The words of a dead man...

Tonight, I am sodden in this.  I, too, am a human.  I, too, feel the unjust in what has just happened.  When will we stop killing?  For EVERY reason.

Below is a letter from Troy Anthony Davis, his body now dead and his soul returned to its source.  His work in this lifetime brought us to this pivotal point in the growth of the Collective Soul of Humanity.  When will it stop?

To All:

I want to thank all of you for your efforts and dedication to Human Rights and Human Kindness, in the past year I have experienced such emotion, joy, sadness and never ending faith. It is because of all of you that I am alive today, as I look at my sister Martina I am marveled by the love she has for me and of course I worry about her and her health, but as she tells me she is the eldest and she will not back down from this fight to save my life and prove to the world that I am innocent of this terrible crime.

As I look at my mail from across the globe, from places I have never ever dreamed I would know about and people speaking languages and expressing cultures and religions I could only hope to one day see first hand. I am humbled by the emotion that fills my heart with overwhelming, overflowing Joy. I can’t even explain the insurgence of emotion I feel when I try to express the strength I draw from you all, it compounds my faith and it shows me yet again that this is not a case about the death penalty, this is not a case about Troy Davis, this is a case about Justice and the Human Spirit to see Justice prevail.

I cannot answer all of your letters but I do read them all, I cannot see you all but I can imagine your faces, I cannot hear you speak but your letters take me to the far reaches of the world, I cannot touch you physically but I feel your warmth everyday I exist.

So Thank you and remember I am in a place where execution can only destroy your physical form but because of my faith in God, my family and all of you I have been spiritually free for some time and no matter what happens in the days, weeks to come, this Movement to end the death penalty, to seek true justice, to expose a system that fails to protect the innocent must be accelerated. There are so many more Troy Davis’. This fight to end the death penalty is not won or lost through me but through our strength to move forward and save every innocent person in captivity around the globe. We need to dismantle this Unjust system city by city, state by state and country by country.

I can’t wait to Stand with you, no matter if that is in physical or spiritual form, I will one day be announcing,

“I AM TROY DAVIS, and I AM FREE!”

Never Stop Fighting for Justice and We will Win!

It's okay, you're not the only one...

I just received an email from a very close friend who moved to the other side of the world a couple years ago to follow her dreams.  She has.  But it's not enough.  It got me thinking (and writing) about how just about everyone I know is struggling right now.  I don't mean to say that people's lives are falling apart, in fact most "strugglers" I know seem to be doing okay "on paper".  They seem content and in most ways, they are FINE.  But fine just isn't enough when your soul is knocking on your brain and saying, "Hello, it's me, your higher self.  You're here for a purpose.  A big one.  And it's a big undertaking.  You won't fail, but you will have to change a lot of things - let's get going."

Sound familiar?

That's all well and good if you know what that purpose is (or at least think you know - or have an idea) and it's easy enough to live with if what you need to change doesn't cause you too much pain, or financial burden... but I don't think that's the case for many of us.  Maybe most of us.  I think we are all releasing something huge... and in some cases, we are releasing everything.

At first I thought it was mainly happening to my "generation" (let's call that Generation X - fancy label isn't it?) - but even that isn't right.  My mom is changing in ways I never imagined.  Others her age are turning over MASSIVE stones in their own lives.  At first, I thought my former students (who are now 18-24-ish)  didn't face as many of these challenges - I thought they had a different perspective because of their innate open-mindedness - they grew up living and breathing a kind of openness that has existed in their world view because they were born into a world that is connected via the webosphere.  They ARE the children of the global village.  But that assumption wasn't right either.  Many of them find the norms of society to be boring, redundant, pointless and un-engaging.  And they're right. How can we lose them before they've even really begun the "grown-up" journey?

Actually, I don't think we are losing them, I think they are leading us on this journey into Change.   For their generation, it's a default setting.  For us Gen Xers, it's a kind of refusal to conform.  For the once-radical baby boomers it's an overdue rebellion (they who got distracted raising us Gen Xers).  For all of us humans though, it is a very personal and very difficult set of questions, doubts, worries, self-examinations and, in the end, a battle that can only be fought and won with love and honesty.  Love and honesty with Ourselves.  Talk about a tough audience.

I wish I had answers for my girlfriend but I feel as though my only advice to her is to stick with it.  I'll stick with it too. (Mine is no less open-ended, unsettled, raw and inside out than anyone elses.)  Not only will I stick with my own uncertainty, pain, loss and confusion, I will do it right beside her (thank God for the internet).  And apparently I'll do it out in the open for the rest of the world to witness if they care to.  I suppose a big part of the self-honesty in this is admitting that we are not alone in the uncertainties - and then reaching out to ask someone to stand by us while we go through it.

This great collective of individual struggles is part of a greater human struggle to find what is right for all of us.  Collectively.  The Collective Human Population.  After all, we are all the same, aren't we?

What are you waiting for?

What now?

Which seeds are we planting?

I don't think I need to say much about September 11th today on the ten year anniversary of that awful day.  The sentiments have been written over and over today by almost everyone remembering September 11th.  We all have our memories, our personal stories and our pain.  I acknowledge that and I feel for us all.

But so much has happened in ten years.  So much has also not happened that should have...

A decade.  I remember feeling like a decade was a long time at one point but September 11th doesn't feel like it was a decade ago.  It feels so current and I'm afraid the reasons for this aren't what we would have wanted back in 2001.  Since then we've added wars, recession, out of touch politics and politicians and waste in more ways than I can even count.  Right after that fateful day it felt like We, in our Collective Soul As The Human Race all vibrated together, feeling like anything was possible.  Feeling like we could build anything, love anyone and right any wrong.

