Hi tracks
Simple.
.
Our problem, as a culture, is that we've totally lost sight of our real connectedness. We don't get up in the morning and think: I am grateful to the people who built this home, the people who dug out the foundations and poured the concrete and framed it and wired it and put up the walls and floors, who roofed it and put on the siding and installed the windows...
I am grateful to the trees and the minerals and the petroleum reserves that were used to frame and found and carpet and wire this home, and to manufacture all of the items that are part of it, all of the furniture and appliances...
I am grateful to every person and creature involved in the making of this home...
I am grateful to every creature, plant and animal, involved in the making of my morning meal; to the coffee plants, and the people who tend them, to the cows [or goats or soybeans] that provide the milk for my coffee, to the animals who have given up their lives or their freedom and their own young ones [eggs] so that I might eat...
I am grateful to the power plant and the resources that feed it, and the people who built it and serve and maintain it, the people who strung the wires...
I am grateful to the knitters, weavers and cutters, the tailors, those who have made the clothing I wear, the towels and washcloths that keep me clean...
I could go on for hours, and every now and then I do, but that's not what this post is about. Beyond this point, my prayers are between me and God.
We don't do this. Most of the time I don't either. Instead, we - including me - grumble as we pay our bills [instead of thinking about the people who will eat, buy medicine, pay their rent because of the check we send]. We shove in front of people at the checkout line [because we are always more important]. We take credit for work done by others. Or we waste our lives and love appeasing bullies, making excuses for them, ignoring the pain they inflict on everyone around us.
We slaughter one another in deserts [whether they are literal deserts such as Darfur or the MidEast, or psychological deserts such as Cabrini-Green and the South Bronx] instead of working together to make the deserts bloom...
Perhaps it's because I'm one eighth Native American [in spite of red-blond curls]. But I've always seen the connectedness at the heart of life, and thank God in spite of everything that's disrupted my own life, I can still see it if I make the effort...
... and it's the disruption, the corruption, of that connectedness that seems to me to be at the heart of most human problems, from abuse in families to abuse in workplaces to abuse of the environment.
It's not possible to be perfectly aware and perfectly connected all the time. We're human, we can't sustain anything for long, we tire, our attention flags, things happen.
But we do have a 'mantra', for it, if you like.
Thou shalt love the lord thy god with all thy heart and mind and strength, and thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself.
A righteous man regardeth the life of his beast;
Not a sparrow, worth half a penny, can fall to the ground without our Father knowing it...
We didn't start out in a jungle. We started out in a garden...
((((((((((tracks))))))))))
