October 13, 2014

What They Won’t Teach You in History Class.

0 Boost Score Arielle Egozi (1,510,185)

520

This is the State of the (Universal) Union and how to fix it.

Sometimes the pain of the entire universe nestles itself under the blankets of my heart and all I can do to comfort her is cry—and so I do so until I cant, and then I smile.

I smile because I remember that in that smile lies the potential for this entire sad and strong and powerful place we live in, create in, hate in and love in.

Change what you give to the universe and she changes what she gives back. Serious sh*t and bullsh*t is going on these days on our tiny planet. Don’t take sides because there are none to take. We’re all in this together.

My land does not exist and neither does yours. If we all gave everything away to each other, wouldn’t we all have everything?

Protestors are rising from Brazil to China

People are demanding real democracy, shouting for change. Nightly rockets wake slumbering families—children being placed as targets simply for the media to take sides. The United States currently spends over 41% of the global military budget (that’s almost half of what the rest of the world spends combined).

Yet the debt our graduating students face is well above $1 trillion. Girls from Ivy League universities to towns across India are being subjected to the physical manifestations of a patriarchal society.

The entire structure of our social system across the globe is based in patriarchal power, although it wasn’t always this way. The Oglala Lakota Nation (also known as the Sioux) are traditionally matriarchal —they honor and embrace the divine feminine, and children belong to the mother’s clan (until their land was stolen, treaties broken, and an entire people were stripped of all their spiritual practices— from their language to their children to their hair).

Through their historical trauma, today’s Indigenous societies suffer from a disproportional amount of alcoholism, poverty and domestic violence.

The goddesses that were once adhered to, are now beaten.

There is so much—too much—going on in this very instant for any single one of us to manage. We don’t know which cause to fight for, which news source to believe, or even how to feel safe and loved inside our own bodies.

We are disconnected, alienated and separated from our brothers and sisters as we lock ourselves in our apartments, our cubicles, our solitary lives. We feel connection through a double tap on a screen, and have forgotten what it felt to write love letters with our fingers, running through a lover’s hair.

It is now understood that we have the entire world literally at our fingertips (as long as we have a wifi connection), but we’ve always had this universal connection. Did we really need the invention of smart little boxes and shiny screens to remind us?

These platforms are powerful, and if social media is the metaphorical highest rooftop of today’s village, let’s shout and scream beautiful things and overflow each other’s mental newsfeeds with positivity and fully charged vibrating energies.

It is so easy to feel stuck and stagnant in our movement, confined in our headspace, not letting our hearts expand because we’re too afraid of it breaking.

But don’t you see? We’re a family. We’re all in this together. We’re all holding each other up. The only thing we can do is give everything we have away, and because our physical existence is so fleeting the only thing we ever really truly have to give away is love.

Maybe we could all give today—and love giving. Give something to every single person you speak with today, whether it be a compliment, a blessing or a flower. Receive what they give back. See how the universe around you changes.

Maybe today, instead of posting and watching and thinking about all the atrocities and horrors and structural violence that exists, post, watch and think about the people who make you smile, the smells that make your tummy growl, and the sounds that make you move your hips.

It’s important and necessary to understand the context in which we live, but the context includes all of it: the things we deem bad and that make our stomachs drop, and the things that make our lips turn up to the sun and sing.

Maybe today is the day to set aside a little space in your room and make it sacred. It can look like a puja, or an altar, or not. Perhaps a whimsical photo, some seashells from your childhood at the beach, and a pretty candle will fit nicely on your windowsill. In this topsy turvy world, it’s important to have our own little sanctuary where we can immediately tap into positive light energy.

Surrender into the shaking that our world is experiencing. Shake with it. Let it go.

So give love, make love, be love. Sing and dance and scream and most importantly smile—whoever you’re fighting has already lost if you’re still smiling.