Learning to Roar

Since starting this blog I feel I have been learning a lot about the world in my heart and the outside world and its many layers and messy truths. So there is the world within and the world without. There is a kind of co-existence, but often not by choice. Indeed it seems the complex nature of navigating the often large chasm between these two worlds is too much to ask, and yet it is required by us all.

Sometimes I think of the activist community as a support-group for those looking to get through life with the world in their hearts intact–fostering growth and evolution. My theory is that each of us holds a unique bit of the elusive, long-term solution deep inside. When our piece is shared and joined with others, perhaps in the organizing of an action or event, the entire community benefits from that offering and we learn new methods of self-empowerment. Offering mutual-support in a journey that is simply too difficult to walk alone.

The struggle in the industrialized world is to first see all that is wrong with the way the system is built, then learn the ways in which you are complicit and finally go about the messy process of extracting yourself from that system and building viable alternatives in its place. And of course you do most of this as you continue to walk around in the very world you recognize more and more as being completely out of synch with the world you are building in your heart.

But then there is Critical Mass, First Warm Night and other such events in which a bit of that world in your heart bursts onto the streets and you are there with lots of other like-minded journeyers and you feel free for the first time in a long time. These little tastes inspire and encourage, and you remember you aren’t so alone and then you start to think about what community really feels like and you realize you don’t really feel that strength very often and you go back out there more determined to feel that way again.