Ruth Hawe's Blog, page 4

The purpose of suffering

My take on suffering has been that offering it up in the trust that thereby I might alleviate the pain of another, both gives it meaning and purpose, and eases it. I feel that we have been gifted with the opportunity to experience the absolute extremes of emotion during our short time here on earth. It isn’t about judgment as such, it seems more about discovering our inner strength and core values. It has been during my times of greatest grief and loss that I have drawn closer to the human collective family than my usual isolated aloof delusion of separateness normally allows. It has been during times of the intense suffering of another that my capacity to face darkness has intensified, on their behalf. Ultimately in our go(o)dness we are singular, and shared sorrow/joy accentuates this knowing.

Earth is our breath, sanctified, being breathed back through us, until we come to see all as self/oneness (this last sentence is the fruit of my 30 years of Buddhist practise, the rest is Catholic study)

The Difference

Just as being Vegan makes all the difference to those individual animals we don’t enslave, maim or murder, it also makes a difference to the countless nameless Other beings still being born into the hideous system. I honestly believe that our love, care and passion to free them does help them in their seemingly inescapable suffering and the total oppression of their ruined lives. Those non-actively Vegan people will not be capable of understanding this of course, any more than they are able to experience the wonders and delights of nature in the loving, gentle, non harming way that we do. No this is not an elitest statement, just the hint of an expression of the spiritual side of my outreach that is inaccessible to those not practising the fullness of a Vegan lifeway.

Vegantopia is the Ark, and each nameless beautiful being we love unconditionally has been saved in it, every single precious one safe and in joy because we cared enough to cry for them inside, and to cry out for them too,. They love us for caring, I can feel the warmth of their sweet breath. And every darling bird shall lift us aloft on that terrible reckoning day to come, when all people will be confronted with what they allowed to happen. So be not afraid, be the hope that sustains life, be the joy that connects us. We are almost there even now in 3D : the waning paradigm, and we are already there in reality and truth.

TEA!

As a nation we are both in love with and addicted to tea, and it plays a central role in our social and soothing activities. Tea is already being successfully grown in the UK, in Cornwall I think, so my request and suggestion would be for us to embark on a major tea plant in areas considered capable of growing it. Tea cannot be overstated, (though we could try growing coffee too because that’s a useful and important item we have fondly adopted). To embark on a measure of sovereignty around our tea supply would be stupendous, so please include this in your deliberations. Much work has been done in developing types of plants for varying climates eg drought resistance, and UK could be pioneers of western tea growing.

Thank you for your consideration of my idea, and for the opportunity to express it.

Here’s my blog should you be interested in reading more of my thoughts:

https://ruthhawe.wordpress.com/

N.B This was my submission to the Food Council who sent out a nationwide request for people’s ideas around our food and agriculture policies, particularly in view of enforced Brexit changes. They are accepting ideas until October 2019 if you feel affinity to contact them. I already submitted another one to them (shhhh!) about ending our (ab)use of animals for food, and transferring agricultural subsidies away from meat and dairy to plant growing and rewilding.

http://www.nationalfoodstrategy.org

Letter from my daughter

“If you are ever in doubt, read this. This is how your daughter really thinks of you. And regardless of how life goes, when it comes down to it the most important thing in life is the love in it, not material wealth or social standing or whatever people think it really represents.

To whomever it may concern,

My Mum’s heart is so big that it can house the entire world. It is limited by neither space nor time. She has love not just for all the life on our planet Earth but on other planets too. She has love and kindness towards aliens she doesn’t even know definitely exist. And Gods she doesn’t even know exist. And not just life right now but life that hasn’t even been born yet. She cares as much about future generations as she does about current ones and she still feels the joys and pains of ones past too. She has been my greatest teacher of love, kindness, compassion, empathy, generosity, altruism.

My Mum is also the most beautiful person I know. She is beautiful on the outside of course. But the inner beauty really shines through – you can see it in facial expressions, hear it in song and in a broad range of expressive noises! Her expression is creative, both in words, in art, dance and in tone.

