I’m climbing out on that proverbial limb. I’m changing the title of this blog. Look above. See???

I want to wake you up.

Instead of being the canary in the coal mine, I am an alarm clock, one of a growing number, thankfully, in our still slumbering culture. May I jangle your ordinary thinking and spur you to make intuitive leaps, walk the ledges and be brave enough to sail off in your own direction without a map.

Wisdom manifesting…Ahh, so THAT’S what my belly thinks, THAT’S WHAT my body knows. I’ve got to act on THAT! Ahhhhhh.

I’m asking myself right now, who am I to have this intention of waking up my culture – just who do I think I am? Not the first time I’ve posed that question to myself. And in the past I have had a hard time responding with confidence so I’d shrink out of sight again. Has that ever happened to you?  You absolutely know something is true, but when challenged you can’t muster the facts quickly enough to sound reasonably intelligent, literally and rationally analytic, audible to the opposition.

I’ve gotten tired of standing in the shadows whispering.

I have spent my life time waiting to speak up until I knew enough – even though in the 1970’s I knew I could never know enough…every fact I gleaned, even about a subject as basic as what to eat, had an opposing fact also statistically, scientifically supported. To eat eggs or not to eat eggs. To eat only the whites or the yolk, too? Those were ponderous questions in the ‘70’s for which there is/was no clear answer.

And I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but every issue is riddled with contradictions, paradoxes and ambiguity and even science can’t sort it out.

Every delicate, scented rose has thorns.

So here’s the deal. We might not know whether global warming is real or not, but in our bones we still know that our culture in particular, northern hemisphere cultures in general, ravage the world by over consumption.

In 1918 or so my uncle noticed the degradation of the Hudson River because of coal mining upstream. In 1953 or so, I witnessed my first clear cut – the wood contiguous with my own backyard – to make room for the first ticky-tacky neighborhood development in the suburbs of western Philadelphia. Multiply these personal observations by 3 billion people. ( I made that number up for shock value. I’ll give
you another.) Multiply those personal observations by a kazillion people and 100 years of rampaging progress and what do we have???  A planetary life support system on the brink of falling apart. We know this in our bones.

We humans have to wake up quickly and make some unprecedented choices. Many of us complain. “I’ve worked so hard all my life. I’ve earned my right to live as I do. Why should I sacrifice anything now?” As if to sacrifice is a bad thing. For me, sacrifice is the gift of making sacred, of choosing to curtail one thing in order to give to another which has even more value to me, to my world…such as wanting my grandchildren to live surrounded by beautiful, mysterious intact ecosystems which nourish both body and soul.

Here’s the real kicker! We need to change more than the practicalities of our lifestyles. We need to change our minds. Literally. The rest of unfolding history depends on human intelligence quickening NOW and that calls for the evolutionary human shift to developing and using a whole brain and an intact bodymind.

As Red Green says on that Canadian PBS show, which I think is hilarious now but which  had to grow on me “We’re ALL in this together”and “Keep your stick on the ice.”

Please use this blog as your stick on the ice, that third leg to support and inspire our teetering two. Tell me your stories of awakening to wisdom beyond knowing “the facts” and I’ll tell you more of mine. We ARE ALL, after all, in this together.