4,500 year old words for today
To whom can I speak these days, when hearts have become rapacious and everyone takes their neighbor's goods?
To whom can I speak these days, when brothers turn against brother when even friends won’t offer love?
And, why speak at all when gentleness has perished and violent men openly slay whomever they will?
Why speak when most are intrigued with evil and goodness becomes neglected everywhere?
To whom could I speak anyway? No one remembers the wisdom of the past; no one now helps those who struggle for good in the world. When the truth of suffering all over the world is mentioned, everyone seeks to lay blame on others.
To whom can I speak, when those who would speak for justice have gone silent and the land is left to the doers of harm?
To whom can I turn, when there is no intimate friend, no heart that I can trust and only my own misery endures?
Death is in my sight today and it looks like a clearing in the sky. Put down my misery!
~Unknown author, written over 4,500 years ago,
as quoted by Michael Meade in Awakening the Soul
Thousands of years ago, an anonymous author expressed sadness and longing that could have been written today.
At a time when we are constantly bombarded with "connection" through social media, a feeling of aloneness and hopelessness is pervasive in the world.
The world can feel like it is falling apart, personally and collectively.
These feelings are compounded in those suffering from great loss, challenge, and unimaginable trauma, but they are probably familiar to all of us. Even, and maybe especially, by those with a surface appearance of success.
WOC Wilderness Ops Director Brandon Harding, recently reminded us that "the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result."
We often must break out of our routine, and radically so, to find the connection and hope we are seeking.
Last week we ventured out into the challenging elements of the California wilderness during a very wet and snowy winter.
We carried our homes on our backs, slept in the snow, and listened well enough to the weather to get off the trail just before massive flooding evacuated the closest town.
A group of U.S. military veterans of 23rd Veteran who walked with us courageously shared the pain in their hearts and the hope we seek.
We found that all is not lost.
That change is possible and inevitable.
That wild nature and accepting community provide the healing freely available to all of us.
Sometimes we need the excuse, the community, and a little push to get out there to the wild outside of us and into the wilderness of our hearts.
Adam