Grow Consciousness
500 words on the heart as a garden
The planet is crying. My world is wet and full of rain and flooding tears.
'Senseless' is defined as 'of a person: unconscious; lacking consciousness; not aware of oneself or one's environment.'
‘Senseless shootings’ occur in greater frequency and proximity (more and more, and closer and closer to home). Thinking that it is happening to other people, that it won’t happen in your life, where you live, is proving to be a false sense of security we wear around our shoulders like a once-warm jacket in the midst of what is now a thundering storm, a flood even.
We correct consciousness, together. First, I do all I can on my own: get a new raincoat, then an umbrella. Then I join my neighbors to construct a small shelter. Then a big one--a colossal arc.
Developing an awareness—we are beyond that point. No one is unaware of what is happening with each new mass shooting. But everyone is still afraid to change.
And the message here is not scary or good or bad or evil: Change will come, whether it is forced on you or not. Consciousness will come to earth, whether you embrace it or not. People die from guns, from viruses, from lacking consciousness of the way the world really works, of misunderstanding where risk, danger, and control really reside, and with whom.
The message, again, is simple: You and I need only become more conscious of our health and safety, because making efforts to raise our own consciousness means first confronting the reality of the responsibility we have—the obligation we have in being human, in getting to use this heart in our chest: standing up for what is right.
The heart is a gift that can keep on giving. Like a garden, it can produce dank veggies for you and your people. Even when the garden gets ravaged in the night, it can be rebuilt; for the seeds become plants, become food, energy, sustenance.
You can try to live today doing the same things you did yesterday, but know that that is expecting your garden to produce fruit when the plants just got uprooted and lay visibly dead at your feet.
Change will occur, even if you don’t actively seek it, and it won't always be in the way you had hoped, but it does always occur in ways you could have better prepared for. This is inevitable.
And as change occurs, with or without your choosing, as consciousness increases, in you and me, and it spreads throughout our worlds, thus, the senselessness of the world decreases, and the senseless things happen less and less instead of more and more.
It begins and ends with you.
Unconscious beings live in a world of mass shootings that are going to be fixed by other people. Conscious beings live in a world where we are each solely responsible for changing the world. To eradicate ‘mass shooting’ from the human vocabulary, we start with consciousness. With you. Now.