We Are the Story of the Soul of Humanity in this Time on Planet Earth
Waking up to the epic movie we are all making together
With my apology to you in one hand – for a whole month passing between posts – I offer you, in my other hand, a movie-playing-in-the-cinema-of-my-heart. I am guessing it might already be playing in your cinema, too. The theme is the one we’ve all been heading towards, pulled by an irresistible force, like rivers unhesitatingly running to the sea, from whence, of course, they come:
The movie’s theme:
The human race discovers that each of us is actively involved in making a collective movie of the story of the soul of humanity at this moment, here on planet Earth.
It begins like any other form of waking up: a lot of blinking, rubbing of eyes, wondering if we’re still dreaming…but now we are looking around at familiar settings and seeing that in fact they’re part of a soundstage, or a location shot, and there are boom mics dangling over our heads. We go to work, and what we thought was the office we work in, turns out to be the room where writers have gathered to brainstorm changes in the script. And here is where it gets interesting, and a bit surreal, or perhaps super-real: They – the writers, the brainstormers – turn out to be us, ordinary people, pens in hand, scribbling our inspirations, getting visions and sharing them, saying them out loud, as if tossing them into the air like thought-balloons.
One person’s idea lights another’s, like lighting candles from each other…“Yes, yes! And then…hold on…I can see it…what if the next scene is a global pause of solidarity…like France organized, a week after 9/11…remember? The whole country stopped – even the cars on the Champs-Élysées – still and silent, to hold love and sympathy for the US. Man…I was there, it was powerful, everyone’s heart was open, you could feel it…Well, this one could be all humanity pausing, maybe 5 minutes instead of 2…a lot can happen in 5 minutes!…to hold love and sympathy for the whole human family…everywhere…everyone…this time instead of for the US, for us!”
The story of the soul of humanity on Earth at this moment? No, no, no…it’s impossible to portray! But so is love! Everyone knows that, but has that ever prevented poets, painters, dancers, composers – anyone creating anything– from trying? We know it can’t be summed up or pinned down with any description, but isn’t the trying what moves us? Isn’t the trying what unites us, because, in our own ways, we’re all trying?
Of course it’s impossible, because every person has their own perspective, their own truth, and their own story. But since it’s a holographic universe, the whole is contained in every particle, and every one of us is equally the center of it. But honestly, isn’t that what we’re really interested in – doing the impossible? Haven’t we all arrived on our own at the exciting realization that “impossible” is just a ready-made negation concept that no longer has any validity, like the belief the world was flat, after Magellan and his crew sailed around it in the 16th century, (something the Greek philosopher Pythagoras had proven theoretically in the 6th century B.C…but hey, you can’t trust an idea that’s two thousand years old!)
This movie is being written and directed, acted, designed, composed for and edited by all of us, in collaboration. No one person should or even could write or direct this film. Nobody is the auteur. Nobody is king. Nobody is telling anyone what to say.
I know, I know, I know…it seems like a recipe for disaster, utter chaos, uncoordinated ideas tangled like vines hanging from the canopy in a rainforest. But just like the rainforest, humanity’s relationships with the world is an ecosystem, too, meticulously orchestrated by something we are only beginning to recognize as conscious, (indigenous cultures all do, and have names for it), that, for the time being, we still usually just call Nature.
After the disbelief comes understanding, and curiosity. We breathe deep, nod and smile as if to say, “Somehow I always knew this day would come.” We’re not sure how we got the job, or even if we’re qualified, but we’re on board, like a ship at sea on a mission, and there’s no getting off it now. We don’t even want to. There’s a curious sense of deja vu, like we’ve been here in a dream. It’s all happening before our very eyes, and we happily await sitting in the theater with our popcorn, watching it. We just never expected to find ourselves part of the making of it, and see our name roll by on the credits.
The story of the soul of humanity. Everyone is doing something different: learning how to use the camera, record sound, ask people to recreate a scene with you, let your emotions be seen and heard, shoot a scene to look like a dream. It all seems chaotic at first – people making their own decisions about how to participate – but the more we think about the theme, the more obvious it becomes that each person has to be doing what they are moved to do by their soul, something most of us have been too busy trying to earn a living to really listen to. As we practice tuning into it, we find, to our great relief and heart’s delight, that the soul always urges us to do the things that make us feel connected to it, working together as a team, the part of us living inside time, and the part of us living outside time, like the left and right hemispheres of the brain, the left and right hands playing a concerto on the piano, the left and right legs making it possible to run, to leap, to dance. Reclaiming our other half, we might say.
