08/20/2024
As I sit with them, my posts this past week all tie into the idea of PURPOSE.
I have all these ideas.
I have these things that are missing from my life that i so want (anybody want to build aircrete domes with me?).
I want the world to change for the better.
I want my life and my family's life to be different.
I want to offer my friends and their families the opportunity for something different.
I want to live nearby, to grow food, to build things, and to be in communion with nature.
I watched the video that the brilliant and compassionate Navlyn shared and a bunch of things jumped out at me from it... (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tmusbHBKW84)
"PRIVATIZE REVENUE, SOCIALIZE LOSSES"
Big companies capture all the revenue from their work and then pass negative health effects on to society.
IE
- Factory Farming polluting lakes and rivers,
- Industrial Fracking polluting ground water,
- Social Media creating mental health issues,
- Walmart encouraging underpaid workers to live on food stamps, etc.
"TECHNOLOGICAL ADVANCEMENT != BETTERMENT"
Advancement has no need for the inclusion of "what's good for us". So tech advancement or growing GDP is not a good measure of PROGRESS. Stakeholders including impoverished individuals, species going extinct, natural resources being polluted/destroyed, that there's very little inclusion of those things in our progress narrative.
It's a really juicy discussion between Daniel Schmactenberger (a great thinker on sense-making and the poly-crisis we find ourselves in) and Nate Hagens (unknown to me prior to this).
I recommend watching it when you have a chance. Treat it like a movie and have a drink and some popcorn.
I really savor this kind of philosophical discourse.
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The talk also highlights the idea of cancer as a cell that doesn't know its purpose with respect to the whole.
It's a cell that keeps multiplying and trying to survive.
If it succeeds with SURVIVAL AS ITS ONLY PURPOSE, it ultimately dies because it kills its host.
A MEDICAL APPROACH says how can we kill those cells or cut them out of the body so they stop wreaking havoc.
A METAPHYSICAL approach would say how can we restore the cell's understanding of its role as part of the whole.
That it's actually meant to just be a liver cell or a breast cell or a pancreas cell, and its function is XYZ.
Once it understands how it can be helpful and useful to the whole, then it will cease simply trying to survive (killing its host) and resume its PURPOSE.
Sound familiar?
And so if we've been programmed to eat factory-farmed fast food, and to quell our emotional pains with purchases, to be online all the time, to take the job that pays us the most money to get someone to click on an ad
or to drop-ship
or to sell something processed
or to buy something processed
or to process something bought or sold
(couldn't help the Cusack reference here; kickboxing, it's the sport of the FUTURE!)
When all of those things are contributing to the problems we're facing... then we are like the cancer cell - just struggling to survive and carve out a life for ourselves that we think will make us happy.
---
And the happiness we're seeking is actually an impoverished and fleeting version of the life we're meant to have.
We are impoverished and we don't even know it!
We don't know that we're missing out on...
- functional community
- rites of passage and beautiful deep meaningful collective and individual rituals,
- being connected with animals
- being connected to the earth,
- on deep spiritual experiences that reveal the majesty of the Universe
- the richness of other cultures without judging them
- an incredible connection with our bodies and all wisdom they hold
- and so much more...
And I know that my friends here have had tastes of many of these things, but it's usually the exception, not the rule.
It's usually the travel or the ceremony once a year.
The visit to the zoo or for a horse ride.
It's the retreat you can't afford to do every month.
It's the therapy session once a week, and then back to disconnection and dissociation.
And so what I've begun to focus on in my work is PURPOSE.
How do we know what we're here to do?
How we fit into the larger narrative?
How do we shift from consumers to CREATORS/CURATORS?
My wife has an amazing metaphor that I love so much (she's brilliant by the way - nylarodgers.com)
The CATERPILLAR and the BUTTERFLY.
The caterpillar is a consumer.
It goes around eating leaves and destroying the plants it needs to survive.
Then one day it decides to take a sabbatical and go off and find itself.
It builds a chrysalis.
It takes days off from work to just be with itself.
It takes its 40 days in the desert and goes on a pilgrimage, so to speak.
Its own beautiful form of Vipassana - getting acquainted with each part of itself, each cell, and turning what was caterpillar into something else.
I have to imagine this is a painful process.
One I'd anthropomorphize with fear and doubt, and bravery, and worry.
Until ultimately it emerges as a BUTTERFLY.
An organism with wholly new features - wings, antennae, new muscles and structures that allow it TO FLY!
Allowing it to understand so much more of the world.
To have a different perspective on its ecosystem entirely.
An organism that now functions as a POLLINATOR... no longer a parasite, but a symbiot that spreads life instead of pruning or destroying it.
It becomes something that the ecosystem needs in order to survive and thrive.
When we find our PURPOSE, we can shift from being caterpillars to butterflies.
We can shift from being disconnected from the Earth to being regenerative, to creating health and life in our wake.
Even now, I'm discovering more and more about my purpose as I write these posts.
I did a powerful meditation yesterday that revealed even more of it along with a symbol for it.
That's a story for later this week though :)
