Welcome

WELCOME TO THE GREEN PEN!

It's my personal soapbox, a place for me to express thoughts and feelings, musings and rants, reflections and recollections; to have fun with words -- about things spiritual, environmental, social, political, economic, and, from time to time, personal. And of course about peace. Soapboxes are in public places (as London's legendary Hyde Park) on purpose, and so I invite conversations with you, for it is through civil discourse that we can gain some perspective on the seeming chaos of these changing times and learn together how to shape a positive future for ourselves, our communities, and the generations to come.

Monday, April 16, 2012

Balance in Bali

Bali is all about balance – of good and bad, male and female, pure and impure, sacred and profane, light and dark, life and death, sekala and niskala. Eagle and Condor.  This I learned on a recent three-week journey to that small Indonesian island in the Indian Ocean.

The Balinese belief system, a mixture of Hindu and indigenous traditions that go back thousands of years, recognizes that the world we experience is a product of the interaction of sekala and niskala. Sekala is the surface, external, material aspects of the world. Niskala is the meaning, spirit, or essential life force underlying what we can see and touch.

Sunday, April 15, 2012

Wisdomkeepers of Native America

I recently read a book first published in 1990 called Wisdomkeepers: Meetings with Native American Spiritual Elders.  The authors, journalists Harvey Arden and Steve Wall, chronicle in text and beautiful photographs their journey to “the land of the Wisdomkeepers, which lies “[j]ust off the map, beyond the Interstates, out past the power lines and the shopping malls, up that little side road without a sign on it … .”

Saturday, April 14, 2012

An Epochal Moment: Eagle and Condor Fly Together

People in the United States and around the world are experiencing a period of change of historic magnitude. It is an epochal moment, as worldviews shift from separateness, fear, and security through competitive dominance and win-lose violence to oneness, hope, and security through cooperative interdependence and win-win peace.

It is a time of breakdown and breakthrough. It is a time in which economic, social, political and other human systems created out of a culture of violence are, at last, increasingly being recognized as just not working any more. It is a time in which those systems are necessarily giving way to new systems based on a very different view of reality, a culture of peace. It is a time in which the eagle and the condor are learning to fly together once again.