The whole situation is magical: state-of-the-art, cutting-edge technology so advanced, it functions almost as seamlessly as the instantaneous imagination-to-physical-action capability “nature” endows us with: the moment we want to run, our legs are moving! As we understand the world around us as the movie set, all we need to do is think of lines and someone’s saying them; visualize a landscape and it’s being painted on a backdrop, a location like it has been found, or someone receives a postcard of the place; realize a scene is feeling claustrophobic, and more windows and open doorways appear; see people under siege starving, imagine a sailboat with people delivering food, risking their lives for strangers who are our brothers and sisters in the human family, and it appears on the news! The story of the soul of humanity in this time.
Imagine a genocide going on, and 1500 people decide to rewrite the script, organizing a caravan to take the 18 months of millions of people demonstrating across the world a step further: zooming in from the aerial shots of throngs of people moving like rivers, to close-ups, face-to-face, entering the war zone to spread the urgent message of peace and unity of the human family. Some called this mission impossible, but supporters from 54 countries joined together to put it into action, traveling 1000 miles by bus and car from Tunis to Eastern Libya, where, sadly, the local authorities stopped them, and arrested dozens for this peaceful protest. Even though it could not reach Gaza, it achieved an important part of its mission: to break the spell of feeling helpless to stop the genocide, and inspire people around the world to believe they can do something.
Huwaida Arraf is an American activist and human rights lawyer who also spreads this message, that when our soul moves us to act, we need not feel helpless. She co-founded the International Solidarity Movement, a Palestinian-led organization using non-violent protests and international pressure to support Palestinians. She was one of the organizers of the Madleen voyage, the latest in the series of voyages she has helped organize since 2008, to challenge Israel’s blockade of Gaza.
That effort has now expanded into the Freedom Flotilla Coalition, a group of 15 international campaigns, who, Arraf says, are already planning the next voyage, hopefully with bigger boats, able to carry more aid. Arrested 24 times, her heart never loses its inspiration of peace.
She says, “As for what the Madleen achieved, I think it managed to inspire a lot of people into believing that we can do something. Sometimes we feel like, ‘What can I do? The situation is horrible and I am just one person,’ but this was 12 people, at sea, going to confront the Israeli military.”
“You know there was a saying I used to repeat all the time, from Gandhi, who said, ‘When the people lead, the leaders will follow,’ and hopefully the leaders will follow what global civil society is saying, so it is with that hope that we move forward.”
We are the global civil society. Yes, I love the sound of that! I love to claim it, to hug it, to hold onto it like a strong oak tree in a windstorm. And maybe that is the subtitle of the movie we are making:
The Story of the Soul of Humanity in this time on Planet Earth:
A Progress Report on our path to building a Global Civil Society
We are all the storytellers. And we are all the story. And, without a doubt, we are all contributing to what happens next, for the thoughts we think, and the emotions we feel, are the voice-over and musical score to the movie.
I find that sometimes, when the world appears to be ridiculously brutal, it helps to be ridiculously literal in envisioning the solution, and how we will get there. We sometimes describe movies as “made from the heart.” I now see why I wrote this piece, to arrive at the ridiculously literal visual image of a film camera in my heart, seeing everything with my heart’s eyes.
Just imagine: if we are making this movie together, and we go about our day with a movie camera rolling inside our hearts, it will surely be the best angle for seeing the story of the soul of humanity at this time on Planet Earth. In any given moment, the camera is aimed somewhere, and it is our choice where we aim it, and our choice how it is edited, finding the rhythm and balance between what breaks your heart, and what heals your heart with renewed faith in humanity.
It’s our movie to make, and our story to write, leaving us either in despair at the brutality of power-mongering governments, or in awe of the courage and compassion and resplendence of the individual human heart, who is always, in a million big and little ways, personal or political, creating reality by seeing it, in the imagination, where everything is born, and in the heart, where everything is healed.
I’ll reread this for sure…the analogy of a camera in every heart and as editor, the choice as to what falls to the cutting room floor.