Occupy Your Heart

I’ve been quite excited and a little worried with the rise of the Occupy Wall Street movement.

The excitement because finally, finally, people are noticing we’ve had dirt thrown in our eyes and have been misdirected from the root causes of the current slide toward an even harsher divide between the richest of rich and the rest of us. The poor are becoming more numerous. The middle classes are ever more precarious. And the rich, well, they just keep getting richer…

The root cause is the great demon greed.

The worried is because while it is true our economic condition is driven by the greed of a small number of us, note not among us, but of us, it is too easy in hard times like this to set off a group and let the blame for all ills fall upon them.

A truth is that in our republic we are all complicit. We all have had a hand in the creation of these terrible times. Well, nearly all of us. The poorest are justifiably excused. Their need for bare survival makes it hard to attend to much else.

The rest of us, well, many of us have bought into the story that its all in our own hands, mine, not yours. And that story, which has resonances of truth, is ultimately not. And a willful embrace ignoring others and their plights, has allowed the infrastructure that lets those on a roll of success to move ever farther away from the mass of humanity of people…

We’re all in this together.

Now this is for the poorest and the richest and everyone in between.

We must travel through the heart of greed and see in it the heart of love.

And along this way we all need to look to who we are, what we do, what we refrain from doing.

Well, only if we really want to find a cure for this common hurt.

Which will come only out of each of us seeing our uniqueness, our preciousness, and the uniqueness and preciousness of the other, and, and, how all of us are woven out of each other, and the world, and, indeed, the cosmos itself.

Intimate beyond words ability to describe.

Greed become love…

Seeing deeply into what we do and what we say matters in this world of intimacy.

And, then, acting from that place.

Just a word of advice from a friend on the barricades: occupy Wall Street. Occupy Paris. Occupy San Francisco. Occupy Providence.

And, occupy your heart.