POVERTY
What shame there is in poverty! Or at least, what shame is projected onto the person in poverty!
DELUSION
I still think I’m going to win the lottery and become fantastically rich! The fantasy plays out over and over again. What’s behind it? Why the obsession? Because becoming massively wealthy is possibly really the only way to achieve freedom in our current consumerist, capitalist society! If you are independently wealthy, you don’t have to bring your kid to daycare so you can go to work so that you can buy crap that other people went to work to make.
It may be delusional to think I can win against astronomical odds of a lottery system. But, is it delusional to want to find a way out? Is health really measured by one’s dependance on, and integration into a system? What if that system is faulty, rotten, corrupted and collapsing? Is it really so healthy to stay hooked in? Isn’t it healthier, and saner, to try to find a way out for one’s self and one’s children?
REVOLUTION
There is a revolution afoot, but without any central leader. It’s grassroots in the truest sense. People are beginning to wake up. The Earth is speaking, yelling, shouting pleading, and the skin of our feet is beginning to listen. As our feet listen, the sound travels up our bones and sinews, into our fat and organs, into all the little cells in our body. As this rapturous, harmonious, discordant screaming and singing echoes through the chambers of our being-ness, voices in the atoms of our cells cry out, “YES!!!!!”
Yes, we want to live!!! Yes, we need change! We need to stop killing ourselves, the planet, our children! We need to stop buying into the suppressive dogma that tells us to be work harder, buy more, listen to our doctors, believe the news, buy houses, buy cars, inject poisons into our bodies, suffocate and drug our wild, crazy spirits! THE END TO COMPLICITY!!! We can no longer participate and revel in our own destruction!!! It is time for life!
It is time to listen to the Earth again. It is time time to really hear our children calling out to be held (even at 2 in the morning, even when we “should” be at work, even when they are “misbehaving”). It is time to live in community, share the work of living. Cook together, clean together, raise our children together. It is time to stop feeding our lives into the corporate machine. It is time to rise up, and claim our heritage as Gods and Goddesses, children of the Earth Mother! It is time to begin healing, dancing, eating, and making love, as if our lives really matter, as if the sensation of living really matters.
SHAME
Back to this short, complicated, tricky, sticky word! Shame. In our current state of “living,” there is shame in being poor. But what is this shame, let’s look closer…
Shame is not the same as guilt. Guilt is a sense that my actions are not in alignment with my values. Guilt is a tolerable feeling, in itself, and can lead to easy correction of said actions. Shame is something different. Shame says that there is something wrong with me, that I am somehow “less than.”
It seems that I have failed to find a way to live outside of the system I so despise (for now… mwa ha ha). I do not deny that it is important to do such things as eat, and therefore, I accept that (as I seem to not have enough money for the basic essentials lately) it is time for me to reintegrate myself into the system. Time to plug back in. I am very sad and disheartened by my inability to find another way to live at this time, yet I am choosing not to feel shame.
See, if I choose to feel shame about my state of poverty, then I am agreeing with the cultural message that I am somehow “less than.” If I believe that something is wrong with me because I have allowed my situation to get to this state, then I am BUYING INTO the message that the world is somehow in a state of rightness, and I ventured into a state of wrongness in my attempt to escape a life I found toxic and dangerous. If I believe that the world is right and I am wrong, then I give up my values and I say NO to the Earth which is talking to me so loudly through my feet (and skin, and hair, etc). By accepting the shame placed upon me, I silence my listening, and I shut myself off.
That’s the point of shame…. to get us to shut up and quietly be our little cog in the machine. The deader we are inside, the more the death around us spreads. Shame is a tool of cultural control, intended to keep us from fighting the destruction, or even admitting to ourselves that we are witnessing the suicide of our species.
So, although I have (for now) failed to escape the “machine,” I do not accept the shame label. My effort was valiant, and I am a hero for trying to save myself. In saving, or even attempting to save, myself and those I love, from all this destruction, I make steps towards saving the human species as a whole. I am a hero who has faced many many obstacles. I will continue to fight, even if I have to concede this battle for now.
OUR SPIRITUAL REVOLUTION IS STILL ON!