No. 11: Love

11: love is essential for an infant to survive therefore it must be essential to our health. 

Love is the ultimate resistance against the addiction for things.

Although I have written about a hierarchy of human based resources to replace the hierarchy of position and status, I understand that any thought can become a thing of oppression when written down.

Love makes its own demands and we can be oppressed if we love too much or too little or the wrong thing. Anything good, needful, beautiful or necessary can also be a trap. 

But love pulls us back into the family of things we are born into. This is where we live first.  We belong to another and love underpins the reason. It grounds the intellect with a root, a place that defines us, shows us where to return to.

I have some bad habits, some character faults, sometimes I get in the way, but beneath all that I know I belong here until I die. Here is where love opens for me. That's all. No flashing lights, no fanfare or gushing phrases.

But love requires attention. Wherever a question arises, pay attention to love.

Report from the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives

On wages in Canada "For the 11th year in a row, we kicked off the new year by releasing our annual report on CEO compensation. This year’s report found that, in 2016, Canada’s 100 highest paid CEOs netted 209 times more than an average worker, up from 193 times more in 2015. The minimum wage for a CEO on our list jumped from $3.7 million in 2015 to $5.2 million in 2016, a raise of $1.5 million in a single year. On an hourly basis, that means the minimum wage for the richest CEOs rose $713.88 an hour to $2,489.62 an hour in 2016." https://t.e2ma.net/message/hbqio/59wlib

No. 10 Belonging

10: belonging - no-one can grow into a healthy person if they do not belong anywhere.

The earth has been sold to the highest bidder and we are sold to them as units of energy. That's capitalism. It could also be communism or fascism. globalization, or simply the system. Whatever you call it, it is the exploitation of life for profit.

We can only belong to the degree we serve the system. We are "its" as Martin Buber pointed out. Atomized as George Monbiot points out.

The extent to which we have internalized our worth in terms of job description or position is the extent to which we are oppressed.

Belonging is a life long struggle to find worth in our selves through family and community, and our discomfort with this reveals a deep and lasting homelessness.

Yes we can go shopping as long as we have a job. We can buy a home as long as we have a sufficient salary. We can own a home but it can be taken away because we just purchased the land where our house sits, but someone who can purchase an army can move us off it. Someone who can purchase a government can rewrite the laws to make us refugees.

The only belonging we have is that of the sentient being that dwells here, and the only power we possess is what comes from a love for life.

No. 9 Language

9: language - every living creature has some form of communication, a way to warn of danger and a way to welcome. 

The language we use is the power we own. It is a weapon, a medication, a numbing or a birthing of what is yet to be.

By listening to the language of others we get a sense of their whole life. Where they have been battered and abused. Whether they are seeking revenge or resolution. This sense, however, doesn't make us experts on their truth, but it can guide us.

That is to say, by listening to a person talk about what he hates, who should be punished and by how much, can reveal the way the world was revealed through his or her earliest experience, who held power over him as a young child, and how he or she was treated when they made a mistake.

A person who is racist is saying that they can't cope with reality - that the world should be full of "me's". People of my faith, my colour, my politics. People that feed me a mirror image of my best self or the way I like to see myself.

A person who feels imposed upon with new ideas is someone who needs to feel that the way they see the world is the absolute truth.

The conflicts of today reveal the brokenness of our society but doesn't reveal what we should do about it.

What we can do is see this as a river to cross and how or where to cross it is the problem that I must attempt to solve.

No. 8 Intuition

8: intuition is a neural warning or announcement, a feeling, to alert us to pay attention to something.

Intuition is not fact, not a truth, but it can lead to a truth. Albert Einstein used intuition to guide him in his choice of what he would study.

Great leaders have honoured their intuitive side. The reason it has not been given as much air time may be the "feminization" of intuition. In our patriarchal history, the madness and destruction of war, exploitation, poverty and injustice are portrayed as simply being "the way things are". But intuition might get us to look at these things more closely and question why or how things are the way they are.

Feelings of being right and therefore anyone who has a different view is an idiot, is a lazy response to the intuitive feeling that you have worth beyond and above what you own. You might be right but what is it you are right about? What is it you actually know? What did you think you knew but were wrong about?

The gap between intuition and fact requires us to do the investigating. The investigation is the involvement of your mind and body in the revelation of the universe.

No. 7 Creativity

7: creativity - finding new ways of growing and preserving what we need.  

The act of problem solving, thinking of new ideas, conveying them and listening to others is what keeps me from falling into despair.

Despair is what I feel when the future is pre-ordained and there is nothing I can do that will affect or change it. Despair is the apathy of watching a TV program where the premise and the characters are the same as most other programs on TV. Despair is reading or listening to the news - a list of devastating crises, knowing that tomorrow there will a whole new list. Despair is being a consumer of things that don't require anything from me.

I know that this despair is very far from being a Syrian refugee or having a diagnosis of cancer, but despair is an emotional rot, and it is not naive to do or be what can alleviate these troubles. It is to participate in life, to seek new ideas, to value oneself enough to attempt a human response to the dehumanizing inventories of the system.

Just because the answer is not available right now doesn't mean it never will be.

No. 6: Storying

6: storying - conveying culture through stories.   

Jack and the Beanstalk, Little Red Riding Hood, Cinderella, Adam and Eve, The Christmas Story, Brave New World, The Handmaids Tale.

These are powerful narratives, rich in metaphor and tragedy. 

But here is a new story waiting to be told.  It is your life. 

Once upon a time there was you. There is still you.  What has saved your life? What nearly destroyed you? What do you do to keep from falling into despair? What gives your life meaning? What concerns you right now, in this minute? Is it something that will be an issue in a hundred years?