Written by:
Victoria A. Brownworth
I’ve been thinking about the new year for months. The need for that clean slate, fresh-start impetus of a new year was really bearing down on me by the end of 2004. The new year holds such promise — 2004 was fraught with such turmoil that I am very glad to see it pass.
That fresh new year waits with all its promise. The calendar is barely started: The days are quite short, the nights long and the prospects for 2005 loom vast and oh-so-possible. This year I have a new kind of resolution.
By any standard — social, political, humanitarian, personal — 2004 was a dreadful year. The poor got poorer, the rich got richer, politicians got more arrogant and all over the world people were dying in senseless wars and genocidal conflicts and every day women and girls were being trafficked, raped, mutilated and even murdered because of their gender. It was a terrible, bloody, murderous year filled with images I would like to excise from my mind.
Someone asked me a few months back, in an interview, to define myself.
“Do you think of yourself as a journalist first, or a writer first?” the interviewer asked. I replied, “Neither. I think of myself first and foremost as an activist. That is what informs my work as a journalist and all of my writing.”
I have long used this space in that way‚ as a pulpit from which to preach my various activist sermons. Rather than a sermon, though, this column is a meditation.
When I was a small girl in Catholic school, the concept of meditation was proffered regularly as a form of religious mysticism, a way to go deeper into our faith, into our souls, into the place where God hid inside us. A meditation was an introspection into self in an effort to find the holiness within us all. In doing that, it was thought, we could become better people, more God-like, less Satan-like. If we looked deep enough within, we would look past pettiness, meanness, pride, anger, hostility and hate and see the best within us, the literal God within ourselves. We would see light and joy and giving and love and we would be able to bring those things forth and live our lives with those things predominating. We would tap into the divine and, in doing so, make the world — at least our little corner of it — a better place. Even though I learned it in Catholic school, the concept of meditation is something that anyone — even the atheists among us — can utilize.
And so this is my meditation on the new year. I want every woman (or man) who reads this to to reflect on all that is best in us and reject all that isn’t. I want you all to approach this new year in the spirit of your spirit, to divest yourself most especially of pettiness and hostility. Do this meditation every day; make it a part of your daily ritual like brushing and flossing and all the things that make you fresh and new each day. Take your divine, God-like, decent and loving self out into the world with you and with that fresh, clean, beautiful persona start to make the world over.
In 2004, evil took hold in many of us. Not just in Bush and Cheney and Putin and the Chechen terrorists in Beslan and the murderers in Sudan. Evil took hold in young Lynndie England when she put the leash on that Iraqi prisoner. Was she following orders? Perhaps. But she was also contravening the good that tells us not to do something to another human being that we would not want done to us. And she was far from alone.
We have clear choices as women: Nurture or destroy. Those who ask “What about all the gray areas in between?” miss the point. Our planet is dying, not just the air and the water and the animals, but ourselves, our very souls. In 2004, there was genocide in Sudan that mimicked, if not rivaled, that of Rwanda a decade earlier. There was grotesque torture at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay that rivaled that of Saddam Hussein. There was hatred: racial, ethnic, religious, gender-based. The president proposed a constitutional amendment to codify hatred against queers.
We must work to stop that hate. We can neutralize hate with love, fear with understanding, violence with peace. We can do these things. We can embrace the best in ourselves, instead of allowing the worst to prevail. The laws of physics determine that for every action there is an equal or greater reaction. A wave of understanding can overcome a wave of fear. It can.
That is my simple meditation for the new year. Some will scoff, but the chaos theory does in fact maintain that when the wind blows in Africa, the surf rises in Florida. We may not be able to end violence and brutality in the world, but we can damp it down. We can tap into as much good within us as possible to counter the evil that bombards us from every corner of the globe. We can reach out to those who are victimized. We can give knowing that we can replenish ourselves with hope. We can go out every day into the world with the idea of making it better. We can try to save this planet and ourselves. Make that your resolution: to do only good. Happy New Year!
|
