Warmest good wishes for 2024. Let’s serve new opportunities with ‘radical resilience’,  as described in this edited version of today’s CAC reflection – see Center for Action and Contemplation

Radical Resilience  theme for 2024

Radical Resilience. Each of those words is important. The word “radical” means going to the root, going to the depths, going beneath the surface.… That’s what contemplation is: it’s paying deep attention to the deep dimensions of life. So, radical resilience means radical, deep attention to the deepest roots of resilience. Resilience is the capacity to withstand and recover from hardship or difficulty. It has to do with the ability to spring back into shape after being beaten down, knocked over, or bent over.

Florida is famous for hurricanes, and lovers of trees know that trees in Florida survive hurricanes by being flexible; being able to bend an amazing amount and spring back into shape. Another tree has a different strategy. The “gumbo-limbo” tree survives a hurricane because when the wind starts to blow, it just lets branches break off, knowing that if you keep the trunk solid and stable you can bounce back after the storm. The gumbo-limbo tree travels light through the storm, letting go of everything that’s not essential to focus on for life.

Radical Resilience relates to the work of the prophets as insiders who love a community enough to critique it in love. They don’t simply defend the community they love. They love it way too much for that. But neither do they attack it from the outside mercilessly and seize upon every imperfection to shame it and hurt it. They critique with love from the edge of the inside.…

If we’re going to help people take wise action and imagine a better future amid coming troubles, then we will have to help people find that better future within themselves so that they can live that better future out into the world. And that’s what we hope to do together in 2024. We know that we are in hard and dangerous times. We, as a global civilization, are living destructively with our planet. We are living dangerously and divisively with one another. And we’re living often delusionally within ourselves. This year, let’s seek to explore together radical resilience so we can become thermostats rather than thermometers in our world, setting the temperature, setting an example of contemplative depth and wisdom and love and peace—rather than just sinking into the fury and fear and denial and despair of so many of our times. 

Welcome all associates to a year of Radical Resilience.

 Peter