Ponderings exploring Bright Shining World’s ideas and intent

[TRANSCRIPT] We’re entering a period of time where we’re really going to have to fight for our planet, and if we’re fighting, we can’t lose touch with what we’re fighting for, we can’t just become battling battlers full of anger and rage. So Bright Shining World is a little bit about remembering what we’re fighting for. Remembering that inside of each of us is something so astonishing, so incredible, so beautiful, and also so ordinary. So ordinary that we forget it. Light is our natural state. Beauty is our natural state. Wonder is our natural state. Our inner universe is astonishing, but again, it’s also ordinary. So we can put it aside too easily. Sometimes we think that winning the war for the climate or against political people we don’t like, we think it feels like some kind of transformative, transcendent, incredible moment…ah, I have reached the mountaintop! but it’s really just about coming back to who we are. To who we are. Because who we are is magnificent. Ordinary and magnificent. Ordinary magnificence, let’s call it that. Ordinary magnificence. We lose touch with that. But if you look at toddlers and babies, and children they know it, they live in it. They live in it all the time. They go outside and they see the trees, they feel fresh air, they see the sky – they think, ahh, what miracles just for me. What magnificence just for me. We lose touch with that state. And in the fight for the world it’s important to hold onto that state, to remember it. Because when we don’t, we’re out there and we’re doing the right thing but we’re getting warn down, getting lonely, getting to feel it’s hopeless, it’s too late, the tipping points have tipped. But what really makes it feel hopeless is being out of touch with our ordinary magnificence. So in a way this book is an attempt to reintroduce that.

[TRANSCRIPT] All the pollution and environmental destruction and political degradation, government becoming an instrument of oppression and vindictiveness and not of support and honoring…what happens is we get worn down and the environment gets worn down, the trees, the air, our relationships with others, all those get worn down. And all those happen outside of us but what we have to recognize is that it happens inside too. That outer devestations have inner ones, corresponding inner ones, and our inner sky is as big and as important and as life giving and as essential as the outer one. Inside we have planets and solar systems and galaxies, we contain all the colors, all the species, the smells, all the gradients of light on the horizon, they’re all inside of us. But when we lose touch with that the destruction of the outer world destroys our inner world. It really does. Our inner world gets beaten up and we feel gray, we feel depressed, we feel hopeless, we feel angry, we feel lost. Thankfully, just as we can heal and reclaim the outer world by paying attention to it by giving it the care and love and expertise it needs, and really by just showing up for it, just as we can heal the outer world like that we can heal the inner world the same way by showing up for it with care and love and just showing up. And so that’s a theme I wanted to share in this book. My life I spent many years traveling around the world looking for something outside to heal what was inside and I didn’t realize until later what I was doing, I didn’t realize until much later how impossible it was. You can’t heal the inside by fixing the outside. We heal the inside by consciously holding it with tenderness. By consciously opening up to our wounds and our fear and our desires and our lonelinesses. We consciously open to them. And at the start in might feel like opening to an infinite sea of loss but it’s not. And the more we hold our wounds and give them the space to share their story, the more they heal. And the more we are healed inside the more we can bring that forward to the world outside.