Guidelines for Transition

Excerpts from Joanna Macy’s essay HEARING THE CALL.  For more, read the entire essay here: http://www.valapublishers.coop/sites/1/media/files/Joanna-Macy-SOTGT-Foreword.pdf.

1.     Come from gratitude.   We have received an inestimable gift: to be alive in this wondrous, self-organising universe with senses to perceive it, lungs that breathe it, organs that draw nourishment from it.   And how amazing it is to be accorded a human life with self-reflective consciousness that allows us to make choices, letting us opt to take part in the healing of our world.

2.     Don’t be afraid of the dark.  This is a dark time filled with suffering, as old systems and previous certainties come apart. Like living cells in a larger body, we feel the trauma of our world. It is natural and even healthy that we do, for it shows we are still vitally linked in the web of life. So don’t be afraid of the grief you may feel, or of the anger or fear: these responses arise, not from some private pathology, but from the depths of our mutual belonging.

3.     Dare to vision.  We will never bring forth what we haven’t dared to dream or learnt to imagine. For those of us dwelling in a high-tech consumer society, replete with ever proliferating electronic distractions, the imagination is the most underdeveloped, even atrophied, of our mental capacities. Yet never has its juicy, enlivening power been more desperately needed than now.

4.     Link arms with others.  Whatever it is that you’re drawn to do in the Great Turning, don’t even think of doing it alone. The individualism of our competitive  industrialised culture has isolated people from each other, breeding conformity, obedience and an epidemic of loneliness. The good news of the Great Turning is that it is a team undertaking. It evolves out of countless spontaneous and synergistic interactions as people discover their common goal and their different gifts.

5.     Act your age.  Now is the time to clothe ourselves in our true authority.  Every particle in every atom of every cell in our body goes back to the primal flaring forth of space and time.  In that sense you are as old as the universe, with an age of about 14 billion years.  This current body of yours has been being prepared for this moment by Earth for some 4 billion years, so you have an absolute right to step forward and act on Earth’s behalf.