Reflections on the Equinox, Invasions, Happiness, Children, and a New Day....

An Equinox Moon-Pleiades conjunction photographed
by MarekNikodem of Szubin, Poland, in July 2009.

Today is the Vernal Equinox and International Happiness Day. Last night was the tenth anniversary of the Invasion of Iraq, and tonight is Nowruz Eve – and Dr. Riane Eisler speaks in Washington DC today!

I cannot let this confluence of events pass without comment, because the tenth anniversary of the Invasion of Iraq is slipping by with barely a note of recognition, much less any soul searching. The President made no direct remarks about it, but settled for a safe written statement about honoring those “who made the ultimate sacrifice”. There was little discussion at all in the media, except the usual cost/benefits analysis befitting corporate investors. At least, according to the New York Times, former Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld found time to tweet: “10 yrs ago began the long, difficult work of liberating 25 mil Iraqis. All who played a role in history deserve our respect & appreciation.”

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All? Does that include the more than 150,000 civilians killed, and more than 350,000 wounded; the uncounted orphans; the three to five million persons displaced directly as a result of the US led Invasion of Iraq – what role did they play in history? Did their lives not make the scales tremble, even just a little, in the great gambit for war revenues and resources?

www.veteransforpeace.org

This afternoon in Washington DC, Dr. Eisler will have made the case at a congressional briefing that it makes economic sense to fund early childhood education and care. How many briefings were held before the decision was made to start a war? A decision that has already consumed over eight hundred billion dollars (including eight billion “outright wasted,” according to the US Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction). An Invasion that will end up costing as much as six trillion dollars during the next four decades, due to the complex, life-long care that so many vets will require; that is, those who don’t wind up homeless, or dead of suicide. One vet kills him or herself every sixty-five minutes – twenty-two American veterans kill themselves every day.

What does all this have to do with Happiness? Everything... it has everything to do with happiness.... It has to do with the amazing disconnect that allows us to create so much suffering with so much of our own money, yes, our own money; yet spend so little to create true Happiness. From continent to continent, the cries for help continue. How can we hear them all; how can we respond to them all?

An Indigenous Leader’s Call to Protect Mother Earth

By doing what we are doing at the Center for Partnership Studies, and the Caring Economy Campaign, and through the Spiritual Alliance to End Intimate Violence: because all of these assaults on the body of Mother Earth, on other forms of Life; on our sons and daughters swept away by invasions; on the Mothers and Children of our Global Community – all these different, seemingly endless assaults are linked by one thread – one thought:
       That Domination is an acceptable way of Life.

It is Not. It Never has been. All the different habits of violence spring like hydra heads from one throat – the belief that the Way of The Dominator is the right way and the only way. 

It is Not. By exposing that Great Lie and shaking off the delusion that the Dominator Way is inevitable, we free ourselves from the Spell of Domestication (as the Great Toltec teachers put it). We no longer Agree to cooperate with the spreading of fear, the theft of resources, and colonization for cheap labor and resource removal. We seek out Ways in our own Lives in which we ourselves are still contributing to Dominator cruelty and destruction – through our investments, our purchasing choices, our actions or lack of actions. We advocate the systematic transformation of our Dominator cultures from within through Awareness, Choices, Alignment, Intent, Teaching – and most of all through Love.

UN Foundation

And that makes me Happy.
--And the biggest Holiday of all today: Malala went back to school!!

~~ Together We Walk the Partnership Way
Toward Happy, Resilient Communities ~~

~ Happy International Happiness Day, Happy Spring Equinox, Happy Nowruz/New Day! ~