The interconnectedness of us all

Discovering the role we play

This morning, as I often do, just after sunrise, I went for a walk around my property. It’s such a magical part of the day, the full potential of the next 24 hours in front of me represented by the rising golden sun.

I live on a 400 acre community property, there are symbols of aliveness everywhere, bursting through the flora and fauna, animating the wildlife, rustling the leaves and warming the concrete ground. At the moment the frangipani trees are in bloom and I stop to pick up a few fallen flowers. I notice a dead snake on the road, flies buzzing around its broken skin. It’s pretty quiet at that time of day and in between the bird calls I can really tap into the silence.

Today, bathed in that silence, I stopped and just took in the space around me. The lush green grass from recent downpours, the yellow dandelion flowers dancing with the wind, the blue sky speckled with large white clouds. There was me and all of this.

We are all so different, yet we are also one of the same. Each of us woven into the current tapestry of the world, none of us a mistake, all connected, a single source of energy. There is something so profound in this moment of recognition. I repeat the same motion most days, I feel and celebrate the miracle of it, then sometimes forget as I start my day of activity. It’s a constant sway between knowing and detaching.

I can’t help but correlate this to how I’ve been feeling about the world these past seven weeks, since the 7th of October. It’s as if we’ve got stuck in the detachment and disconnection part.

As I watched young teenagers march through the streets of Melbourne on Thursday and Sydney on Friday, my eyes filled with tears and heat started to burn within me. Impressionable kids, shouting for a cause I can assure you none of them really understand. In actual fact the very thing they think they are saving one set of people from, they are impinging on another.

And although I’m talking about the war here, I don’t wish to talk about who is right or wrong or ask you to take sides. I just wish to talk about the implications of what is going on and how as women we can imagine something different.

When a child (or anyone for that matter) screams ‘From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free,’ they aren’t just chanting a catchy phrase, they are chanting for the extermination of an entire state and population of people. And to be blunt, if Israel goes, so does half of the entire worldwide Jewish population, considering half of them live in Israel. So despite what anyone tries to convince you of, there is no real difference between Zionism and Judaism. If Israel goes, so will the Jewish population. If that slogan is being chanted, it is as much anti-Jewish as it is anti-Israel.

How then can these protests be called peace protests?

In its truest definition, peace doesn’t take a side. Peace is not pro one thing and anti another. Just ask any mother trying to get her children to stop fighting. She doesn’t pick one over the other, she wants them to find a way to relate to one another.

How can mothers of children be encouraging them to protest? I’m at a loss.

What happens when those young marching students go back to their schools where Jewish kids may be next to them in class. How are they going to feel? I assure you not very good.

Peace is a form of wholeness when we all begin to see our connection, our interdependence, our oneness. Like I do in those morning walks of mine, I question where I fit in with that I witness around me.

Somehow we’ve got this binary view of oppressor and oppressed meshing its way into our definitions of peace.

There has to be one baddie and one goodie. Is this what Hollywood has left us with?

Or, maybe it’s our animal instincts gone wrong, the prey and the preyor dynamic living out in ways it never was intended to?

Or, really is it this mentality of war victor that has been around since the dawn of time, or the dawn of fighting, rather?

The way I like to see it, peace isn’t the polar opposite to war. Rather, it is a level up from war.

Perhaps the victor isn’t one of the sides but a notion that is beyond what we know as possible.

The questions I’m asking myself are big questions. And I truly feel this is the role we women need to take to create a new world. The patriarchal system has embedded war in our mindsets. We don’t dis-assemble it by picking a side.

We dis-assemble it by showing all sides and finding a way for them to work together.

This is harmony.

This is community.

This is the embodiment of love.

At first I was very conscious of creating harmony by not looking biased.

But then it hit me.

I’m not taking a side, I am a side. This realisation has been both disturbing and empowering.

It is not bias, it is reality. It is my part in the bigger plan. It is my embodiment of who I am, which is the essence of feminine expression.

So one of the biggest lessons in all of this for me has been to understand the inner version of my outer oneness daily nature experience. Just like all of us form the entirety of the world we exist in today, all the parts of me form my entirety, my fullness. And if one part of that is Jewish then that side must come out as part of my whole.

If I don’t own that in me, who is going to?

And with this comes a responsibility. How do I represent this side through me, so that we can become more whole again.

The key is in this subtle semantics of words: ‘I’m not taking a side, I am a side’. If I express myself fully and lovingly to the world, then I’m in perfect harmony. If I take a side based on wounded-ness, then I may be disturbing the balance.

I know, this can appear complicated at first, but I invite you to stay with it and see where it may apply in your own lives. When it lands, it really lands.

My intention of this piece is to get us all thinking, outside the box, beyond media narratives, out of the grasp of social media algorithms.

We’ve just entered Sagittarius season. The sign ruled by the lucky planet, Jupiter. But it’s also the sign of expansion.

How can we all expand, see the whole as well as the parts, but mostly see the interconnectedness of it all?

And how do we influence the interconnectedness.

If you’d like to comment, feel free to chime in. I’d love to hear your thoughts. And if you enjoyed this piece, I’d love you to share it with other women in your world.

With love and gemini full moon blessings for Monday.

Sharon