The Struggle for Freedom is a Creative, Communal Act

“We need to stay grounded in the reality of the situation. THIS IS HAPPENING. It’s actually been happening for a LONG time. It’s only now that those of us who have been privileged to be protected from seeing it are being impacted.

So it’s time to burn the fainting couches. Only clutch those pearls if you’re willing to tear them off your neck and sell them to free the children.

There’s no going back. There’s only going forward. There’s a lot of work to be done and it’s going to take ALL of us to create a world where justice is real. Equality is a given. Reverence and respect are the true coin of the realm. And community is a place where everyone belongs and is treated as the precious, holy, valued beings that we are all meant to be.” Chris Zydel

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Ultimately, we, humans, are creators at our core. We have come to create. While many seem to be dead set on destruction, it is the creator within each of us that holds the true power, strength, will, joy, and compassion to make a new and more just and beautiful world.

In the face of destruction and deconstruction, we find a huge invitation to stand up for what we envision for this world. In the face of those who wish to return us to darker times in our history, we have the opportunity to create a world more just, inclusive, respectful, and filled with institutions that truly hold all of life as valuable and set policy based on such.

The struggle for freedom is a creative act — but an error many of us have made in the past is to believe the struggle is for our personal freedom, for our personal equality, for our personal world to be bettered. 

No longer can we afford to see freedom and creativity as such. Freedom and creativity have never been about the personal. Even when one is creating in solitude as an artist or a writer, what comes through that creative act is always something for the whole never just for the creator.

The idea that we are individuals first and foremost is and has always been wrong. Our individuality is born out of the wholeness of life. 

We tend to think our individuality is born of itself and we contribute to the whole. That is backward. Our individuality and uniqueness is born out of the whole. Everything we are and have comes out of the whole of life, out of the world itself, out of the Earth, out of our culture. 

Life is relational. Life is circular. Life moves in rhythms. If our societal institutions and environments do not mirror this, which they don’t in most current western cultures, then we don’t create sustaining systems. 

What we create has to mirror how life works and life works to support life itself, the whole, community, the continuation of life. 

So let’s get grounded in what we can create together. What kind of world do we wish to live in and do we wish our children and their children to live in? What values do we want this world to be built on? How do we treat each other in this world?

Take some time today to envision this new world as YOU envision it from within you. The vision that comes through you is the vision life is asking you to live and if it is TRULY creative, it will be in service to the whole. 

While we stand up to and do what it takes to stop the madness that is happening in the world, a madness that wants to move us back in time and stop our evolution toward an inevitable global community, we must also listen to what wants to be created through us.

Trust that you are a creator, that this is your nature, that it is your strength and power, and that acting upon your creativity IS an act that comes out of the whole for the whole when you listen to this powerful creative voice within.

Allow yourself to feel this new world. When you begin to feel the way this world feels, the way this vision moves you, you plant the seeds for the creative beginnings of your part in it. And then you act. One step at a time. You hold the vision. You face what is here knowing you and your arising IS needed as a necessary expression of the whole. 

Within communities. Within organizations. Within families. Within institutions. You ARE an integral part of the circle of life. Step into creator. Listen deeply to what is being asked of you then act on what you hear and invite others to join you, creating together. 

It’s a circular, moment to moment, life-birthing, life-dying process. 

Listening, then acting. Listening, then acting. Listening, then acting. Connected. Sustainable. Together. Related. Whole. Ear to the ground. Always in service to life, to this Earth, and to your fellow human beings and all beings who inhabit our world. 

We are waking up together. There is no such thing as a singular awakening.

Earth, isn’t this what you want: an invisible arising in us?…What is your urgent command, if not transformation? — Rilke, Ninth Duino Elegy