It is a measure of something that after barely ever using the word "crisis" in this blog for seven years, I am now using it again for the second time in about six weeks.
And the word is completely warranted this morning. It is a crisis when gunmen routinely enter stores, malls, houses of worship, and other public spaces to kill people. It is a crisis when there is limited baby formula to feed the next generation. It is a crisis when human rights are threatened, when the environment is threatened, when seventy years of relative peace in Europe is threatened. It is a crisis when prices rise and people start becoming fearful.
As I've said before, I think that all of these crises are really a single crisis, kind of the final act in a play called, "Patriarchy", another word I have barely ever used. Last week, I bought a book in a used book store, published forty years ago, basically saying that patriarchy was the cause of all the crises facing humanity -- which, of course, were all the same crises we are doubly facing now. It was shocking to see this mirror held up to where we were then, and moving in my mind fast forward through the events and trends in between. Of course, in 1982, I probably would never have bought the book. I was working in the corporate world, trying to pay back a heavy load of student loans, trying valiantly to be a "normal" American in the wake of my heartbreaking decision to turn my back on England and a church music tradition that, as a woman, I couldn't enter. At that point, I didn't really see myself as a feminist, and these kinds of words were uncomfortable for me. They still are today, frankly. There's anger in them, frustration and anger, with a paradigm that just seems to keep giving us too much to be frustrated and angry about.
At its essence, putting aside the male- or conflict- orientation of our current paradigm, the problem is that it is hierarchical. Somebody is above somebody else. Somebody is worth more than someone else. Someone's work deserves more income than someone else's work. And everything we do as humans is worth more than our earth home, and more than anything else in the galaxy. Instead of looking at our place in the Universe as a horizontal disc of equally important places and people and planets and lifeforms, instead of being able to generously embrace all life everywhere, we are taught early on to claw our way vertically to the top -- or accept a humiliating place at the bottom. And then we wonder why life is so violent and brutal.
Oh, dear friends. There is another way of living. It's hard to make it work, but it is worth trying to find the "place" beyond all these uncomfortable words and realities, and not put it off until that ultimate hierarchical concept, "heaven." Find heaven in one minute or one hour today, on this planet, in this moment, and it slows the worldwide momentum of crisis. Infinitesimally, perhaps, but that's all any of us can do today.
