Prayer: Aligning my daily life with LOVE
This is a prayer and not metta (loving kindness). This prayer is asking for guidance on how to live everyday in a way that is aligned with LOVE in these times of polycrisis. This prayer is seeking a gentle turn towards a road that TRULY ensures the wellbeing of all beings. This prayer is about (re)kindling a desire to live in a way that doesn’t compartmentalize the suffering of other beings in a box: a box that we only look at once a week or month or year.
Calling in: I’m calling on the elements (Water, Air, Earth and Fire), wise and loving ancestors, the spirit world and the unseen deities to witness with us the totality of where we are. Ancestors, please guide us in acting in accordance with the entire truth of our polycrisis. Please help us evolve, please help us enter the portals towards new ways of living.. Deities, please open up a long path for us to walk upon so that we may act in accordance with the whole truth. Please help us not bury the ugliness of the world and our complicity in creating this world. Please help keep our hearts open!
Human lineages and culture Yes, It’s been over half a year, six months, 190 days of bombs picking off one family after another, more than half a year of seeing rows of tiny white body bags – that look like candies wrapped in white – lined up on the ground, half a year of the bones of children poking out under the rubble, also of a mutilated bodies hanging from windows as if from a hook; half a year of massacres, sniping, driving over the corpses with bulldozers, forced starvation and elimination of entire blood lines and cultures. One can go insane with despair watching this from a distance. How would people who are still alive in Gaza feel? Ancestors, Wise ones, please help me gently and lovingly keep the pain of Gazans in my heart.
Role of fossil fuels and artificial intelligence: This genocidal violence cannot be carried out without fossil fuels, first coal, followed by oil, then natural gas. Fossil fuels are needed for manufacturing and using weapons, and transporting soldiers, drones and airplanes that drop massive bombs. Because both militaries and economies are thoroughly dependent on them, the protection or acquisition of fossil fuels remains a cause of gory violence. Western forces can pulverise the living quarters of Palestine and other parts of the world by mobilizing the boundless capacity for destruction only fossil fuels can give. Other technologies we feel so proud to have in our lives support conquest of the poorest parts of the world. AI systems “Gospel”, ‘Lavender’ and ‘Where’s Daddy?’ mass produced kill lists and targets in Palestine. Ancestors, please help me see how I am involved in this pursuit for more energy, more power and more technology? Ancestors and deities, please gently guide us and whisper in my ears as we wonder how to be in “right relationship” with our economy, the technologies, the powers and these fossil fuels that keep waging violence in our names.
Ecocide meet genocide These have also been close to 190 days of seeing how destruction of Palestine is destruction of Earth itself. Genocide and ecocide have come together, once again. This isn’t the first time. People in Africa, Asia and Latin America have seen this before. Climate heating gas emissions during the first 60 days of the Israeli operations in Gaza equaled annual emissions of 30 least emitting countries. These emissions are similar to emissions from hundreds of coal power plants a year. Emissions to rebuild Gaza will be equal to emissions as a New Zealand as a country. The Israeli military is poisoning the seas, the rivers, the drinking water and harming a stunning amount of sea life. Sea life including wise and precious loggerhead turtles who travel for thousands of miles from one part of the Earth to another carrying deep love and wisdom. Tears of sea life are becoming one with waters of sea and rivers. Military is also killing dogs, cats, birds, bees and bugs that make us feel ah-so-alive in the Western world. Israeli military has killed soil and farmlands. Ancestors help me stay with this truth with equanimity. Please help me so that I do not turn away and please guide me see how I can live a life that is in accord with the truth that our thirst for dominance makes us kill precious beings. Shine upon me ways to live and thrive without violence. Wise ones, shine upon me those north stars which can light our way to disentangling ourselves from systems of harm.
Violence to acquire more fossil fuels: The genocide is also unfolding at a time when the state of Israel is more deeply integrated in the primitive accumulation of fossil capital than it has ever been. Five weeks after 7 October, when most of northern Gaza had been comfortably turned into rubble, Oil giants resumed operations at the gas fields, something which made Israel an oil and gas exporter for the first time in the history of the world! The Palestinians, on the other hand, have zero stake in that process: no platforms, no rigs, no pipelines, no companies listed on the London Stock Exchange. Ancestors, please open up a loving but resolute path, please unfurl and unwind a long road… for us where we can see how to live a life that is not dependent upon causing harm to other lives. May I find a way to melt (and grow) away from my dependency on these systems of harm.
Minerals, metals, animals and economy: Children in Congo die while finding precious minerals for us. World leaders wage wars to find more oil or natural gas for us. We enslave billions of animals every year to feed humans. In fact, some argue that it was steam-engine based warships (run on coal power in the 1840s) and the need for new markets in the MiddleEast that conceived the Zionist movement. Ancestors and deities, please lovingly show me each day a CLEAR path where my dependence on minerals, metals, fossil fuel based economy, an economy that thrives on selling more and more products, policing systems or slavery of plants, animals and humans across the world decreases. May I have a path…the long road towards liberation of all beings. May I have courage to not bury the inconvenient truths that make my life possible. May my life on Earth be truly of benefit to all beings.
Ancestors, elements, deities, May my actions be in accordance with these realities. May I be okay taking small, loving and yet resolute steps on the path of reindigenization you light for me. May it be so. May it be so. May it be so.
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