David's Desk is my opportunity to share thoughts and tools for the spiritual journey. These letters are my personal insights and opinions and do not necessarily reflect the sentiments or thoughts of any other person in Lorian or of Lorian as a whole. If you wish to share this letter with others, please feel free to do so; however, the material is ©2019 by David Spangler. If you no longer wish to receive these letters, please let us know at info@Lorian.org.
It’s hard to write my David’s Desk this month. Words seem pale before the towering immensities of sorrow and grief at the tragedies stalking our nation and our world. I do not need to quote statistics to you—they are easily obtained, staggering in the losses they represent, and, unfortunately, constantly changing for the worse. Last week, another unarmed black man, George Floyd, was killed by a white police officer, and last night, parts of my city, Seattle, were burned and destroyed by violent agitators hijacking what had been a peaceful protest march by those mourning his death.
Perhaps your city was burning, too.
At the top of the page, I write, as I do every month, “David’s Desk is my opportunity to share thoughts and tools for the spiritual journey.” So, what are my thoughts and tools today, in the midst of our national and planetary tragedies?
Those who are dedicated to the spiritual journey and who seek to be sources of Light upon the earth know that in moments like these, the need is for calm. This is calm within oneself and, where possible, extending calm to others. This can help us banish fear from our hearts and minds and, again, where possible, through example if nothing else, from the hearts and minds of others. Calmness and fearlessness give us a foundation to see clearly, think clearly, and act clearly. They also enable us to act with love. Otherwise, we can easily contribute to the problem, increasing the agitation and turmoil around us.
But in addition to calm, this is a time for attentiveness to what is happening. Not just ordinary attentiveness, the kind that listens to the news and then assumes we know what’s going on. What is needed is a fierce attentiveness that, from a calm and loving place, can look deeply at the chaos of the moment, see it, feel it, and not reflexively, immediately, try to understand and name it and thus pigeonhole it somewhere in our psyche.
It’s easy to do. We all have our favorite labels for moments like these: it’s “outsiders,” it’s “them,” it’s this race or that race, this religion or that religion, this political party or that political party, this politician or that politician. Our labels can keep us from seeing and feeling clearly the anger, the pain, the suffering, the chaos we all feel, that Humanity feels, that the Earth feels. It can put these things outside of us, onto “them,” the ones to whom our fingers point. We buffer our pain with blame.
It takes courage—and calmness, and love—to say, “Let me just be with the pain. Let me feel it.” When we do, we learn three things. The first is that we really are strong enough to do it; we are stronger in spirit and in love than we may think we are. The second is that it’s our pain. It’s not their pain, nor my pain alone; it’s ours, together. If you hurt, I hurt, and vice versa. The third is that when we realize this, then we can act, not from pain, not from suffering, but from wholeness, from the realization that we are all in this world together and if healing is to happen, we will do it together.