Growing up, when I’d talk about the more loving, gentle world I could imagine, I was often told I was naive. I was given a head pat, and admonished that I just didn’t understand how the world worked. This happened with teachers, with relatives, with so many of the tall people looking down at me.
“That’s just how the world works.” War, poverty, brutality, homelessness, environmental destruction — “is just how it is,” they’d say.
I never believed them.
But I did let those comments shame me into some level of silence.
In all that is so devastating right now, one place I find hope is this: more and more of us are becoming convinced that our status quo ways of living, of thinking, of organizing an economy and a government, our ways of treating the earth and each other, is not “just how the world works.”
It is a way that in fact does not work at all.
More and more of us now feel strong enough, fed up enough, weary and wise enough that we are not going to be shamed or silenced by the head pats.
We are seeing things more clearly, and we know what we see.
Yet we still struggle, at times, to stand for our values. When I hear women say, “I’m not political” or “I don’t know enough” to speak up, I wonder: do we have a “civic inner critic” just as we have other kinds?
I wonder, did we internalize the head pats? Did we swallow someone else’s idea that there was some complicated, hard-to-understand reason the world had to be insane, hard-hearted, or cruel?
I know you already see and feel how this world could be very different. I know your heart sees a world in which nurturance of all people, community, and kindness are the organizing principles. A world in which those things come first, before and above all else.
These are incredibly difficult times. I know you are holding a great deal. I hope you are holding yourself with love and gentleness as you do. And I hope you are walking with others who hold you that way too.
May we be emboldened in our critiques,
inspired in our imaginings of the alternatives,
together in community,
building a loving world.
With love,
Tara
Top Photo Credit: A Chosen Soul
