Many people have spoken such things about how the world isn’t what it seems. Or, that there are a few more choices. Or, that a few key defaults have become harmfully habitualized and concretized.
I have most often felt my heart awaken and my spirit enliven, to hear affirmed that there might just be other ways beyond the norms of reductive thought. I love the creativity. I love the interruption of once, albeit good ideas, that have become dehydrated and void of nutrients through their unexamined repetition. Or worse, toxic.
Whether it is talking about choices for how the chairs are arranged in a meeting, or whether it is about world views emboldened by uninterrupted systemic powers and manipulation.
The world is a beautiful place. I will stand by this. It’s not hard to find beauty in the people. In nature. In simple things.
It’s also not hard to find perpetuated harm. In systems. In defaults. In amplified fear behavior.
Today I’m grateful for these words from Linda Hogan, Chickasaw Author and Activist (thanks Lisa Hess for sharing), that speak to this interruption of epistemological pattern and practice.
The constructed world
of our own human intelligence
in a Western system
has not been a fit large enough
or deep enough;
it has betrayed us.
So have the Western systems
of education and medicine and agriculture.
It seems that all we can say for certain
is that we have been deceived
by what we thought was knowledge
and by the many systems
that have been born of this inadequate knowledge.
~ Linda Hogan, “First People,” Intimate Nature
Here’s to any of the ways that any of us, individually and communally, find our way to expanded learning and ways of being beyond that born of inadequate knowledge and limited ways of seeing, feeling, and encountering the world.
