A quiet revolution
Another world is not only possible, she is on her way.
Eleven years ago I started a blog. I called it A Quiet Revolution.
To me, at that time in my early 30’s, living in Brussels and creating a life of freedom and adventure, that name represented both my own inner revolution and that of the world - the micro and grassroots movements I was starting to find out about, reading the great thought leaders and thinkers that were paving the way for a radical paradigm shift, the rise of permaculture and its associated ethos and on and on.
So many tiny seedlings of hope. Hope, even in the face of what often seem like impossible odds.
And hope also for myself and my life, hope that was finally beginning to blossom once more after a few desperately tough years.
And now, eleven years later (and six years after letting go of that blog when I built my website) I find that name coming back to me, more relevant than ever. Relevant because I believe that the deciding revolution of the human species in this age will not be loud, violent, swift or solid.
Instead, what it looks like to me, is a slowly building tide. I see it now, far out to sea still, but gathering momentum. And if that tide gathers enough strength it will come sweeping into shore, pushing past all resistance and bringing in a new era.
We live in times where hope is hard to come by; where almost everyone except the very young appear to have lost it long ago and to have resigned themselves to despair, apathy or delusion.
But I believe we have a duty to hope.
Yes, that word. Duty. “A moral or legal obligation; a responsibility”.
We have the ability to choose how we respond to these times. If we choose despair, we are effectively copping out (of engaging with life, of our responsibility for the world we pass on to the next generation, and for all other beings that share this planet with us).
What is needed now is the birth of a new vision.
All things are immaterial before they manifest in physical matter; in other words to create this new world it must first exist sufficiently as an energetic field.
And after all, what have we got to lose?
In hoping, in dreaming?
Our pride, if it all goes to hell and the world burns?
There’s a poem, one of those ones that sets every cell of my body tingling, that lingers in me long after the words have passed, that moves me beyond tears to a place of nonverbal complicity;
“Do not go gentle into that good night.
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.”
There is something in us - that light that brings life, that spark of the divine, that part that is inherently loving and trusting and powerful - oftentimes referred to as the “human spirit”, that cannot turn its back on life. That knows at some profound, bone marrow level that life is sacred and must be protected.
And so let us hope. Let us dream. Let us call a new vision into being and hold onto it with all the might our will can muster.
It begins in our hearts. In the furnace of our own will to live, our love for life, and the quiet knowing that if we can dream it, it’s possible.
As Arundhati Roy wrote;