We are our choices.
Our lives are the history of our choices.
Awake, my soul!
Last weekend on the spur of the moment, very much knowing I needed to get away in all ways, I went to one of my favorite weekend getaways – Niagara-on-the-Lake, Canada, home of the world-renowned Shaw festival. It is one of the most peaceful, exquisitely beautiful places I've visited, excellently maintained as a Victorian time warp, overrun with flowers and beautiful landscaping – a true haven for the soul and the mind.
So named as overlooking the shores of Lake Ontario at its source, fed by the Niagara River, I meandered through the town, had high tea at the Prince of Wales Hotel (built in the mid-nineteenth century); and sat for what I felt was transcendent time watching the small white rolling waves and hearing their gentle surf-sound . . . writing the following as I viewed, across the great waters, my country and Old Fort Niagara:
Awake my Soul!
Take back your birthright
In these lazy rolling waters
Of the Great Lake
Borders between worlds . . .
Peace . . . sanity . . . laughter
War . . . dysfunction . . . fear
Two countries –
One Trumped, crazy, sharply conflicted
Other . . . universal health care
Decency rules . . .
I escape here
Niagara-on-the-Lake
Soaking up these rolling waves
In established stillness.
It's nice and beautiful here –
Culture abounds in the land of Shaw's wit.
We're all human, he says . . .
We share the same range of potential – character – no difference.
We are our choices.
Our lives are the history of our choices.
So the real challenge is: Are we able to respond? (Response-able)
Of course!
Always – and as we come to accept our ability to respond (Response-ability), so do we receive and actualize power –
To transcend,
To radicalize,
To create and sustain r(evolution) – another evolution for all our greater good . . .
We've sat like pigs, content in the dirt of of our presumptive, powerless selves
Blind, not wanting to know or be any different.
The profound disquietude is upon us, as we're all here to note (like it or not) all the walls that have been built . . .
Resurrected on the soil that still holds our founding vision
All equal
Entitled equally to "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness".
Wherever one is denied, discounted – all suffer, and are lowered into the abyss of truly-sanctioned slavery, dominance, submission.
We have been called "the sleeping giant". Many stones have now been unturned, many seemingly dead directives have once more emerged to clearly dominate and say, "We have not gone away. We will not go away . . ."
What is it to be a caring, visionary, awake human? In our times we are newly challenged to define again and beyond who and what we really are as how and when we DO and achieve – understanding there now really is no choice.
Awake, my soul.