But where are we today?

I don't know my neighbors save for those in my hallway.  Money has been cut for practically everything and it has impacted my own life in major ways.  I've given up on politics and politicians - I just can't handle the layers and layers of spin, sugar coating and down right lies.  I'm glad to have been born an American but that's because it's all I've ever known and I've been given many entitlements from this side of the "border."  Who knows what my life would have been like had I been born an Austrian, a Frenchman or an African Maasi.

In the past ten years I've learned that borders are money-lines, most truths are lies and no one owns anything - not land nor buildings nor diamond rings.  It's all temporarily "ours" and ownership is an idea, not an right.  It all goes away and it all should because in the end, none of it really matters.

What does matter then?  That's easy for me to answer.

Peace.  Love.  Equality.  Fairness.  Abundance for all people (yes, it is possible).  An end to AIDS.  An end to stress.  An end to slavery, starvation and corruption.  An end to disconnectedness.  A return to our collective soul.  One Soul.  One humanity.

And that's what the next decade of my life will be about, no matter who is in the White House, the Kremlin, British Parliament or the apartment upstairs.  They are all just like me and I think more and more of them will learn this over the next ten years.  Here's to faith and here's to the kind of solidarity of purpose we all felt after September 11th - and a return to that seed which was planted that morning, not the twisted story of war and poverty and slavery and commercialism that has pushed us to the brink ten years later.

What about us?

This is so well done.  

What are we doing to our world?  

When will we stop?

The greatest dichotomy...

It isn't black versus white.
It isn't good or evil.

It's the cavernous and almost endless stretch of pain, injustice, abuse, neglect and power that extends the distance between poverty and wealth.

Poor versus Rich.
Give versus Take.
Life versus Death.

It is no longer a catchy and kitschy theme for a Hollywood television show or comedy a la the rags to riches variety.  It's a terrifying and ever worsening two-headed dragon that humanity has single-handedly created.  It's a beast that has been fed  with the blood, fear and lives of countless human beings.  And it is a beast that is killing hundreds of millions of people around the world.  Tens of thousands while you read this.

You know the headlines.  You've seen the pictures.  But it's worse than you think.  It's worse than even I can imagine.  The "causes" themselves are the new players in the game of wealth versus poverty.  We believe that good people and organizations are doing their best to address the needs of those trapped in man-made poverty/war/starvation all over the world, but more than you can begin to imagine, we are led to believe something is happening (with, perhaps, our own money) but in reality, we're being lied to about what is really happening.

In this article in TIME, an employee who works for one international aid organization admits:

"Western aid agencies aren't reaching many of the starving. Some, incredibly, are pretending they are. Oxfam is one agency raising money for Somalia and claiming to be reaching hundreds of thousands when, as a spokesman admitted to TIME, it doesn't actually distribute food and has no staff in the famine area. Less disingenuous agencies will admit the emergency operation is not going well."

This, sadly, is one admission to the crimes being committed in the world by the very people we put our faith and home in to do the work we cannot do ourselves.  Or can we?

It doesn't seem impossible once you begin to consider that the starving child in Somalia is your child.  When you look at another human being as yourself, as your loved one, as your own child then everything in your heart changes.  What you pay attention to changes.  What you advocate for changes.  What you can do grows bigger.  You grow bigger.  And it is in the growing bigger that you do within yourself where the change in the world begins to happen.  Your single consciousness can ignite a fire powerful enough to spread across the globe - and change the hearts and minds of people you'll never know as it catches flame between you and your friends - to their friends and their friends' friends.

It's the pebble in the pond.  It's one small change in your world that can make a change and bring balance to the dichotomy between extreme wealth and poverty-disease-starvation.  It's your heart - and your informed mind - that can and must insist on fairness and equality in the world.

One day, we can and WILL live in a world where hundreds of thousands of human beings don't die of starvation mere miles from stockpiles of food.

Heal the world... You can make it a better place.

There'd better be a good excuse for a blogger with a fair number of regular followers in all corners of the globe - from Demark to Hong Kong, Romania to Sri Lanka and Argentina to Israel - to disappear for six weeks, right?  Well, I've certainly got a good reason -- and countless stories to tell.

I've spent six weeks in a part of the world with the greatest dichotomies I can imagine.  I've seen the richest of the rich living fat and happily on one side of a concrete wall while the most poverty stricken human beings live on the other.  That these extremes exist is heart-wrenching in and of itself - that they exist within a stone's throw of one another is unfathomable.  That they live daily with the reality of each other is heartbreaking.  That nothing is being done to change this is criminal.

I've seen poverty, slums, starvation, corruption, child prostitution, abuse of power, child neglect, beggars, crippled outcasts, blatant pollution, hard labor, bare feet on city streets, animals and children eating from dumps, trash in national parks, exploitation of natives, parading of culture for commercial consumption, exploitation of those doing good and false promises by those who should be doing good.  I've seen it all, I've felt it all, I've been changed by it all.

There will be many stories to come but this is the opening of the box of souvenirs I brought home in my own heart - a collection of vile and screaming injustices that must be changed in the world.  I ask you to join me, if only in your heart.  Open up, ask yourself to give your attention and compassion to any of these stories and you will have made the first step.

I'll see you there - where we are changing the world, one step at a time.