LIVING & LEARNIN G
The sweetness of knowing how special you are – physical form manifest from the dust of a star.’ It’s not hard to get lost in this busy, busy world, too easy to feel
confused and alone, angry, irritated... How hard must it be for a child? Charlotte’s feelings are the same ones I’ve been learning to deal with all my life. I raged through my teenage years, Robert Smith and The Cure providing the soundtrack, then into my twenties narrowly escaping overdoses and a suicidal car crash. Charlotte and I have a new young artist we both like and sing along to Sky Ferreira’s song, ‘I Blame Myself’: “I’m 10 years old without a voice. I feel like nothing’s really changed. Now I’m just a little older.”
postulates, as humanity rushes headfirst into a planetary crisis, that we have the chance and the desire to step into a new way of being, which he calls the ‘Story of Interbeing’, a state being brought about by individuals ‘waking up’ to the reality that we are all a part of creation, that our every thought and action impacts the whole. From this standpoint we can rise to become true custodians of our planet, ‘Enlightenment is a group activity’, he says. The words have resonated with me so intensely that I have
wanted to shout much of the book from the rooftops, and have had to content myself with the next best thing – posting quotes on Twitter.
It saddens me deeply to think my seven-year- old daughter is so vulnerable. I thought I could protect her, had hoped all the work I’d done on my own self-development would somehow extend to her, thought we were evolving, she and I, not circling the same patterns for eternity.
I’ve been reading a wonderful book while all this has been going on, ‘The More Beautiful World Our Hearts Know is Possible’, by American activist-cum-philosopher Charles Eisenstein. He’s identified the pain that many of us feel and describes it as living in the ‘Story of Separation’, a result of being part of a culture and civilisation that has thought itself separate from the world since the Industrial Age, expounded by everyone from Descartes to Darwin. It is only now, he
8 MAY 2015
Why is this book so important to me? Because reading it I have realised at a global level how important my own personal soul searching has been.
The angst I’ve always felt, that tugged at my heart as a child, and raged through me like so many tempests – I could never outrun it. The harder I struggled the more pain I felt.
It’s only been recently that I feel I’ve discovered I was never supposed to – that this feeling was truth bubbling up inside me. I recognise it in my daughter, her fresh impatience for anything that smacks of the Age of Separation. “All right Charlotte”, I say, “We’re going to try a little experiment. I’m going to put you on the naughty spot,
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