Occupy Your Heart

Yesterday I went over to Occupy Wall Street again as I do just about everyday and I got inspired to take a few portraits of a day in Zuccotti Park. SO here they are. If you have not been to Zuccotti Park you need to know it is not filthy or dangerous, they are not rabid communists or greedy hippy students who want someone to pay their school loan or lazy unions wanting a free ride off the company. I am tired of people telling me they know what’s going on and then making outrageous statements and they haven’t even been over to participate.

This is an awesome, inspiring action by brave and committed people of all areas of our culture. I met a World War 11 veteran who is angry, a family from the suburbs who are motivated to hold signs, a teacher, mothers, fathers, union workers, artists, musicians and many more who have something to say about the inequity of our current system. This movement is important to all 100% of us, we are in this together.

In Zuccotti Park everyday there are spontaneous and organized discussions on what needs fixing. Everyday there is a meditation. Everyday the sacred space is refreshed and continually in use. Food is offered to all and clean up is very conscious with a grey water cleansing system complete with growing plants in it. The library has been growing all along from a small pile of books to the entire northeast corner of the park and there’s always someone browsing through. It has been amazing to watch the growth of this community over the last month or so. From 20-30 students with sleeping bags and backpacks to bedrolls on mattresses, to blue drop cloths draped in trees, until tents sprang up over every inch and now the military grade weather proof tents are moving in for the winter weather. The self organization of the community is quite amazing.

All ideas are on the table, this is the place of consciousness that is willing to shake up everything and rethink from the bottom up. That is why the movement has caught on worldwide and is showing up in various forms on all continents. On a white board in the park all discussions, events and meetings are listed for participants to join if they choose. There is always some kind of open discussion going on right in the middle of the park and many more sprinkled around the area in various public spaces from an atrium on Wall Street to Charlotte’s Place community center.

This week I learned that the intention is to gather the consensus of gripes and solutions over the winter from Occupy groups all over the country and then to meet in Philadelphia in March to aggregate everything into concise demands of congress. You may think this is slow and tedious, a very un-soundbite universe way of doing things. People say, “What do they want?” “Why don’t they have a leader?” and “This will never succeed.”  But the prevailing sentiment in Zuccotti Park is that the way we do things now is NOT working so let’s do it all a very different way. Maybe you’ve heard the quote, “A problem cannot be solved within the space in which it was created”? Who said that? If you know please tell me, I can’t remember. Anyway it’s true, there needs to be an alchemical shift in consciousness for a solution to any problem to present itself, so the Occupy Wall Street movement is making space for that shift in consciousness to present us all with some choices. If we are left up to the devises of the banking/corporate/government hydra we will have no choices but to hand over even more of our wealth to them. We see the media machine labeling this movement and I know for a fact that some media are trying to stir things up to get the sound bite they want. I watched a guy that I talked with last week who is very grounded as he was hounded by a camera man to say that he wanted violent revolution and was ready to kill another person. Don’t believe what you see about Occupy Wall Street on TV.

SO this IS another Heaven is Here post, this is to say that we do have choices, your vote counts, your sign on your chest counts, your voice counts. We are the 100% and we are the smartest ones in the room because we have common sense and we listen to our hearts and we take our time to allow wisdom to blossom into good action.