Wisdom

Power to the Matriarchy ❁

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D A Y 2022

Arise, all women who have hearts!

P l o u g h:

“In the United States, the origins of the official holiday go back to 1870, when Julia Ward Howe – an abolitionist best remembered as the poet who wrote “Battle Hymn of the Republic” – worked to establish a Mother’s Peace Day. Howe dedicated the celebration to the eradication of war, and organized festivities in Boston for years.

In 1907, Anna Jarvis, of Philadelphia, began the campaign to have Mother’s Day officially recognized, and in 1914, President Woodrow Wilson did this, proclaiming it a national holiday and a “public expression of our love and reverence for all mothers.”

This the proclamation Ward-Howe wrote in 1870, which explains, in her own impassioned words, the goals of the original holiday.”

Arise, all women who have hearts, whether your baptism be that of water or of tears! Say firmly: “We will not have great questions decided by irrelevant agencies, our husbands shall not come to us, reeking with carnage, for caresses and applause.

“Our sons shall not be taken from us to unlearn all that we have been able to teach them of charity, mercy and patience. We women of one country will be too tender of those of another country to allow our sons to be trained to injure theirs.”

From the bosom of the devastated earth a voice goes up with our own. It says, “Disarm, disarm! The sword is not the balance of justice.” Blood does not wipe out dishonor nor violence indicate possession.

As men have often forsaken the plow and the anvil at the summons of war, let women now leave all that may be left of home for a great and earnest day of counsel. Let them meet first, as women, to bewail and commemorate the dead. Let them then solemnly take counsel with each other as to the means whereby the great human family can live in peace, each learning after his own time, the sacred impress, not of Caesar, but of God.

In the name of womanhood and of humanity, I earnestly ask that a general congress of women without limit of nationality may be appointed and held at some place deemed most convenient and at the earliest period consistent with its objects, to promote the alliance of the different nationalities, the amicable settlement of international questions, the great and general interests of peace.

https://www.plough.com

Chapter 3, let’s go!

“For Mother’s Day, my mom would like the activism of her youth to not be for nothing.”

Wisdom is the mother of all good things.

“In this time of excessive patriarchy, may wisdom prevail over folly, love over fear, compassion over hate, justice over injustice, the mammal brain over the reptilian brains so that future generations may thrive.” -Matthew Fox

Rilke:

I love the dark hours of my being.

My mind deepens into them.

There I can find, as in old letters,

the days of my life, already lived,

and held like a legend, and understood.

Anne Baring:

“The Latin word for ‘Mother’ comes from ‘mater’ (matter)…Divine Wisdom…Holy Spirit.”

Ilia Delio

“The biggest step in the evolution of human morality was the move from interpersonal relations to a focus on the greater good.”

On Children

Your children are not your children
They are the sons and daughters of life’s longing for itself
They come through you but not from you
And though they are with you yet they belong not to you
You may give them your love but not your thoughts
For they have their own thoughts
You may house their bodies but not their souls
For their souls dwell in the house of tomorrow
Which you cannot visit, not even in your dreams
You may strive to be like them
But seek not to make them like you
For life goes not backward, nor tarries with yesterday. -Kahlil Gibran

jai

This month: ‘Loving ourselves…breathe and push.’

Valerie Kaur

Breath: A Guided Inquiry

Transition: Ways to Practice

“Transition is both a noun and a verb. Transition is the fiery process that is required to move from one reality into another. To transition is to summon the courage to stay in the labors of love and justice, even when we want to give up. It requires us to draw upon collective wisdom to birth something new together.”

Create a wisdom practice. Choose ways to listen to your deepest wisdom, the parts of yourselves that are wise and brave and unfailingly loving. This might mean protecting a few minutes daily to journal, meditate, draw or color or create—whatever gives you the stillness to quiet the noise of the world and listen to the wisest voice within you. If you do not yet hear anything, that is okay. Keep breathing.  Keep listening.

Surround yourself with sources of bravery. Who makes you brave?  These may be people in your life, or they may be ancestors, authors, artists, or activists you have never met. Keep these people and their voices close to you so that you can nourish the root of your own deepest wisdom.

Transition requires endings as well as new beginnings. As individuals we can ask: What stories am I willing to let die in order for new possibilities to be born? As a society we can ask: What stories about our nation have to die for a new America to be born?

Reflect in your wisdom journal. The wise voice in you will tell you what practice you need on the revolutionary love compass — when you need to breathe, push, grieve, rage, fight, and on. What do you need on any given day, in any given moment?  Calling forth our deepest wisdom is not just how we love ourselves. When we lead with our deepest wisdom, not our fear, we can play our role in transitioning the world around us. Imagine a critical mass of people leading from their deepest wisdom: We can transition humanity as a whole.

“Joy is the gift of love. To let in joy is to give our senses over to what is beautiful, delightful, pleasurable, or wondrous in the present moment. Joy returns us to everything good and beautiful and worth fighting for. It gives us energy for the long labor.”

What brings you joy? Choose one thing that is simple and accessible. A person, a place, or an activity that you could go to right now if you wanted to.

The Revolutionary Love Project envisions a world where love is a public ethic and shared practice in our lives and politics. We generate stories, tools, and thought leadership to equip people to practice the ethic of love in the fight for social justice.

