OLD, BLACK, WRONG COLOUR, LGBTQ+, DIFFERENT… US AND THEM
This blog brings a lot of issues together because they’re not really separate. Neither are we – you being colourless, ageless space right now for these words to appear in, and me being the same empty space for where they’re coming from. I may look like a gay old green Martian from the outside, but from the inside I’m just wide open space for the words, the computer, the hands typing, you and everything. You may look like a black, white, old young whatever from the outside, but right where you are there’s no coloured, wrinkled or smooth-skinned lump – just that very same clear space that’s room for everything.
We had a couple of our MYsocial “Together” Zoom meetings recently on the subjects of Pride and Black Lives Matter. In both of them people brought up loving your neighbour as yourself. As your self.
In both meetings people talked about all of us being the same at heart and living from the heart. One participant spoke about Pride in terms of being proud of himself and explained that this was his big, true, inclusive self: his background, his neighbourhood, his communities… That word inclusive came up a lot in both sessions. People talked about the terrible mistake of seeing the world as us and them creating all the problems. I used to have a favourite wee expression: “there’s nobody here but us me”.
So: old, black, wrong colour, LGBTQ+, different, us and them…
One of our people talked about the way to deal with all this being solidarity: living and acting together from the heart that we are all one. Liverpool FC captain Jordan Henderson recently said: “How do we look after each other? How do we all come together? That’s been a value of mine since I was a kid, and always will be. Looking after each other, solidarity between people, that’s the most important thing”.
I would add that everything else, all the prejudice and disrespect right up to hate, is just bad dreams created by fear because we think we’re separate – just dreams because we’re really and truly not, and we can choose to wake up.
