Michael Meade: Yeah, I'm
with you. I'm with you, and the only
meaningful revolution is a revolution from the inside out. Revolutions that happen on an outside,
abstract, or ideological basis turn into their opposites. The revolutions that happen from within add
to the continuity of the world and the healing that's necessary. So I work with all kinds of activists, and
one of the things we always say is "Healing is a revolutionary act." In other words, what healing means [is] "to
make whole"; so when a person -- think of all the activists that have burned
out. I've done all kinds of activist
projects. I just returned here from LA
where I was meeting with nine different activist groups in the Latino and
African American communities. One of the
things we talk about is burnout, because you're always against something that's
bigger than one's self, you're always trying to bring in the great universal
values of truth, and love, and honesty, and justice, and equality; and that's
always been a big fight, a big battle, and people get burned out in the midst
of it.
What's usually missing there is an awareness of
the soul and how to heal it, and how to step back once and a while in order to
find one's own wholeness before going back to the big project or the big
battle. So yeah, I'm with you on the
activist ting,. I just think that, for
instance, for the activist working in nature, two things that I think are going
to be necessary for ecological change and environmental healing is
understanding - there's an old African idea, that says "Nature is just spirit
with clothes on". So if the ecologists
base what they're doing simply on science, they're already falling into the
game that's controlled by the abstract aspects of culture. Nature has a spiritual quality that needs to
be understood.
And then the second part is: if the ecological
movements don't get a little smarter about how mentoring works, they will fail
to bring in enough young people to really carry the whole project forward. So there's a connectiveness between older
people and their experience, and younger people with their living dreams that
is necessary for activism to work, and then in the case of ecology, there is a
need to get a better understanding of the spiritual presence that people find
in nature: why they love trees or why they love that body of water is partially
spiritual thing, and that's an important trasformative quality for the
ecological movement.
On the other side, in the issues of justice and
building just communities and all, what is needed is not just collective sense
of agreement and certainly not just consensus, but a greater process for
awakening the individual genius of
people, because that gives people automatically knowledge what they have
to communicate. The real old idea is
that a genuine community values it's individuals for their uniqueness, and on
the other hand, the person that learns their gifts and their unique qualities
needs a community to give them to. So I
think the revolution right now is re-imagining the size of the world we live
in, and our unique ways of connecting to it.
I think the big revolution is from within back out to the world.
Rob Kall: OK. Now, let's get back to a story.
Michael Meade: OK. So that brought one up.
Rob Kall: Great.
Michael Meade: This is a
story from down in southern Mexico and in Guatemala, so it's at it's roots a
Mayan story. In the story what happens
is there's a woman in a village who is about to become a mother because she is
going to give birth to her first child.
That's what makes her a mother, and she feels the labor coming on and so
she sends word out to the midwife, because this is an old story, and it used to
be that the midwives were ready to help each child come into the world. And so the midwife arrives and whoever else
is there to help, and the labor gets stronger, and the mother is giving herself
over to the labor, and then the crowning moment, as it's called, occurs, where
the infants head comes through and opens the way for it to be born And at that point everybody is so busy
helping the mother and the mother is so busy helping the child, that no one
sees that when the child is born, it's not only clear that it's a boy, but he
enters the world carrying gifts. That is
to say, he has on his shoulders a green cloak, and in his hand he has a gourd
full of water. The midwife takes the
green cloak and she takes the gourd full of water, and she puts them away so
that no one sees them, and she goes back to helping the mother give birth and
dealing with all the things you have to deal with.
