“People that say that they system works, works for the system.”
Russel Brand
I am complicit. I was born that way. That is how it begins. It takes some doing to be born free, here on planet Earth. Few of us grew up in the woods catching a glimmer of the stars and it’s hard to imagine what that might be like. The moonlight glimmering through a canopy of trees. Yet here it’s far more common that the durge of light pollution, might block our view of the stars, it seems too perverse. As does the blocking of the sun with air pollution. Yet for many of us humans, this is the world within which we live. We are removed from our parents at birth for our safety. We are removed from our parents to be educated. Our parents are financially punished if they put parenting above productivity. We a re-taught how to be financially productive. We are taught how to fit into the system. Yes we were born complicit. Maybe this is the real original sin.
It all feels wrong and many of us find ourselves confused. Longing for a place to call home never knowing if it really exists wondering how to find it. If it is a feeling, a place a person and so we find our selves lost. Looking to heal the part os ourselves that we never knew we had to heal and then that story comes. The healing journey, where we are cast of productive society and we find our selves in a wasteland and that is where the fallow field of healing humans come. Lost our of the matrix. We are self-medicating in bars. Getting high in back alleys. Walking along beaches. Thinking about jumping off buildings and in front of trains. Screaming for attention. Most importantly not getting it. Our pain is too uncomfortable, our loss is too great and our schism is so deep it forces our isolation.
I’ve come a long way on my journey from holding my face up against the school fence and being heartbroken about having to paint a tulip when we were told we were going to paint flowers and all the other equally devastating moment of my life in between. Sometimes I lose sight of how far I have personally come and more than that how much I have learned along the way.
The challenges are huge and what I can say is that at times they can also be totally overwhelming. I have spent many years of my life trapped in anxiety paralysis trying ot figure out the best ways forward. Going round in circle trying to find the best ways to intervene in a broken system. I have literally drilled down into the core of this an found that what we really have to do is heal humans. That beyond that in the healing process we have to teach people that we are not the challenge ‘The System” is the challenge. Severla years of activism then taught me that working from within “The System” was exhausting and the best way to create change was, disengage and create new structures. That creating small community inventions and non-compliance with what was prescribed could create the major changes in the lives of the people I worked with and create positive change and impact on a community level. That we could learn and grow with one another. That together no-compliance was possible and that we created new ways of being which stopped us from being complicit in a broken system.
