A Couple of Idle Thoughts as the Hours Tick Down on 2014, With Just a Little Finger Wagging

I understand that Arthur Guinness started up his business after signing a nine thousand year lease on an unused Dublin brewery on this day in 1759.

So far, so good…

I kind of like audacious.

And, frankly, after years like the one just passed, looking forward a little audacious may be particularly in order, at least if we want to be hopeful.

And, I do, and so, well, here are some of my more audacious hopes for this new year.

May our American dialogue about race and the reality of and dire consequences of racial prejudice in our culture continue to be pushed, and addressed, and, while we’re being audacious, overcome.

May we look at those ways in which we divide ourselves and oppress and repress. May we consider how women are treated. And while we’re at it, consider all those who don’t fit into the boxes we have received as gifts from our ancestors, but, which are becoming shabby, and sometimes create more evils than good…

May we challenge authority. And may we start with ourselves.

May our politicians begin to notice we are creating conditions with our actions that will have dire environmental consequences not only for our children and their’s, but even endangering the survival of our species.

Of course that would cause us to have to challenge the blind grasping after short term gain which our people have embraced as gospel, and so maybe even harder, to accept we are in fact totally a part of this world, need it to live, while at the same time having in our hands the power to destroy the whole thing…

Here’s audacious: may we get over the binary economic theories that suggest unalloyed greed is any kind of fix for human suffering, or that command economies have ever done much good, either. There are alternatives to this battle to the death between two partial truths that when held tightly, kill rather than give life.

My small suggestion for us to begin to notice:

We are not material beings. Nor are we spiritual beings having a material experience.

The spirit and the material are one. Think waves and particles. Think one and many. Think two truths.

Brain and heart are two ways of knowing. Using one is like a bird with one wing. It isn’t going to fly…

And it all happens here, nowhere else.

And with that:

Be audacious.

Look big.

Feel big.

Dig in.

Come home.