Pablo F. del Real

Wisdom communities make choices about what to embrace and what to renounce, including modes of transportation. Is renouncing air travel wise? Necessary? Delusional?

“I will tell you something about stories. They aren’t just entertainment. Don’t be fooled. They are all we have to fight off illness and death. You don’t have anything if you don’t have the stories. The evil of the world is mighty, but it can’t stand up to our stories.” (Leslie Marmon Silko)

The foundation of future wisdom traditions rests on harmony among four roles: poet, prophet, scientist, and god. They have to agree, beginning with the simplest of things: how human beings experience reality. And they must convince us of the same thing. The Four Spheres of Awareness are a beginning.

The Civil Rights Movement was the most effective movement in modern U.S. history. We ignore it at our peril. Two secrets of the movement: study and prayer. Do these seem insufficient to this moment and our challenges? Love and nonviolence seemed insufficient to overcome Jim Crow. Yet they won.

In the absence of a compelling vision for overcoming individualism, racism/sexism, and capitalism, it is tempting to simply be against those things. Yet being against an unjust system will not transform it or us. We need a vision, one that heals what ails us by aligning us with the love of god.

"Why silence?" was a question I got in response to my commitment to a monthly day of silence. 1. Observing a day of silence tells the story of The Way with a Thousand Names. 2. Native peoples were trained in the ways of silence. Let us mourn the genocide of native peoples with a day of silence.