January 1, 2017: New Year’s Day Reflections

My Personal Mission Now
These words (subject to some further reflection and polishing 🙂 came to me when I woke up this morning:

To join hearts and hands with others, in fierce urgency and unyielding determination, to plant the seeds of an emerging, non-violent, love-based social movement for transforming ourselves and transforming the world.

Imagery for the Present Moment
In 1919, with the intuition accessible to prophets and poets, William Butler Yeats wrote a poem that channeled imagery of what was coming. Seems relevant on this New Year’s Day 98 years later.

“The Second Coming” by William Butler Yeats

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

Take a Bad Year. Make It Better.
The New York Times lead editorial for December 30, 2016, offers a sober but inspiring way forward in the coming year:

… It was bad. But to avoid the poles of despair and denial, it would help to have a frame of mind, a perspective with which to consider the year gone by. And with it, a sober but bracing way to meet the headwinds and miseries that await in 2017. It could be this: a recognition of the power of unity, of drawing close, and of speaking out. Of the strength that solidarity wielded in 2016, over and over….
Complete editorial