I honor the community builders, the people among us who respond to the soul call for belonging and welcome rather than hatred and divide. There is a great cry for connection and compassion as an alternative to the current culture's bankrupt worship of fear and violence. I received a text from my son's high school letting me know they conducted a lock down drill yesterday morning. I understand preparing for an emergency such as an earthquake drill, tornado drill, fire drill, but when did lock down drills become a regular part of school life? When did the threat of campus violence become such a possibility that preparing for that event became part of our day to day experience? What does preparing for the possibility of someone on your school campus with a gun ready to shot you do to the formation of a young psyche? Is this the world we want for our children? A world of fear and hiding. Locking ourselves down because danger, real or imagined, lurks about? What root factors give rise to such violence? Conversations and soap boxes on this topic launch into gun control, mental illness, first person shooter video indoctrination, broken homes, and on and on. I would suggest campus shootings, and the larger culture of violence we experience arise from an anger, despair and alienation based on a fundamental break or rupture in the fabric of our connection and belonging. Connection to our own beautiful essence, to each other, to a sense of place, to community and to the greater ecology of creation. At root, an alienation from the secure sense we matter and we have a home here. This rupture in belonging, being wanted, knowing we are welcome tears at our soul, wounds us to the core, creating a horrific angry "ouch". This anger can either go internally into depression, despair and withdrawal or externally with assault words and actions or to assault weapons aimed at the perceived source of the pain. These assault weapons are not limited to headline grabbing AK-47s on campuses, but also include knives and penises in rapes, excavators in strip mines, and Big Macs washed down with Coke. We are assaulting ourselves with addictions, trying to numb the pain with food abuse, drug abuse, information abuse, gossip abuse. We are assaulting easy targets, women, children, immigrants, people different than ourselves. We are assaulting nature through unrestrained extraction and pollution. All in a blind response to feeling tragically displaced in our own home. When we no longer have a sense of the other as kindred to ourselves, when we no longer experience our belonging to our core, a black emptiness starts prowling, harming ourselves, those around us and the Earth who sustains us all. So I honor the community builders. The ones among us who realize we all need each other, we all need to belong and belonging includes the very Earth we walk upon. "We are all related" from the Lakota phrase, "Mitakuye Oyasin." May it be so, for us and our children's sake. We don't need lock down drills, we need to wake up.
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AuthorJose Enciso is an engineer by profession, a poet by necessity and a seeker of spirit and soul. He brings a gentle presence and deep respect for the interior journey as expressed through creative and expressive arts. Jose is a skilled group facilitator who is committed to the spiritual and psychological growth of those around him. He trained under Francis Weller to lead men’s initiation groups doing deep soul work and is equally comfortable in managing complex technical projects. Jose is devoted to the emergence of the divine feminine, supporting women and men claiming their voice and power, and rediscovering the soul of masculinity. He is currently working on multiple projects including a book which seeks to encourage everyone to write their own poetry as a discovery of their own soul's truth. Archives
March 2018
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