Friday, December 07, 2007

they can consist

Recognizing that our most intimate relationships need not be based on power, points toward an even more dangerous possibiity, that all of our relationships can have as their basis pleasure and communication: that they can consist of communion.

Dec 7, 2007 11:29:47 AM | ear candy

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what to do Dissonance does not always lead to action, nor even to understanding. It is just as possible--if not more likely--to resist the understanding itself than it is to resist the injustice. Not only is it feasible, and for many, tempting, to retreat from the dissonance back into denial, it is just as possible to turn one's anger inward as it is to turn it where it belongs. Derrick Jensen
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so what do you do about it The question becomes, I think, how do you incorporate--from the Latin in corpor, to take into the body--this understanding in a way that sustains rather than defeats you. I have no answer. I know only what sustained me through that transition...The main thing that helped was the fact that I had many friends who had already gone over this threshold, and who were continuing to act as effectively as they could. The knowledge that our culture is not redeemable had not paralyzed but encouraged them. These people were my models, my inspirations. Most of them had not articulated this change in perspective--this stripping away of this particular false hope--but, far more importantly, they were living it, and living it beautifully and happily. They did not take the insanity of the culture personally. Oh, sure, many certainly cried about it, often, but they also recognized that by acting vigorously against the injustices and insanity they saw around them they could remove the shame of their participation in it---their participation by the mere fact of being in its center, in reaping some of its rewards. By an act of emotional and spiritual ju jitsu, they could change their perception from that of living in the center of civilization--a place of unfair advantage where our way of life is based on the exploitation of all others--into having a different sort of advantage: access to the soft underbelly.

Deb Schanilec

Connected and Committed relationship transformation strategist.

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