Thank you all for your thoughtful comments about the first part. Here’s Part Two. One more after this. Then I’ll work on a second essay–at least that’s the plan.
…But do we have the strength, the will and the courage to undertake this monstrous task? Or will we do what we have done so many times before—rebuild the structure in the same model using the shattered and inadequate rubble that caused the collapse in the first place? Can we build something—in this case, a healthy world—while clinging to the ideas of the past that are no longer useful and acknowledge the ideas that are still valuable for a strong culture that works for the whole?
We have been debating, analyzing and discussing this is circles large and small since at least the 1990s. Many valuable ideas have sprung from that and many are being implemented even now. Here are a few: mutual aid, micro-lending, re-generative agriculture/Green Belt, relocalizing all that can be localized, focusing energy and attention from the center/hearth out not the top down (from heart to hearth to neighborhood/community to town to county to state to region to nation.
Many of the tools we need are already at hand—I would argue we have all the tools we need. But we stand enveloped in a culture that talks more than it does, that criticizes more than it creates, that silos itself more than it shares ideas and strategies. This may be the greatest stumbling block to achieving a nurturing and livable society. The years of Covid isolation and the general dysfunction of every system during the last decade of the Tower’s collapse has made us weary, fearful, angry and argumentative while also weakening our ability to function in groups. How we choose to address this healing work will say much about how we proceed with the work that lie ahead of us in anticipation of the next card in the Tarot, the Star.
(For those who may not know, I have been reading cards for fifty-five years and Tarot for more than fifty. The symbolism of the deck has woven itself into my work even as I find new subtleties in my practice.)
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