One thing I DO know…

What you usually refer to when you say “I”, is not who you are. By a monstrous act of reductionism, the infinite depth of who you are is confused with a sound produced by the vocal cords or the thought of “I” in your mind and whatever the “I” has identified with. So what do the usual “I” and the related “me”, “my”, or “mine” refer to? (Eckhart Tolle, A New Earth)

I am called Joanna, and I call myself I, and I strongly believe that I am identified with that name and my possessions, individual skills and my past, etc. And I believe that I must prove that to the world. But should that be my truth?

I have a friend who has memories from the womb. She remembers when she saw her feet and realised for the first time that they belonged to her. In awe she was of the individuation of her own body. Isn’t that just beautiful!? She remembers making use of her power to make her first somersaults… In glee!

And this same friend remembers, later, the first time she understood that her mother was telling her she was a good girl, as she did not cry, or fidget on the changing mat. And she thought aha!, I should do what others tell me to be ‘good’. We are introduced to all these wondrous, interconnected worlds of awe and wonder, good and bad,  belonging and separation, and the dual worlds of wrong or right from a very young age and it has become increasingly difficult to disentangle what has been dictated through millenia of conditioning from the natural incline of humanity at its source.

I have little memories as a child, maybe because I travelled around a lot, losing a sense of geographical, social and even linguistic reference. I do remember numerous moments when as a teenager and a young adult I felt pressured and conditioned by the system of following the crowd and therefore the credo “more is better” too. I felt pressure to assert my individuality in competition with others and was saddened by that. Even in social circles. And then in Business (as Usual) you are told things are meaningful if they sell in high numbers, to the masses – generally not things that have a life-enhancing purpose. It was all about what I could prove, not about who I wanted to be naturally, shutting up those inner voices. If I had been offered the freedom to choose “less is better” in the doing, yet more is better in the inner listening, I certainly would have a deeper knowledge of I today.

In this a world of exponentially fast, massified systems, information highways are flowing through our fingers but true wisdom is fleeting, It started a short while back on our human chronology and it started a while back for each of our current conditioned human lives.

The Great Turning wants us to actively demonstrate that demise is not a fatal human destiny and that we are here to learn from our errors and to participate in this exciting shift towards a new story.

We don’t need to do what we are told. We don’t need to strive for individualisation. We don’t need to pretend this Great Unravelling isn’t happening. We need to use our inner and outer voices.

I prefer an injurious truth to a useful error.
Truth heals any pain it may inflict on us. (Goethe – 1801)

There is an exercise in the collection of practices of the Work that Reconnects (WTR), in the book “Coming Back to Life” by Joanna Macy and Molly Young Brown, that is called “Who Am I?”. There, one participant asks another that question repeatedly, allowing us to drop thought constructs surrounding our identity and naturally wind down to a few simple words, that can hold and express the most essential truth of our being,

When I saw a phrase by WTR facilitator Lydia Violet appearing in my email inbox last week it stopped me in my momentaneous flight. I felt grateful for this short sentence: “One thing I know is that I can sing.”

Today I want to play with that sentence: “One thing I know… In this crazy upward-plunging crazy unravelling world of uncertainty I could also begin the sentence as “One thing I DO know…” as I know little else… Let me try it… One thing I do know, is that I know how to sing, yeah. One thing I do know is that I feel love. One thing I do know is that I am a living being… One thing I do know is that I am moved by nature… One thing I do know is that I love this Earth… One thing I do know that I am connected to a myriad of other beings… How expansive is simplicity?!

I know these answers makes up my true, collective identity. And we all are conscious of the same common essence if we can pause long enough to remember. What we identify with as connected individuals, how we speak our truth individually and what we DO with it all defines our role in this new human chapter, one of great responsibility, and possibly one of great simplicity.