From the front page:

This woman’s name is Ieshia Evans. .   I am touched by her presence – not just in the face of being arrested but also in the face of all the violence that is happening in the world right now.

I am looking for inspiration and her presence inspires me.

Some days I read the news and I sit at my desk and I weep or I rage or I go numb. I don’t always know how to be with it all.

I tire of the blame and the hatred that I so often see. I want to be a part of change. Change that I know needs to happen. And some days I don’t know where to channel that energy or even where I fit in.  

I know that there are no simple answers to what we are up against.

We face a legacy of trauma within our entire culture and within how if functions. It is not a coincidence that both of the shooters in the recent police killings were military vets.

We live in a culture that is far better at teaching how to kill, than it is at teaching how to heal.

We live in a culture that thrives on making everything okay, when people are in many ways not okay. I understand the need and the desire for okayness – and I am hungry to live in a culture that honors our okayness and our grief.

I am hungry to live in a culture where women like this woman are honored. Where we learn to be courageous from a place of presence and not of blame.   I listened to the story of the Dallas Police Chief, David Brown, the other day. Here is a man who has just lost 5 of his fellow police officers. Here is a man whose own son killed a police officer and was then killed in turn.   And when he speaks, he does so forcefully and seemingly without bitterness.  

Like Ieshia Evans he holds a kind of presence.

  A kind of presence that touches and inspires me. A kind of presence that makes me have faith in who we are as a species in the face of all the drama of the world.   I am not a police chief. Nor am I a political activist in the traditional sense of the word.   But I am an activist in the sense that I believe that we need to change consciousness in ourselves, in our culture and in the world. Consciousness around race, around gender, around violence and around trauma.  

And I use that word trauma in the broadest sense of the word.

  For there is a kind of spiritual trauma in the loss of our deeper selves and of our relationship with spirit.   To heal that split, we need a kind of spiritual activism.   An advocacy for broader healing as individuals and as a culture, in order for deeper social change to happen. My hope is that our work with our dreams can be a part of that healing and a part of a broader movement.   That it can be a part of giving us deeper guidance in these challenging times.   For I don’t think that this guidance will ultimately come from the outside. I would be more than happy to have leadership today like the leadership of Martin Luther King in the sixties.  

But I don’t think the leadership will ultimately come from a leader in the world.

  I believe that it will come from people learning to turn inward toward the kind of guidance that comes from dreams, from prayer, from meditation and from other depth practices.   I believe it will come when there are tens of thousands of us out there who can stand in presence and in grace the way that Iesha Evans and David Brown are teaching us.   With Much Respect,

Bill