Rather quietly, over the course of the last few months, a major shift has been happening within me. Or perhaps it is better to say that I have finally started to understand the "why's" of what I have experienced for nearly 70 years. Forgive me if I am repeating anything I've said before...realizations come in waves, and I'm trying to ride them!
So yesterday, I did the thing that leaves me overwhelmed and depressed every time -- just for a change of scenery, I went to a different grocery store than usual, one that is enormous. It requires taking a bus I rarely take; sometimes I simply need to get a different vantage point on this small city on a hill, and the huge lake at its feet.
Yet more than ever, and more quickly than ever, I became completely overwhelmed. The size of the place. The fact that with so few exceptions, everything is packaged in plastic or plasticized paper. The fact that in a store that could feed the entire city, perhaps 25 people (apart from me and the staff) were walking around with carts. Wondering how much of this stuff actually gets sold, and how much is disposed of in the end. I was grateful to have about $50 to spend (and these days that buys maybe ten items!), but I felt, as I walked out the door, a huge wave of sickness at the unhealthiness of our entire construct. Our entire way of life.
I think maybe all along, looking at things from a Goddess perspective was at the heart of my inability to function in this modern paradigm, although I wouldn't have been able to articulate it when I was younger. It wasn't just my England thing, or my church music thing, or my artistic thing, or my beauty thing, or even my feminist thing. It wasn't just unease with notions like profit and interest and competition. It wasn't just that my family was a mess. Deep down, since at least the 1990's, I believe I was aligning to values that I now see as more consistent with the divine feminine, beauty and Nature. While "morality" is a very loaded concept, and one that may phase out as we leave our duality landscape, it still may be pertinent to ask, what is "moral" about going so far out of our way to create a way of life that is not environmentally sustainable? What is "moral" about glorifying violence, and putting profits so far above any other consideration? There's a "moral" in almost everything that is happening in our world right now -- both the adjective and the noun -- and it's painful for all of us individually to look at the moral of the story, but necessary. I'm relieved to realize that it was never a case of "if only I could have tweaked this or that"...I was so profoundly out of line with all our institutions that I guess the way my life worked out was inevitable.
The good news being, that as more and more waves of love, beauty and unity enter our earth space, many of us will find our values more widely reflected. We will find something to hang onto, waves we can genuinely "ride" with delight and enthusiasm. Today, I will try to focus on those things as much as it is humanly possible, to balance out yesterday!
