Month: March 2022
One planet, one backyard
I am living on the Hawkesbury River and this morning at 6am I looked out the window and saw a house floating by, the roof glimmering pale and ghostly in the dawn light. These past few weeks have flickered by in a pastiche of movie frame impressions. A man who should be sectioned is holding the world to ransom because we were stupid enough to sign off on nuclear weapons on 16th July 1945 in a project that sounds like a hotel highball: “The Manhattan Project”. Flushed with recent victory at a time when humanity should have been reassessing its values a bunch of ego-driven lunatics decided to develop a weapon so satanic the next Hitler could not fail. Well, here we are, at the gates of Hell. And on my own doorstep someone’s home floated by like a surreal image in a movie, except it isn’t a movie. It’s someone’s home.
Some people are getting the message. Some people are asking their neighbours if they need help. Some people are closing ranks around their families and friends and offering to pool their resources to overcome the tragedy of having to rebuild lives and livelihoods. But so many people still don’t get it. If we do not pull together now as the waters rise we will all drown. Isn’t it time we stopped relying on governments and institutions for our safety and started relying on each other? I have faith that Russian soldiers and ordinary Russians will start to question the morality of bombing the crap out of their neighbour. Likewise I am hoping this melee of natural disasters will wake us all up to the reality that we can’t function in isolation from our neighbours. That the entire world must pull together if we are to survive.
My entire post right now is about dissolving those imaginary property and national lines that divide us globally and individually. Stop putting money and ego above heart and health.
On that note, I would like to observe that people like Putin don’t have lives. Why else would he steal so many others? Until and unless you have tried to create something unique and original out of the common clay of your spiritual coil you have no idea what real life feels like. There is no deeper joy than contributing something meaningful to the lives of others. The joy of contribution shadows the addictive pleasure of distraction and greed. If people could find the courage to try being who they really are instead of mantling institutionalized positions of usurped power there would be no more war and poverty would look like the crime it is.
Catch The Moon, Mary 