Everything is connected
/In this week’s letter where I share the Good Stuff I find on the internet: finding perspective
visual journal
I struggled this week with what to say about the excellent links I want to share with you. What do they all have in common? And then I saw it. Each of the first three speakers (linked below) takes the particulars of their subject—whether republic democracy, art and activism or U.S. treatment of migrant children—and finds big picture, universal truths for us: how it all relates to us.
Images of both a microscope and a telescope come to mind. Both instruments reveal what we cannot see with our eyes alone—and it’s always amazing how it all connects. How the structure of the atom as quantum physicists look closer and closer, for instance, replicates the structure of the whole universe.
Connections—how every bit of the universe connects—is what we end up seeing when we REALLY look at the Big Picture—which Rob Bell presents with great wit and insight in the fourth and last amazing link (a video).
1. How Republicans Destroyed the Republic/What a Republic Really is, and Why it Matters
“You might think: “isn’t it perfectly rational and reasonable to care about no one’s kids but my own?” Ah. In that very moment, and in that very belief, you might not know it, but you’ve given up on the idea of republican democracy.”
2. Art, activism, and the soil we grow in
“"Art can serve activism by teaching an attentiveness to existence and by enriching the culture in which our roots are set down. Culture is both the crop we grow and the soil in which we grow it…To effect profound cultural change requires that we educate ourselves about our own interior wildness that has led us into such a hostile relationship with the forces that sustain us. Work on the self is work on the culture."
3. The US Systematically dehumanizes migrant children
“Many of the guards at the border must have children. It seems fair to imagine they don’t think the ones they are leaving without food or that they are cursing against are as valuable as theirs…
“Behind them, there are the thousands who agree with Trump that migrants are “animals,” and behind them the ones who voted the president in because of his xenophobic rhetoric, and behind them the ones who voted the president in despite his xenophobic rhetoric.
And behind them, all of us Americans who keep going about our business—Labor Day weekend trips, the last sale of the summer—and have been, for months, because, after all, these children aren’t our children, these people aren’t our people.”
(The link list is short this week to give you more time for this one. Give yourself the gift of twatching this video this week).
Here’s to more joy, laughter and peace—for ALL humans and all living beings.
—Denise