My Mum thinks outside the box. She can appear symultaneously so insane that I cannot help but laugh so hard that I ache from it (knowing she is belly laughing right along with me) and at the same time the most sane person I know. She helps me come to terms with the funny side of my own insanity and that of others.

My Mum is SO BRAVE. I mean really brave. She cannot help but speak the truth no matter what. She knows suffering. She is not afraid of suffering. She dares to tread where most others will not. Dares to say what most others will not. Dares to look straight into terror where others will not. Dares to look towards the light where others will not. Dares to dream. Dares to explore. Dares to question. Dares to challenge. And because of this she lives with vibrancy that others cannot even imagine.

My Mum takes things seriously. Like what needs to be addressed in the world. That might be big serious things like animal liberation or human rights or it might be the need for humour and perspective. She isn’t just a big thinker. She can get that ‘life’ shit done when other people are faffing around not knowing how to deal with it. If you’ve got a splinter you want her there to get it out and do a good job. If you’ve got a dog or a horse or a human about to give birth you want her there to make sure it all goes ok. If you’re having an emotional breakdown you want her there! If you’ve got a big salad and you don’t know what to do with it, Mum will sort that out too. I love having her around. Things are just more fun if she is there to share experiences with.

Mum is a great cook, writer, singer, dancer, artist, speaker, cyclist, yogi, healer, poet, activist, environmentalist, thinker, visionary, listener … well you get the idea.. just a great Mum really.

Yours sincerely,

Iona Rowan”

True Colours

For me, observing the vegan movement with the benefit of vast longevity (47 years a vegan activist and stopped counting!) it is the slow unfurling of people’s hearts and minds, at first selectively out of fear at the enormity of the horror, and then excluding others out of rage at its continued acceleration because they could be doing more. There are direct parralels between this and the incited splits and blaming that society is goaded to keep false barriers up, keeping us in disconnect, and into shaming and blaming one another = the age old divide and conquer tricksterism which has suppressed human awakenment and controlled behaviours for ever. Seeing through this lie is all we truly need, with the willingness to allow the love which is our true nature to dominate our small conditioned minds.

We are getting there; I believe and hold the vision on behalf of those still partially in the delusion.

Being a peace ambassador in a world at war within itself.

Unravelling my part in the collective shadow and loving it into light.

Being aware of the myriad forms of projection our egos indulge in to stay alive. Owning the addicted habits and gently nursing self back to original wholeness. Reclaiming original innocence,

perfect trust,

and total honesty.

Very soon humanity shall have no choice but to show our true colours, because to some of us they are already clearly visible.

a definition of christianity

I read this definition : “Christianity is hungry people telling other hungry people where the food is.”

why did I bother to share this?

Because like so many platitudes repeated by those lacking originality it doesn’t even make sense! It attempts to imply the sharing of the means of sustenance between seekers, I get that. It appears to offer some means of satiation in a starving world. But the notion of a prescription written millennia ago, or a recipe handed down and altered inter-generationally, is what I find challenging. Demeaning even. Forgive me Jesus, you know I’m not referring to You here, but to those hoardes of conditioned followers of some form of Your Word. Is it arrogance which leads me to sense that God prefers those who think for themselves?

2020 vision

We thought it was 2012: the big breakthrough year, and were disappointed when it didn’t happen. Last night I had a realisation that it is going to be 2020 which is the year of real transformation.Yet this long awaited mega-change couldn’t be happening without the groundwork laid by the 2012 energy and activity. Of course the most important message of the passage of time-based elements is not so much the fleeting inexorability of nature, but that which underpins it. Measurement was the start of the human compression of events into arbitrary packets. Our obsession with naming and recording, dividing snd delineating everything for the purpose of understanding in the hope of controlling it IS temporality.

I have been asked what past era I would most like to live in, and it has always been the first (recorded) age of enlightenment, the magical medieval days of the simplicity and cleanness of pre-chemical contamination. The purity of places as yet untainted by human interference. A time when science and alchemy were bedfellows and the pursuit of knowledge was for its own sake, not for profit or exploitation. A space with room for angels and endless exploration, a cornucopia of experience, wonderment and discovery. A lifelong freshness like continuing childhood playfulness and innocence. People today like to consider themselves at a level of sophistication beyond those days, but the price has been lost creativity and imagination as we wait for others to invent the latest gadget, superficial amusement or labour saving technology.

