Highlights
Over time I came to realize that this question of who’s winning the game is actually entirely the wrong question. Being a part of the Great Turning is not hanging out in the stands of a soccer stadium asking which team’s going to win. It’s asking which team do I want to be a part of, and that it’s getting off the stands into the game, playing all out no matter what the scoreboard says. So that’s the Great Turning, that’s what it is, it’s a choice.
Joanna says “It’s the great adventure of our time,” which I love. The great adventure of our time because just like any epic adventure the stakes are high, the possibilities are infinite, the protagonists are flawed, and the outcome is totally uncertain. And that’s what we choose when we choose to step in to offering ourselves to something better, that we believe is possible.
When I’m talking about staying focused I want to be really clear that I’m not talking about negating anything like turning away from what’s wrong and I’m not talking about turning away from the heartbreak and the pain of this moment. If you know Joanna’s work you know that she teaches us that our heartbreak is the other side of the coin of our love for the world we can’t make our way into an emerging growing Great Turning without those things, without looking and telling the truth at what’s going on and feeling all that that brings up. So staying focused instead might mean remembering that the only way the just and life sustaining world that we really want comes into being is by us carrying it piece by piece every single day into being together. That’s the way it happens.
This is a hell of a mindfulness practice y’all, especially these days, right? It takes an incredible amount of imaginative and spiritual fortitude to bring our attention back again and again from the mess to what we love and what we really want for our world and we can’t do it alone, especially for those of us raised in a context where the story of Business As Usual was the natural order of the world.
This practice is really simple. It’s simply asking yourself if I were being the seed of the world that I want to see what would I be doing today in these circumstances? So here’s some examples: when you’re faced with the aches of the world, if I were the seed of justice in the face of this injustice in front of me, how might I respond? If I were a seed of liberation in the face of this oppression, mine or someone else’s, what might I do now in this moment? And if I were a seed of belonging in the face of this isolation how might I reach out? So that’s the practice and it’s really deceptively simple, but part of the power of this practice is recognizing that these are not rhetorical questions. This is a real inquiry that I’m inviting you into and the answers are rarely loud. We often have to get quiet to hear them. They’re rarely perfect. Sometimes they look extraordinary but often they feel pretty mundane and the task is to ask them honestly and listen carefully into our bodies and into the Earth and refuse to let the messy circumstances of our world or the limitations of our own skill or experience keep us in the stands. And when we do this, this will blow open the doors of possibility and we will be so surprised by the creativity and the compassion and the cleverness and the capacity for care that will spring forth from us.
Something that Joanna said to me while we were recording the podcast was that there is no limit to what we can do if we do it together. And so that’s the Great Turning. It’s us.