COVID, CLIMATE & COMPASSION

We need to focus and fix all three.

From Eric Holthaus:

Original art for The Phoenix is by Laila Arêde.

Our time here on this beautiful planet is so temporary.

If there’s anything that 2020 taught us, it’s that while time is fleeting for everyone,

it’s the way society is structured

that determines how fleeting it is, and for whom. The overlapping tragedies of Covid-19, police brutality, and the climate emergency don’t fall equally on everyone, and

it’s up to us to change that system

to ensure everyone here gets the chance to thrive that they deserve.

That’s the heart of climate justice.

Our window for revolutionary repair of our planet’s atmosphere and biosphere – caused by centuries of excesses brought by capitalism, patriarchy, misogyny, imperialism, and racism – is bound by physics. We can (and should!) argue about the best ways to get to a zero-carbon world as quickly as possible, but we can’t argue with the fact that current global policies will deliver a planet that’s incompatible with a safe future for billions of people who did the least to cause the climate emergency.

This is what we’re fighting for: Indigenous sovereignty, regenerative care of the land, shelter, equity, joy. All the basics that people need to live a good life. A vision for a bread and roses future for everyone.

Getting started with that journey isn’t hard.

The point is only that you show up.

We need everyone to be a part of this transformation in their own way.

At the same time, becoming a Climate Person isn’t easy. But it’s some of the most important work in the history of the world. You don’t get to give up, but you do get to ask for help.

If living your best life includes making the world more life-sustaining for every creature we share this beautiful planet with, the rest of this post will help you get started.

Meteorologist and climate journalist Eric Holthaus describes himself as “a meteorologist who strives to foster understanding of humanity’s connection to the atmosphere.” Here he delivers a monologue on climate change and his mission to remind everyone that we are all in this fight together. Eric wants to change the narrative of climate change from being “one of inevitable disaster to one of possibility.”

Author Allysha Lavino and a thought for 2021:

And what do we want to bring with us?

Courage? 

Wisdom?

Tenacity? 

This is the year we feather our nests – it’s time to take care of ourSelves, our families, our communities, and our environments.

❀

Sophia.

“Be ye diligent that ye may receive the mysteries of Light.”

-Pistis Sophia [Gnostic]

‘A word of counsel to people who are seeking to demonstrate about great big things: shut up about it. Don’t talk. The world does not believe, and they reflect their doubt. Keep your power within yourself. Insulate yourself, encompass yourself with it, protect yourself with it, surround yourself with it. That is putting on the armor of faith against the false thought of the human race. Get that big consciousness if you want to do something that takes a great deal of money to do it, takes a lot of understanding, takes a lot of people engaged in it…something that [is] an awful big thing. That is the point: Do something new.’

-Love & Law: The Unpublished Teachings (2001), pp. 114-115.

…unfolding what is within.

The physical structure of the universe is love.

—Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (1881-1955) 

Wrapped within young leaves: the sound of water.

—Soseki

”Our gift already unfolded. Embedded in the seed is the blossom. embedded in the womb is the child fully grown. Embedded in the impulse to care is the peace of love realized. Embedded in the edge of risk and fear is the authenticity that makes life worth living.

For as dust owes its path to wind, we, as human beings, are asked to acknowledge that something larger encircles us and prompts us to unfold.

There is a gravity of spirit that pulls the essence of who we are into being. Our job, like all our sister creatures, is to find the abundance of air and water and light, and to unfold what is already within us.”

-Mark Nepo

♥

‘The more we are worn by experience, the more of an inlet we become and the more the waters of life wash out of us. This is why tears come more easily the longer we are here.

Perhaps wisdom is nothing more than the unsayable waters rising within us to swell around the eye, the way that oceans soften land, evidence of that inevitable tide that takes a lifetime to rise.’

-Mark Nepo

Alan.

There is a world of difference between an inference and a feeling. You can reason that the universe is a unity without feeling it to be so. You can establish the theory that your body is a movement in an unbroken process which includes all suns and stars, and yet continue to feel separate and lonely. For the feeling will not correspond to the theory until you have also discovered the unity of inner experience. Despite all theories, you will feel that you are isolated from life so long as you are divided within. 

But you will cease to feel isolated when you recognize, for example, that you do not have a sensation of the sky: you are that sensation. For all purposes of feeling, your sensation of the sky is the sky, and there is no “you” apart from what you sense, feel, and know.

The sense of unity with the “All” is not, however, a nebulous state of mind, a sort of trance, in which all form and distinction is abolished, as if man and the universe merged into a luminous mist of pale mauve. Just as process and form, energy and matter, myself and experience, are names for, and ways of looking at, the same thing — so one and many, unity and multiplicity, identity and difference, are not mutually exclusive opposites: they are each other, much as the body is its various organs. To discover that the many are the one, and that the one is the many, is to realize that both are words and noises representing what is at once obvious to sense and feeling, and an enigma to logic and description.

[…]

When you really understand that you are what you see and know, you do not run around the countryside thinking, “I am all this.” There is simply “all this.”

Alan Watts.

[Maria Popova – – brainpickings.org]

Krista Tippett.

Becoming Wise/An Inquiry into the Mystery and Art of Living

-Krista Tippett (2016)