The Great Turning (adapted by jonathan)
Unconditional
The Great Turning
Excerpts from Common
Sense
I take to
myself
The Book of Endings
The Great Turning (adapted by Jonathan Haber 1.29.07)
This
is adapted from Christene Fry's poem
below...
backhomegv_7_Great_turning_words
Unconditional
Willing to experience
aloneness,
I discover connection everywhere;
Turning to
face my fear,
I meet the warrior who lives within;
Opening
to my loss,
I gain the embrace of the
universe;
Surrendering into emptiness,
I find fullness
without end.
Each condition I flee from pursues me,
Each
condition I welcome transforms me
And becomes itself
transformed
Into its radiant jewel-like essence.
I bow to
the one who has made it so,
Who has crafted this Master
Game.
To play it is purest delight;
To honor its form--true
devotion.
- Jennifer Welwood
The Great
Turning
You've
asked me to tell you of The Great Turning, of how we saved
the world from disaster.
The answer is both simple and
complex.
We turned.
For hundreds of years we had turned
away as life on earth grew more precarious.
We turned away
from the homeless men on the streets, the stench from the
river, the children orphaned in Iraq, the mothers dying of
AIDS in Africa.
We turned away because that is what we had
been taught.
To turn away, from our pain, from the hurt in
another's eyes, from the drunken father or the friend
betrayed.
Always we were told, in actions louder than
words, to turn away, turn away. And so we became a lonely
people caught up in a world moving too quickly, too
mindlessly towards its own demise.
Until it seemed as if
there was no safe place to turn. No place, inside or out,
that did not remind us of fear or terror, despair and loss,
anger and grief.
Yet on one of those days someone did
turn.
Turned to face the pain. Turned to face the
stranger. Tuned to look at the smoldering world and the
hatred seething in too many eyes. Turned to face himself,
herself.
And then another turned. And another. And
another. And as they wept, they took each other's
hands.
Until whole groups of peole were turning. Young and
old, gay and straight. People of all colors, all nations,
all religions. Turning not only to the pain and hurt hut to
beauty, gratitude and love, Turning to one another with
forgiveness and a longing for peace in their hearts...
-- Christine Fry (October 19, 2004)
I take to
myself
I take
to myself
my broken self:
my guilt, my peace,
my folly and
joy,
my sickness, my health;
in laughter and agony,
hating
and loving,
my fear and my birthing--
and I am made
whole.
I take to myself
you, my neighbor,
cupping your
life
within my hands:
your broken self
pure gift to me;
not
burden, gift,
as mine to you--
and I am made whole.
I take
to myself
you, broken Earth;
stripped and abused,
paved
over and poisoned,
you mother so freely,
abundant in
grace:
clasp in your mercy,
surprise into tears--
and I am
made whole.
I take to myself
your broken self,
my dear,
near God;
broken for broken,
for lost and for spent.
As
fragmented love
and nectar of life,
you come, gentle
God--
and I am made whole.
- Bill Johnston
Excerpts
from Common
Sense
We have been born
into a
moment
of unprecedented danger and opportunity.
Our
failure to act
is itself a choice.
There is nowhere to
hide
from this awareness.
It is time.
Our purpose here
is
to build a bridge.
The purpose of the bridge
is to span
the distance
between our present situation
and our vision
of a better world.
The beauty of a bridge is that,
once it
is in place,
anyone can walk on it.
A few people can build
a bridge
that can be walked on by many.
. . .
On the edge
of the dream
we face our deepest doubts.
Now that it all
is almost real
a terrible fear of success takes hold
and we
grab desperately, incontrollably, for failure.
One last
chance to get off easy.
Who among us really wants to save
the world,
to be born again into two thousand more years
of
struggle?
How much sweeter to be the doomed
generation,
floating gently on the errors and villainy of
others,
towards some glorious apocalypse now . .
.
Hallelujah! It's not my fault--
Bring on the end
times!
We hate our enemies
to provide ourselves in
advance
with excuses for possible failure.
Only when we
give up
the comforts of pessimism
the luxury of enemies
the
sweetness of helplessness
can we see beyond our own
doubts.
I am speaking today of a great possibility
a
chance to return to life
a chance to create a world for our
children
not worse than the one we have
How dare I be
discouraged in the work
by anything so trivial
as the fear
of personal failure?
. . .
There are bridges to build
new
maps of consciousness to be delivered
to every planetary
address
in every planetary language.
We are ironworkers,
skywalkers,
stubborn messengers
of light and life.
O
friends
don't forget
why we're here!
The truth is, we have
the skills
and we have the courage
if we could only keep
our minds
on what we really want.
. . .
How to prevent
world catastrophe:
1) Admit that it could happen.
2)
Decide that it will not happen.
3) Commit your vision and
energy to number two
without ever forgetting number one.
To choose to build a bridge
is the essential act of love.
- Paul Williams
The Book of
Endings
Some time while you read this
page
or the next one, a species –
a species as vast as your
life
and the lives of all your ancestors
chasing bison
across Old Europe
or huddled around a fire – will
disappear.
A species that has found its own
ways of eating,
of moving, of hiding
from predators; a species
that meets
itself and makes love
in the bark of a tree or on the
leaves
of the canopy or in the humid dirt.
And it has come
with us for millions
of years, for millions of years,
it
has watched the night
and day follow each other, it has
breathed
with the frogs, it has wrapped
the stars around it
like a blanket,
a patterned music, a map.
At the beginning
of this page
there may have been three or four left,
but
now there is only one.
And if you read this page again,
it
will be another one, another species,
another story of four
billion years
telling itself for the last time.
Wherever
life began – a word, a wish
breathed into water, a seed
falling
through space – it was all of us
there – as it is
now
in this unknown last one.
It has bored into wood, it
has carried
water on its back, it has drunk
the dew from
its back in the desert,
it has fed its young with strips
of
leaves, it has built homes out of bark,
it has caged the
sky into a song,
it has spoken in ways no man has heard.
it
has emerald wings
it has sapphire wings
it has wings of
night
you will never see it
it is already gone.
- Sam Taylor
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