– We are all unreliable narrators of our own lives. – To tell a story is inescapably to take a moral stance. – Stories are the way we make sense of our lives. – The way we narrate our lives shapes what they become. – Change, even really positive change, involves a surprising amount of loss. – What would happen if you looked at your story and wrote it from another person’s point of view? – Life is about choosing which stories to listen to, and which ones need an edit. – There’s nothing more important to the quality of our lives than the stories we tell ourselves about them.
If you could do one thing to make your community a better place what would you do?
via J.T. @ https://www.facebook.com/jerome516/posts/1082094282191807
This is a great question Jerome, thanks for sharing it and your thoughts. I would prioritize healthy, equitable agroforests through urban and rural landscapes. Trees that can help meet people’s basic needs (fiber, fuel, food, farmaceuticals, fun, +), in public parks and sidewalk green spaces, in yards, serving as bountiful fences, and texturing our agricultural landscapes, diets, and cultures. Acts of restoration, relinquishment, and resilience which ripple mass reforestation and good health.
Much love to the trees that have been with our northern climate ancestors who I’d hope to see in my area: hazelnuts, birches, maples, honeyberries, chestnuts, acorns, hickories, walnuts and pecans and that whole fam, elderberries, willows, spruces, and so many more.
More specifically, if it needs to be one single thing: cultivate a cooperatively-owned tree crop processing facility that can be used in the community and potentially as a regional hub, to help people meet their basic needs using trees. Areas of primary interest would be:
food (for biocultural restoration),
fuel (to heal fossil fuel addiction), and
fiber (to build resilience in the face of social environmental, and economic disturbances).
Interested in this also? Let’s talk and collaborate, let’s walk and exacerbate our own nuttiness, let’s squawck and walk the talk and elaborate on a way to initiate … do great or forsake. People ate acorns for millennia before they ate candy corns. Let’s make it happen.
Empathy has many vital effects. It is a basis for compassion. It is critical for forgiveness and healing. This post focuses on the importance of empathy in alchemical works, in the context of a metaphysics of panpsychism and panentheism.
Solve et coagula. I am an individual, separate and isolated in my perception from other minds. I am part of a whole, minds intertwined such that my experience is a particle that emerges from and toward a woven collective (not only of humanity, of All) consciousness.
In separating, empathy is import for individuation. Especially in these days of information overload, interconnectivity, and FOMO, the ability to empathize with one another enables oneself to better delineate one’s own self-actualization. Bombarded with information I may want to go this way or that way; with the ability to empathize with those who go this way or that way, I can better navigate those branches of reality and recognize ‘my way’ efficiently.
In coagulating, empathy is important for wholiness.
“Compassion hurts. When you feel connected to everything, you also feel responsible for everything. And you cannot turn away. Your destiny is bound with the destinies of others. You must either learn to carry the Universe or be crushed by it. You must grow strong enough to love the world, yet empty enough to sit down at the same table with its worst horrors.” ― Andrew Boyd
‘Be in this world but not of this world.’ ~
“When you wake up in the morning, tell yourself: the people I deal with today will be meddling, ungrateful, arrogant, dishonest, jealous and surly. They are like this because they can’t tell good from evil. But I have seen the beauty of good, and the ugliness of evil, and have recognized that the wrongdoer has a nature related to my own – not of the same blood and birth, but the same mind, and possessing a share of the divine. And so none of them can hurt me. No one can implicate me in ugliness. Nor can I feel angry at my relative, or hate him. We were born to work together like feet, hands and eyes, like the two rows of teeth, upper and lower. To obstruct each other is unnatural. To feel anger at someone, to turn your back on him: these are unnatural.” – Marcus Aurelius
(And in a paraphrased version of Aurelius’ statement, other people’s wrongdoings are driven not only by others’ lack of good judgement of good from evil, but also by others’ own suffering and personal history and inner environment which cannot be known but can be reached with compassion.)
