Retrospective 2024-49

This is a retrospective of week 49, 2024 (2024-12-02–2024-12-08).

This week I’ve started reading Coming Back to Life by Joanna Macy and Molly Brown and The Dreaming Way by Toko-Pa Turner. Learning takes place not just in the head but in the heart (Macy & Brown) through dreaming (Turner). Trust your own experience, discernment, and inner knowing. It’s about reclaiming our true humanity. We are never alone on the path toward mutual wellbeing. We come back to life when reconnecting with our inner wisdom.

Joanna Macy and Molly Brown write:

…it has been the aim and the genius of the Work That Reconnects to help people open their eyes, rather than tell them what they see and what they should think. …so people can trust their own experience and speak the truth of what they see and feel and know is happening to their world.

—Joanna Macy, Coming Back to Life

…our trust is in the mind’s ability to discern and to choose. Despite all the very real as well as fabricated fears, despite the pace of destruction and the fog of distraction, it is still possible to turn back to the wellsprings of life. We can find, in the love that grounds us in the living Earth, clarity, courage and self-respect to free ourselves from bondage to a sick and death-dealing economy.

—Joanna Macy, Coming Back to Life

The whole structure of corporate capitalism participates in this kind of self-deception, as we ignore and cover up the enormous harm done to the environment, to our fellow creatures and to oppressed peoples around the world and within our own country — for the profit of a very few and the convenience of some.

—Molly Brown, Coming Back to Life

Living within a society that denies the pain it causes engenders deep conflict within us, but the taboos against speaking of it, or even seeing it, are subtle, strong and complex. Being nice — even being intelligent — means going along with the communal deception, like the mutually shared trance of an alcoholic family. Yet we do ourselves and the larger world real damage when we go along with the taboos and deny the truth of our inner knowing, as I did for so long. —Molly Brown

—Molly Brown, Coming Back to Life

The Work That Reconnects as presented in this book can help us reclaim our true humanity.

—Molly Brown, Coming Back to Life

Toko-pa Turner writes:

As you follow The Dreaming Way, may your life open to a multiplicity of benevolent relations both in your imaginal and material worlds, creating a broader sense of belonging in your life. Even as you practise on your own, you are never alone on this path. We are a gentle multitude, mounting a revolution from within. May it be through our shared devotion and passion that dreaming, one day, returns as a practice shared in families and communities, guiding us toward our mutual wellbeing.

—Toko-pa Turner, The Dreaming Way

While the rational mind focuses on individual parts, the eye of the heart perceives an ecology of energy and meaning. Unlike analysis, which pulls things apart to gain knowledge about their workings, the eye of the heart holds a contemplative curiosity in which life’s inherent meaning is invited to reveal itself.

Rationalism aims to observe the world with as much passivity and neutrality as a camera lens, but the eye of the heart is relational. While the rational mind distances itself from what it sees, the eye of the heart recognizes the connection between things.

—Toko-pa Turner, The Dreaming Way

Like the humble acorn holds the potential for the mighty oak tree, so too is our intrinsic pattern concealed within. But not even the acorn can become an oak without the right conditions: the nutrients of the soil, warmth and light of the sun, and space to spread its crown. We too must collaborate with Wisdom in order to draw our story into the open.

—Toko-pa Turner, The Dreaming Way

…remember that any conversation of depth needs responsiveness from both sides to stay engaged.

—Toko-pa Turner, The Dreaming Way

By choosing to enter into kinship with your dreams, you will come to recognize a deeper authority than the ones of the dominant culture. … You will encounter the ways in which your life force has been inhibited, thwarted, co-opted, or neglected. As you unlearn the habits and conditions that led to these losses, so too will you receive guidance, synchronicity, and inspiration as your rewards.

—Toko-pa Turner, The Dreaming Way