As the global players make their moves on the world chess board, we have one of two basic social responses available to us as individuals – go to sleep, or wake up and stay awake.
Going to sleep can manifest differently in each of us but it is essentially a movement of forgetting the vastness of who we are, which causes us to close down, and wall off. It is fear motivated, and its agenda is protection of our own small, separate interests.
Waking up and staying awake on the other hand is a movement toward conscious, discerning engagement, setting firm boundaries – yes, but also flowing with the Love that permeates all of creation. Nothing excluded.
This doesn’t necessarily look any particular way. There is no one-size-fits-all moral code to follow. Especially when big collective movements are afoot.
When a tidal wave hits, things move in the directions assigned to them (observable by natural law/ physics). But awareness of what is happening, while playing our own small role, surrendering to and flowing in the directions that life has assigned to us, this is staying awake. This is staying at home, inside who we really are.
Rainer Maria Rilke praises this choice in his short poem, “The Gladdest Thing”:
Ah, not to be cut off,
not through the slightest partition
shut out from the law of the stars.
The inner—what is it?
if not intensified sky,
hurled through with birds and deep
with the winds of homecoming.