6/28/2020 The antidote to division
I hope this last weekend in June finds you safe and healthy, moving into summer with plans to enjoy the long warm days ahead.
I know how difficult it is to find and focus on the ways we are united, our commonalities across so many repeated and vigorous invitations to divide ourselves along political, social, religious, economic and other lines. The numbers tracing the global pandemic are discouraging and tragic. Protests for racial equity and inclusion continue, as does the need to work for justice. Social media amplifies the most controversial, most emotion-provoking stories and images, to keep our eyes on their advertisers, making itself fertile ground for misinformation campaigns. It's exhausting, and we all need time to rest, turn inward, reflect, rejuvenate.
Perhaps the invitation to divide ourselves from one another is also an attempt to divide us from our inner wisdom. Western thought loves to place categories in opposition to one another: we either focus outward or inward, we either engage or retreat, we either move forward or backward. But in the same way that the summer solstice holds within it the movement toward winter, perhaps our need to retreat holds within it the ability to engage.
Perhaps the call of this moment is to go within the differences, not to "overcome" them, but to understand the core of shared humanity from which they spring. What if it is not in spite of our fear of what could divide us, but within that very fear, that we find the seeds of acceptance?
Perhaps we already have, at our fingertips, the most powerful antidote to division: our willingness to humanize everyone, including ourselves.
With deep gratitude for your company on this long, arduous, essential journey -
Liz