Month: March 2025

When I first wrote this, I decided to stop blogging for a while. It was just too bleak. But with the help of friends, I found a way to present it that feels gentler and appropriate.

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Brilliant thinkers have described modernity as being in hospice, but having worked in hospice myself; I wonder if it is possible that our culture isn’t in hospice but in the throes of active dying. A part of me now believes that radical acceptance means acknowledging the imminent end of our current systems, our established norms, and our sense of security.

When I look back at my life as an activist and, indeed, decades of my activist ancestors’ struggles, it seems we have made little actual progress. Yes, Martin Luther King spoke of an arc bending toward justice, but today, we seem to be spiraling into destruction.

We have reached a point where we are no longer in control. We watch helplessly as climate change accelerates, species vanish, and democratic institutions crumble. Many of us are at a banquet table, laden with privilege, while beneath us roils the darkness of suffering: refugee crises, immigrant abuse, systemic racism, and environmental destruction.

Those who lead us and promise to keep us at the table offer only false promises and fear. They demand our loyalty and compliance while the abyss pulls at our feet. Even those who strive for justice, who crawl beneath the table to offer aid, still partake in the feast. We are all complicit, all feeling the pull of oblivion.

The obvious responses to this are despair, anger, fear, and sadness, and those are absolutely appropriate responses.

But maybe, as part of radical acceptance, we can simply admit that we have failed. And maybe that’s the way it has to be.

In her newest book, the amazing, brilliant Sofie Strand speaks to how entities have come together in an effort to create and failed miserably throughout biological history. The destruction that arises from that inability to digest each other has sometimes been the catalyst for something new to arise. I think she is pointing out that this failure we are experiencing is the impetus we need to birth something new.

We witness the rumbling sound beneath the table, our food bumping and skittering and sliding toward the abyss, and all that we treasured sliding away. Yet in the chaos and terror, there is also a gift.

So, can we live with that? Can we take one step at a time? Can we put one foot in front of the other and lead with love, to quote Melanie Demore?

What else can we do?

I depend upon what I’ve heard called intrinsic hope. The hope intrinsic in the seeds trembling in the ground at the beginning of spring. The hope that is intrinsic in the salmon battling upstream to lay its eggs and die. The hope that is intrinsic in stardust. The hope that is intrinsic in the vibrations of every molecule in every cell of everything that exists. Intrinsic because, somehow, something we cannot imagine will continue.

Maybe we have squandered our opportunity this time to create the paradise that was our gift. For that sin, we will suffer, and that’s what needs to happen. This antichrist-would-be king did not arise out of nowhere. All of us have birthed this monster. And now we have no choice but to move on in any way we can.

In the end, all we have is the bursting buds of springtime, the water flowing, the fish in the sea, the birds in the air, and all our human and more than human beloveds.

So, let us weep, mourn, and then rise again, not with illusions of control but with a fierce commitment to love and service. And let us do it in community and ritual and make it sacred. Because finally, I have to believe that there is nothing that is not sacred, not even failure.

Friends, I’m taking a break for a few reasons.

1. It sometimes seems like there are enough (or even too many) words.
2. Many times they seem redundant and unnecessary.
3. I’m considering what part of my ego is attached to the idea that my words actually add any value.
4. My heart is struggling and I won’t subject you dear reader, to despair (I heard Matthew Fox say, the worst sin is spreading despair).
5. And finally, other than a few sweet and loyal folks who regularly respond, I’m not convinced anyone (or at least not very many) are listening.

It’s not a bad thing and maybe it’s just a rest.

For the most part my despair and exhaustion with the world leaves me in deep surrender, acceptance and wonder. I’m sincerely curious about what will rise from the ashes of our crumbling culture.

And I’m blessed with the realization that all I can do is laugh, sing, love, and serve in my little circles of influence.

Alhamdulillah.

Bye bye for now. ❤️😎🙏💕

And then one day you find
Ten years have gone behind you…

The sun is the same in a relative way
But you’re older
Shorter of breath
And one day closer to death
~ Pink Floyd’s ‘Time’ by Richard Wright and David Gilmore

Time has been on my mind lately. Some days seem to fly by, while some minutes seem to last forever. But in every case, we are only gifted a limited time on this beautiful planet.

“Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?”
~ Mary Oliver

A book I’m reading by physicist Carlo Rovelli called “The Order of Time” reminds us that what we think of as the marking of time is a creation of our culture. He notes that not that long ago, we didn’t bother to monitor and manage time with clocks and time zones. Those inventions only came about when we moved another step away from the natural rhythms of dark and light, the travel of the moon, stars, and sun across the sky. They were created in another of our misguided efforts to tame nature. Only when machines began to move us rapidly across the land did we need to agree on it being the same time here as it was there.

So, if time is a mental construct, what would it look like to fall back into the arms of the beloved earth and spend moments outside that construct?

Why do I find this compelling right now? Because we are at the mercy of the passing of the past into the future. There can be no such thing as now because it is already gone. We may remember the past (more and more vaguely possibly), and we envision a future that is, in fact, only a dream.

It begins to sink in that we are foolish to “fritter and waste the hours in an offhand way” (Pink Floyd again). Since we only have now and now is already gone, what is our motivation and passion that compels us to get up each day, to sing, to dance, to pray, and to work?

This is our practice this week. Invoke the assistance of the Divine and the Ancestors. Aspire with all your heart to know “the purpose that [divine] wisdom chooses.” (paraphrased from the prayer Saum gifted to us by Hazrat Inayat Khan). Vigilantly open to the best possible use of every wild and precious moment of the limited time we are gifted.

And don’t forget to be thankful when you hear the answer to your prayer. This is the blessed and beautiful experience of “God” that Hazrat Inayat Khan speaks to when he says, “The time comes when the belief in God is replaced by the experience of God.”

And as a final gift to all of you, my beloveds, here is the rest of St Mary Oliver’s wild and precious poem, “The Summer Day.”

Who made the world?
Who made the swan, and the black bear?
Who made the grasshopper?
This grasshopper, I mean —
the one who has flung herself out of the grass,
the one who is eating sugar out of my hand,
who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down —
who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes.
Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face.
Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away.
I don’t know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,
which is what I have been doing all day.
Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn’t everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?