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Living In Our World Community

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Hear me, four quarters of the world – a relative I am! Give me the strength to walk the soft earth, a relative to all that is! Give me the eyes to see and the strength to understand, that I may be like you. With your power only can I face the winds.

~Black Elk~

I have been reading Eckhart Tolle lately and thinking about his call for a higher consciousness rather than being trapped by our thinking. His words reminded me of the writings of Teilhard de Chardin, a French priest who wrote about cosmic consciousness and Thomas Berry, a priest I knew in the 1960’s who wrote about awareness of being connected with the rest of creation. It seems hard for us to think of ourselves as a world community. Many people disparage the United Nations as useless. Society is pitted Republican versus Democrat, Christian versus Moslem, Jew versus Palestinian, radical religious thinker versus secular thinker. The list goes on. It feels to me like the whole world has taken sides on just about every conceivable issue. We can’t even agree on the earth. Some people think we are in danger of destroying our habitat while others think the idea of global warming is nonsense. Despite differences in how we look or act, we all have a great deal in common with each other even in our physical makeup. We come from the earth when we are born and will return to it when we die. In the mean time we interact with the earth every time we eat, drink or draw a breath. We are all part of the same earth. It’s hard to be any more connected to the earth and to each other than that. There should be some way we can treat each other as part of the same community. I have been thinking about such a development and waiting for it for the past forty years. The reality is that it won’t happen by itself. We must all do our part to bring about such a change. How? Of course none of us can change the whole world all by ourselves. None of us has control of anyone else’s interactions with their world neighbors. What we can do is to start treating every person we meet as a cherished member of our world community. Action Steps
  • Start thinking of others as part of your world community.
  • Make them feel welcome in your world.
  • Start with people you fine easiest to welcome.
  • As you progress, work up to people harder for you to welcome.
  • See if you can have a relationship with someone and leave out all the labels we use to categorize people.
Selection from my book Navigating Life: Commonsense Reflections for the Voyage, available at Amazon