Sunday, July 24, 2011

The Call (A Friend's Inspiration)

I was awakened on a night not so long ago, pondering what I must do and for what cause I must stand - there is so much injustice.

Ralph Waldo Emerson said "Our faith comes in moments, our vice is habitual".

We indeed do see injustice abound, and we perhaps find ourselves most readily and competently doing what we can within our own sphere of influence, by the means of our own gifts, toward the end of answering a calling we seem to have heard within that first 'moment of faith'.

That intuition, that silent, still voice, that beautiful whisper, that stirring inside - is the 'voice of calling', perhaps indistinct and confused, yet peaceful - a dissonant harmony - and it is that voice we must answer, for that voice is our conscience. And once answered, we must not slip back into slumber; we must act.

At times I feel weak, unable, too small, too insignificant.

And I recognize then, more than ever, that the greatest success of the smallest minds is the victory of their unified efforts to mobilize and simultaneously silence to complicity the masses, while allocating immense resources, utilizing the vast power of impotent weaponry, empowering machines of disinformation in the implementation of mechanisms of consent management.

The only thing we can do is anything we can do, each within the strength of their own will, within his/her own gifts, talents, skills, and resources.

The greatest deed is perhaps the smallest, for within that moment, enormous conviction has moved the soul.

All we can do is what we must do, and that is to be anything but treasonous, which is where our silence would lead us.

In due time what must become - becomes.

What we can ask of ourselves today is whether our lives serve a purpose - have we stood for what we believed in; or have we silently apologized for who we are in the darkness of our introspection - have we abandoned the will, ignored the calling, and surrendered to the conformity of consumerism.

We can wear the shame of our government; it is the only cloak we are given.

But we can also absorb the wounds and wear the scars of having stood for what we believe in.

It would indeed be our greatest loss to become immersed in guilt for things over which we have no control; our only guilt is if we allow ourselves to be individually and collectively disempowered by the feeling of smallness, and if we then do nothing. Indeed, we then become not just guilty, in actuality, but we become complicit in the most atrocious crimes of the apparatus that has rendered us 'powerless'.

For no person is rendered powerless by anything other than themselves, by hearing the call and doing anything less than voicing dissent, by standing still when stirred from within to move.

When each moment brings its calling, it is then that we know what must be done; and at that point - at that very moment - we must do it.

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