My apologies for such a long post!

Yesterday I celebrated the birthdays of both my mother and my mother-in-law – both of whom shared the same exact birthday:  February 2, 1929.  They were both born in the year of the Great Depression, and both were teenagers in World War II, experiencing these events from different parts of the world – my British mother in Europe, and my American mother-in-law in the United States.  Both had parents who were immigrants.  As girls, women and mothers, they both grew up relatively invisible to the world around them, which favored and valued the opinions and desires of males and fathers – and yet, they viewed others with love, compassion and empathy in return.  In commemorating both of them, I am also thinking of how they would be contemplating the world we are currently living through right now.  They both passed away more than a decade ago – definitely before the Trump years and the extreme division of today in the US and around the world.  But I think they would also have said that they had seen much of this before in the experience of their own lives, and that now it is much more crystalized and dangerous and in serious need of attention.

The dilemma for me in the past few months since the election in the US, has been what to say to those who follow my blog. It may surprise you, but my silence is not the result of anger or fear or withdrawal from the world.  Rather, I have been watching all that is unfolding, and thinking about what that means for us in our lifetime, for our democracy, for our planet, for humanity.  Evolution always moves forward, and always reveals weakness (It is revealing our greatest weaknesses now!). I am disappointed in the result of the election in November 2024, and I feel extreme empathy and deep concern for the suffering that is occurring as a result of a vengeful, thin-skinned, self-absorbed person who once again found his way to the Presidency of the US, but I am also asking myself “WHY has this happened?”.  I have not lost myself to rage at the outcome I did not want and did not expect. I have gone within to understand the reason it is important for us all to collectively experience and witness this horrible event unfolding. I still believe in the goodness of people; I still believe in the power of our collective thoughts and faith; I still believe that events occur in life for reasons we can’t always comprehend when close at hand (and sometimes requires more distance from the event, before it can be more fully understood); and I believe that we can think (and long for) what we assume is best for us (and not be wrong, necessarily), but also not realize that that “solution” may not be in our long-term best interest, if it does not bring the significant change needed quickly, and reveal important truths about us and about our systems and processes that have gotten us to this point in time in the evolution of our species.  Perhaps we need to more fully and comprehensively understand how deeply broken things are or can be, when the wrong kind of energy takes control.  Human beings have a habit of forgetting our past, and also of not properly fixing what is broken and what needs to be healed.  The result is to repeat mistakes – only each time we do that the mistakes are more dangerous and more destructive and more difficult to resolve!

So now, we are in a time not unlike what so many of our ancestors have faced, in which we are being called to really look at and “see” each other and our world, and to decide what kind of a future we really want to create.  What should our reality be?  What should it look like?  What are we willing to live with?          

Extreme disinformation has divided us, and more dangerously, has created an environment in which no one agrees on what is real.  And until we can reach a place in which we start to agree on basic facts, we can never again trust one another and see ourselves as one country or one world.  This is very destructive, and can only lead to our complete demise!  Also, we have discovered that amassing great wealth among the few, has huge consequences for our very existence, as money and those with it, becomes the only power given voice, influence, and control of our collective destiny.  Now we witness the world’s richest person who feels entitled to walk into the US and take over its government by buying and controlling information and people with very little push-back. A “democracy” in which the people have not chosen its leader! A healthy country and a united people, would never have permitted this.  But we have not been healthy, and we have not been united, because we do not agree on what kind of a future we want to move towards, and we are lost in a sea of misinformation and disinformation. And apparently money is all that matters.  We’ve known this about our culture for a long time, so perhaps a personality like Trump or Musk taking control away from us through the power of money should come as no surprise!  

Sometimes, it takes seeing and experiencing what we DON’T want, in order to begin to understand what we DO want. Sometimes it takes those with ill intent to point to all the places we have not been safe, secure, or thriving, so that we can fix what needs fixing.  Sometimes it takes surprising and unexpected destructive action, to wake up those of us who have been sleeping.  Sometimes it takes the breaking open of something we thought was OK, to understand that it was not OK under the surface.  Sometimes it takes looking at the extremes and chaos, to realize how dis-empowered we truly are by what we thought was working.  And sometimes, each generation is faced with an enormous task to confront, which is required for our needed evolution and the protection of our planet.  I think we are in that moment right now!  And I think we are all here to bare witness to what happens when enormous change is required, and also to be a huge part of that change! 

What is going on in the US is not affecting the US alone.  It is a world-wide problem that requires a world-wide solution!  We need to fix “us”, so that we can save the planet, so that together, life can evolve! That world-wide problem is greed, corruption, unequal influence and voice, theft and absolute power for the few.  And the US, with its freedoms and its focus on money and power, is the perfect setting to shine a light on this problem.  Trump, Musk and those who prop them up and do their bidding, are showing us and the world what urgently needs to be addressed.  Yes, much of what we are seeing, many of us could have predicted, but we are also seeing things we were not aware of (or will see soon!).  And more importantly, those who have been affected and mesmerized by extreme disinformation need to see the reality of their world, and the lies which have been told.  Some may never see it, but I believe that many others will.  And when a more significant number of people begin to have a shared experience with shared facts, then we have an opening to changing our course and changing our world and fixing our deepest problems. 

My mother and mother-in-law walked through a world that told itself one story about who it was, but actually lived another story. As women, they had to navigate through that world, knowing what they knew to be true, was different than what they were told was true.  This is an experience and a knowledge particularly shared by all marginalized people.  The ability to influence the perceived reality of others has been going on for a long time, and has been deeply destructive!  AI is a natural progression from this idea – and it can be a very dangerous progression, depending on whether our intentions are to do good or to do damage.  We have to clearly decide NOW what we are willing to accept, to live with and to manifest! 

For my mother and my mother-in-law, they could not escape the reality created for them in their time.  So, they found ways to be a Light in the world with their families, with their neighbors, with their friends, and with strangers. They supported and healed others in ways they would never have imagined they had done, nor would they have taken credit for it. They simply saw what they had to face, and then worked at changing it one person at a time.   

Our challenge now, in our time, is to not get lost in what is happening around us, but to be aware of it and to understand the seriousness of it, and to find our own unique ways to make a difference in the lives of others.  We can see the danger before us, and we can decide that everything we do from this point forward, is in service to each other and to our world.  We have to get this right! 

This can be a very dangerous time, but it can also be a very transformative time in which we decide we are moving in a different direction from what the powerful and the wealthy have decided for us. It is in times like this that I wish I still had my mother to talk to, but I also remember that she was forced to live in air raid shelters for years during a time when the entire world was at war trying to stop a problem that we are now facing again – the destructiveness created by the desires of a few for absolute power!  We have to get this right!  Its time for the “power” to truly rest with “the people” – and this is something the United States should understand intimately, and has a responsibility to fix within its own borders! As such, our lesson and our challenge has been presented to us, once again, in the form of Trump.  We have been provided with a second chance and a harder lesson to learn and to overcome, and now, we have no choice but to get this right this time – in our own time!