“As we accept what is, we become people who stand in contrast to what is, freed from the aggression, grasping, and confusion of this time.
With that clarity, we can contribute things of eternal importance no matter what’s going on around us — how to live exercising our best human qualities, and how to support others to discover these qualities in themselves.”
~ Margaret Wheatley, So Far From Home: Lost and Found in Our Brave New World
Wheatley speaks of calling upon “skills not common these days, such as (quality) thinking, sense making, pattern recognition, reflection,” and there are others as well that would qualify as contrasts to what passes for normal (albeit an insane ‘normal’) in these times.
I would add to this uncommon skillset the age-old virtues – delicious qualities like generosity, graciousness, empathy, compassion, presence, whole-heartedness, intuition, and loving-kindness.
Plus, one of my other favorite qualities to cultivate or reclaim: Spidey Senses, which is a fun way of saying body wisdom.
Oh, and integrity … which too often seems to be heading into the old-fashioned-virtue category.
These are also the very skills and qualities that spring forth more gracefully when we tend the fertile ground of the Via Feminina, cultivate the Inner Way, and ground those re-awakened gifts and ways of knowing in rooted, Earth-connected and Earth-honoring action.
That these have become more and more uncommon skills and traits in our time, and over a relatively short time, is a great sadness. The effects and consequences of that are grief-striking.
That these uncommon skills can be remembered, cultivated, and reclaimed is the great news that holds within it hope, inspiration, and perhaps even survival.
“We are the early adopters of a revolution of values.”
~ Pancho Ramos-Stierle, Occupy Love,
When we reclaim these and other forgotten virtues, qualities, and gifts, we stretch our roots more deeply into ancestral soil (and cellular memory).
We also invoke the remedy that helps to heal the current and growing imbalance, and restores the heart and soul of what it is to be human, reconnected with our home and sustenance, Nature … Earth.
Imagine that.
Big Love,
Featured Image Credit: Love’s Messenger (1885), by Marie Spartali Stillman
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Lots of love,
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