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| Vienna, Austria |
It is equally important to appreciate our past dynamics and let them serve only as warning and not the given, the unchangeable with the past playing out again and again. Society may not be different emotionally but this is a different time. And the collective is engaged. Consciousness is afoot.
We can have the tendency to think that our current political situation is an isolated experience. It is not. Many times and in many places people have reached crisis in living together due to politics and desires of a few in power. Our global community is powerful in bringing this to our attentions.
Maybe Americans just thought it would never happen here. (We can conveniently forget our own American First Peoples interactions). There can be the disbelief of what is happening and the failure to shift quickly into actions to counter. Or a sense of overwhelm to change a mob or incoming force. Or when the force is already present within you or your neighbor. Our tolerance for differences can be like elastic and can get stretched out of shape and broken.
We attended the opening of a new play this weekend "Adroit Measures". The playwright had combined actual events and people and documented truths of many into a character and her family. It was told in flashback about the Anschluss when the Germans annexed Austria in 1938 and the subsequent horror results for the Jewish population and others. They had scrim fabric panels above the set of the grandmother's New York City apartment. Using rear screen projections they played actual film news clips of Vienna throughout the play to demonstrate the power of Hitler on a mass of Austrian people using Christian symbolism into emotional frenzy. The streets were so filled with cheering masses it looked like a sea of people with buildings corralling them.
It was very effective in putting the context, the overview and place in the Jewish grandmother's retelling to her grandson of her life in Vienna among cafe society in the 1930's. A story she had never shared with her children's families in the US. As part of the resistance she helped collect information, family and friends to escape until it was not longer safe for her. Her husband would spend 7 years chasing Hitler until they met again to live together.
She left Vienna by way of the Siberian train to Shanghai, China. From there by boat to Seattle and another cross country train ride to Washington DC. A nine month journey by herself pregnant by rape by a family member who helped orchestrate her leaving. All while carrying her 5 month old son in her arms. No food or family, only strangers all escaping.
It brought forward the reality of what one might do to live another day when faced with death in that moment. And the current story line was about her own children themselves acting in the same fearful thinking as in the prior generation of Austrians towards their own family members and sexuality and fears of the AIDS generation in the late 1990's.
This was a story of power and the human spirit. Who had it, who didn't, and who had it and did what they had to do to survive another day. Who used it over others, how power itself is in the application, the intensity, the bias.
It was about how, no matter the experience, we can not visit some of internal spaces at times to even speak of what one witnessed and experienced at times. What can make us strong and feel weak. What makes us seem weak to ourselves and yet strong in spirit. Our resiliency to continue on. And how we still feel about a moment in time.
In these current times we are witnessing what for many of us has been a relation to silent horror held inside. We have in all of us sides of every story every horror depending on our choices. Those choices we were forced to make or chose freely to make. Included our own choices and those from other generations of DNA imprinting.
Sometimes we can be accused of being Pollyanna or live in states of compromised denial or discredit of our inner feelings and drives. Which is not useful in a society that allows for abuse of all kinds.
We have to grant ourselves acceptance for what we are and how to utilize our primal drives in helping us all. We each may need to make different choices in extending tenderness or violence. Societies may hold different values about the two and with other societies. We can each be playing by different rules.
No matter what one might think we are animals even it we have only two legs and not four. I don't know how often animals kill just to kill or harm to just harm as humans are inclined to do. I don't know of animals that often are looking to annihilate a group or clan or tribe of the same except under survival stress frenzy. But we as humans do it all the time.
Our primal states are influenced by our ability to reason a thought and feeling into some thing, some action. We collectively create our civilizations and decide what is appropriate actions and reactions. That is what our various justice systems are in place for. They are subject to change and influence and reason and bias, our fears. They incorporate our highest held ideals and our lowest emotional spaces as we embody the spectrum of being.
Access Heart Centered Awareness and feel the calm there. Let your knowing as Consciousness help guide you in the coming days. Be okay with what you find inside as it is past choices. It may take an apology or a Ho'oponopono or appreciation. Reparation and humbleness. It will mean looking at what is within and not being frightened but accepting.
And, making a new choice, a different choice the next time.
Janet Barrett
Life in the Beyond/Journeys Into Enlightenment
