I am pretty lucky. We live in an amazing moment of planetary transition and I am bouncing around the globe witnessing it.
I once wanted to be a journalist so that I could travel and witness the world like this. However, in fact my experience without a press pass is even more profound. Back in Canada I heared a CBC reporter talking about the 20th anniversary of the Berlin Wall. The poor guy only had a few days to stay in Berlin and research the story. I had to cringe at how superficial it was.
I had been there at the same time but had been emmersed in a web of East and West German friends, homes, culture, language. food and history and boy… Did I learn about the Berlin Wall and the old GDR! Perhaps more importantly, I got a feel for what is going on there now.
And now, I am in the Philipines. Today is historic elections are being decided. The photo is of me walking in a poitical march for Nicanor Perlas, the local Green party candidate for the president.
Alas, he is not going to win, but boy has he got an exciting movement behind him. All the really good musicians, artists and rappers gathered last night for his rally as well as lots of really interesting Filipinos. Also were a collection of international activists from Australia to Germany to Canada that are attracted so much to his ideas that they flew in to support. I had a chance to talk to many of them.
Nicanor’s campaign is part of a nameless global movement. It is part of the same shift that I have witnessed from Berlin to Paris to Manila. A shift that trascends bandaid political legislations to a great new enthusiasm for changing on the inside to see change on the outside.
That would be why Nicanor took the rally on a march through the city to visit the statues of one Filipino revolutionary after another. We did it in progressive historical order, with a speech at the foot of each monument. We heared the story of priests, a poet, and revolutionary. Nicanor showed how it is one person at a time makes change, how one person making a stand affects others around him and into the future. He showed how change starts first inside us, then moves into our lives and then the world outside and then generations unborn. Traveling beside him was a Visaya spiritual man. There was an implicit spirituality to his message and green/ecological emphasis. Politics is afterall your spirituality expressed.
I may not see any of these folks again, but just to be there was inspiring. They reminded me that this is happening all around the world. People are shifting! They might not be getting elected… Yet… But the movement the shift is growing. Nick and those who were there have their equivalents all around the world. It reminds me and inspires me of the importance of my work.
The election aftermath risks being a tumultous day. Today and tomorrow I will meditate for one hour to contribute my peace to keeping the peace in Manila tomorrow.
