppable.
How do we change the world? Change the story.
We are all here to contribute our gifts toward something greater than ourselves, and will never be content unless we are.
We are not just a skin-encapsulated ego, a soul encased in flesh. We are each other and we are the world.
Ultimately, work on self is inseperable from work in the world. Each mirrors the other; each is a vehicle for the other. When we change ourselves, our values and actions change as well. When we do work in the world, internal issues arise that we must face or be rendered ineffective.
Is it too much to ask, to live in a world where our human gifts go toward the benefit of all? Where our daily activities contribute to the healing of the biosphere and the well-being of other people?
There is a vast territory between what we’re trying to leave behind, and where we want to go – and we don’t have any maps for that territory.
Each experience of love nudges us toward the Story of Interbeing, because it only fits into that story and defies the logic of Separation.
The present convergence of crises––in money, energy, education, health, water, soil, climate, politics, the environment, and more––is a birth crisis, expelling us from the old world into a new.
Contemporaneous with the financial crisis we have an ecological crisis and a health crisis. They are intimately interlinked. We cannot convert much more of the earth into money, or much more of our health into money, before the basis of life itself is threatened.
When any of us meet someone who rejects dominant norms and values, we feel a little less crazy for doing the same. Any act of rebellion or non-participation, even on a very small scale, is therefore a political act.
The gift economy represents a shift from consumption to contribution, transaction to trust, scarcity to abundance and isolation to community.
When we must pay the true price for the depletion of nature’s gifts, materials will become more precious to us, and economic logic will reinforce, and not contradict, our heart’s desire to treat the world with reverence and, when we receive nature’s gifts, to use them well.
In a gift economy, the more you give, the richer you are.
Even the most thorough change happens once choice at a time.
Play is the production of fun; entertainment is the consumption of fun.