Of course the new age of enlightenment, the dawn of awareness, the birthing of empathic wokeness will be more of spirit than materiality. We have done materiality to death.

Calamitous fall from grace

Many decades past was the time when humans had to rely on the parcelled out remains of dead animals for sustenance.

Evolve into the present, please, awaken into the knowing that this is wrong on so many levels.

Why do you want to eat food that has someone’s lifeblood running out of it? That is so ghastly and disgusting.

Act like the “help and not harm” gentle beings humans were designed to be.

What calamitous fall from grace plunged us into this predatory nightmare where we confine, commodify and kill each other in the same way we do to innocent sentient creatures?

Ideals and actions

When I was younger I was not more idealistic than I am now, I was just more hopeful of finding creative or psycho-spiritual or scientific solutions to the overwhelming problems it seemed to be my duty to expose myself to. Tearing away a peeling piece of wallpaper here, peeling back a puckered bandaid there. My empathy for the suffering around me enticed me down the medico-healer route. Slowly it became obvious that far from healing the wounds of the world I was in effect shoring up the weary warriors to enable them to continue being willing participants in the toxic destruction we were collectively duped into supporting.

Then what? Work on self, transform self not through egoism but because in that way, by becoming more aware of my involvement in the systems of corruption, the possibility of transcending them was offered. Rather than efforting to dismantle oppressions one individual or situation at a time, then realising the threads which tie the whole heaving weighty armour together, the notion of simply replacing the garment with a higher order of magnitude arose. A shirt of light no less. No need to discard and burn the pestilential shroud, but allow it to fall away like a spent rocket which fuelled us only so far.

That humanity is poised on the brink of a momentous shift is not merely my understanding of course; far sharper minds than mine have foretold this. My intuition says that struggling to awaken others from the denial, dragging them through the birthing tunnel of fear, has only been partially purposeful. It is both too blunt and too ponderous a process. Instead of attempting to inspire a willingness to embrace change, with encouraging noises like parents bombarding babies with noises so they speak their language of limitation, perhaps if I instead return to my own story?

The mind sky is murking up, the light is hiding, the birds have fallen asleep. My usual solace of song has been silenced as if a cosmic blast has paralysed sensibility. These are all personally portentous pointers. Taking my body up to the sea, flying in opacity, trusting in lucidity, opening to eternity.

This i does not know who will return from the journey, but unless words fail me a voice will share it hereafter.

Ketosis

Still straddling two dimensions and stretched to snapping point? It’s time to let go of the old limitations – including that of time. Whatever the caterpillar of Youness spent its energy doing must now switch over to the Butterfly of Being mode. I have been reading about the keto diet and how it requires the body to switch from carb-centric to fat-centric fuel for energy and cogitation. This strikes me as similar to prising our fearfingers off solidity and instead opening hands and heart to what is emerging as a simultaneity of becomingness. Otherwise we are frantically pressing our foot on both accelerator and brake and wondering why we’re spinning in vertiginous nausea. The key word here has to be Trust, doesn’t it. We have to trust the process, the wisdom, the plan which delivered us thus far. Even if it means abandoning belief that there ever was a plan = embracing chaos if you will. How can you ever retrieve all aspects of your wholeness without risking the releasing of part of the construct required to deliver us to this point?

Imagine one of those aquatic larvae which built a cave from meticulously gathered twigs and pebbles in order to feel safe moving along the sludgy bottom in search of food. He or she cannot fly up to the sky from that rigid encasement. If you’re thinking “oh its easy/natural/instinctive for them” then know that it is also easy, natural and instinctive for us too. Right here and now. Because our whole existence(s) has been preparation for this. Maybe if we stop imagining its something momentous and therefore scary, and instead embrace it as every bit as essential a transition as replacing baby teeth with adult ones, learning how to balance hormonal changes of adolescence or menopause, or yes, yielding to death with full consciousness.