„What are we being called to do at this time? To wake up together.“ (Joanna Macy)

Highly recommended!!! A long, very beautiful and inspiring article including an extensive interview with Joanna Macy.

„We need to sit together, grab each other and be together as we even take in what is happening, let alone how we respond. Because alone you get overwhelmed, and it becomes traumatizing. But once people have tasted that they can, with each other, speak about what they see and feel is happening to our world, a number of things happen, in addition to the fact that they fall in love with each other. There is a trust and realization of, „Oh my god, I’m not alone.“ There is a return to your own self-respect. I think self-respect has not been realized as such a source of strength in the individual psyche. I think people would rather see themselves facing an overwhelming foe with conviction of their purpose, than to be comfortable.
So that was the release. And the release would come, and as people began to break through their reluctance to suffer with our world, once they took that on and spoke to it, then they found their unity with our world. Often, not only did a sense of bondedness come, but a lot of hilarity. There is laughter and joking, and a shaking off of a kind of spell or curse. A feeling comes, of, „I can be here.“ And that feels more liberating and true to you and brings you into the moment when you are less dependent on someone giving you a failsafe method to make everything fine, because no one can do that. (…)
What is called of us now, from the planet? What are we being called to do at this time?
To wake up together. That is actually the name of the movement in Sri Lanka that I went over to do field work with. Sarvodaya. Taking the Gandhian term, but using it in a slightly different way, but the same Sanskrit, which is „everybody wakes up together.“
It’s hard to wake up alone now. It’s scary to see even what is going on. But there is almost no limit, I’ve come to believe, to what we can do with the love and support of each other. There is almost no limit to what we can do for the sake of each other. This taps into the Bodhisattva heart. That’s that hero figure of Mahayana Buddhism, „the one with the boundless heart.“ The one who realizes there is no private salvation.
If you are going to wake up, you have to wake up together. Never has that been more true than now, at this stage of late stage corporate capitalism.“

http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/39448-learning-to-see-in-the-dark-amid-catastrophe-an-interview-with-deep-ecologist-joanna-macy

Wisdom Embraces the Whole of a Person

Beautiful quote: „Wisdom is a way of knowing that goes beyond one’s mind, one’s rational understanding, and embraces the whole of a person: mind, heart, and body. These three centers must all be working, and working in harmony, as the first prerequisite to the Wisdom way of knowing.“ Cynthia Bourgeault

Restorative Approaches in Schools

„Circle in the Square“ is the inspiring story of restorative approaches as implemented throughout Minnesota schools and communities, as told by one of the country’s foremost practitioners, Nancy Riestenberg.

„Restorative approaches help to shift the dominant social norms from ‚power over‘ to ‚power with,‘ talking ‚with‘ instead of talking ‚at,‘ and ‚we centered‘ instead of ‚I centered'“ (Riestenberg, 2012, p. xiii).

Over the span of her 25 year career with the Minnesota Department of Education, where she is now Violence Prevention Specialist, Riestenberg documented the successes that teachers, counselors, community-based practitioners and administrators have had repairing harm, restoring relationships, teaching lessons, and changing lives.

Characteristics of a Wise Person & a Wise Democracy

In this blog entry Tom Atlee aks the question whether it is presumptuous and misleading when he calls his vision of democracy “wise”. His vision is one of political and governance systems accessing the wisdom, power, and participation of the whole community and the whole of life in service of the whole community and the whole of life. He describes the characteristics of a wise person and looks at what those qualities mean in the context of a community or society.

A wise – or wiser? – democracy?