Reflection on images and experiences entering our hearts after Hurricane Katrina tells us of the many who opened themselves to the virtue of compassion. Actions of people across the globe made visible and helped us experience the inspirited and inspiriting aspects of being fully and truly human. We are awakened to our potential as human beings: Our potential to overcome life’s difficulties, to live in healthy relationship with one another, to help one another to the point of putting our own lives at risk even for the care of “strangers,” and our potential for becoming instruments of the Creator’s love such that compassion might flow through and among all human beings. We are awakened to the truth and the gift that we are so created that spirit can enter us and flow through us as we answer our own unique calling and take on our work and role as living members of the family of life on this earth.
Reflection on the disaster across the Gulf Coast awakens (or reawakens) us to several essential truths, the first being that we are not the source. We – humanity – are neither the center of, nor do we or should we ever have control over, the essential life processes of earth. There is a Source – an Ultimate Source of creation – and we are not it. Second, each and all are members of the living whole of life on earth. As such, if we touch one member of life, we touch all of life. Third, the human being was and is created with dignity and intended to have dignity. In truth, in essence and in dignity, we are all equal; no one person is above another. Fourth, and most importantly, if love is not in our processes, love will not be in the outcomes.
When we hold in mind all of what we have seen and experienced since the storm, Katrina, and simultaneously hold in our hearts these essential truths, what begins to emerge is the realization we are in a process of moving to a new platform – a new starting point. One way we might say this is that we cannot use the same mind to solve our problems as the mind that created them in the first place. What becomes essential is leading from wholeness and an image of its virtuous working. Movement to this new platform is and will be a grassroots process, for in the face of issues of magnitude, intuition informed by wisdom is what is called for, and we know that both intuition and wisdom come only through quiet minds and open hearts. The perspectives of economics, rights, ownership, law, power, science or even righting wrongs are not whole enough to lead us as a people to a new level of planetary ethics for life and living. Coming to the fore is the need for processes inspired by wisdom, “seen” by intuition, and led by virtue – all of which are possible only if we open our hearts to love, our minds to reflection, and our eyes to potential. By so doing, we may become vessels of the Source for “seeing” and doing what is right for the essence of each, while being good for the whole of all of life.
Leading from virtue, with love in our processes, and guided by a true living philosophy, we have hope of “seeing” what could be for the healthy inspirited healing and living of each and all… we have hope of harmonizing with the virtue of the land… the soul healing, spirit lifting, rhythmic flowing virtue of the Mississippi River watershed.
