What our lives depend on
Anyone else scrolling through your preferred news sources these days as if your life depended on it? I’m having trouble deciding if I’m finally, irrecoverably, addicted to my phone and computer screen or if I’m just trying to stay informed, or if it calms my nerves to “know” as much as I can at a critical time in the history of our country and the world. Probably equal parts of all of the above.
In an effort to balance all of this, islands of sanity include: paid employment, regular chores, boiling maple sap, a music night with old and new friends, the hilarity of tobogganing during a spring snow storm, and a daily commitment to centred prayer and meditation. This list of activities are not escapes from the insanity of the spectacle of the rise of authoritarianism and fascism in our southern neighbour. (If only it were simply a spectacle and not so truly dangerous). In fact, the activities listed here are their own form of resistance.
This line of thinking was corroborated by an article I was directed to from Waging Nonviolence, The Opposite of Fascism.
Living fully and generously together should not induce a state of guilt as the world unravels. Instead, living fully, as we are able, is exactly what we should do as our response to “these grifters and bigots and billionaires and bullies.”
Living fully scares them as they try to absorb us in every way they can.
And so, as this fabulous article suggests:
“The best revenge is to refuse their values. To embody the kind of living — free, colorful, open — they want to snuff out…Because having, and nurturing, in your life a sphere for joy and connection and community and love and food and music and human difference and living and letting live is everything they are not and is everything they are trying to take away.
Be what scares them.”
Blustery spring winds this afternoon remind me that the resistance of a full, joyful and generous life in community will not easily overthrow the cold power of oligarchs. 70 km per hour wind gusts shake the floor beneath my feet as a warm weather front defeats a cold front. It’s unsettling, scary even, but in this time of a full spring arising (uprising?), when warmth and rain soak newly thawed earth, the veriditas (greening spirit of the earth) will not be denied. It persists, insists and is ultimately unstoppable. That’s the resistance to the changing world order that we will be part of as we remember that everything we need is already here beneath our feet and around us in abundance. This is what our lives depend on.
Written by Marilyn, April 2025
