issue 18: Bridging the Rift

How can two distinctly differing sides find common ground? How do we maintain our own integrity when the world around us is falling apart? How do we cultivate peace and foster reconciliation with those who seem committed to a worldview of separation?

There is a quote famously attributed to Albert Einstein that says “The significant problems we have cannot be solved at the same level of thinking with which we created them.” Wise words from a wise man. Though it doesn't take a genius level IQ to know that we must be willing to see things from other angles and level up our view of any challenge we face to effectively work through them.

In this issue of the Community Garden, you're invited into a bird's eye view and shifting of perspective with the hope that many secure bridges across great rifts of separation—here and everywhere—may be built.

Through cross-cultural and interdisciplinary lenses of cinema, art, literature, philosophy, activism, neuroscience and, most importantly, lived experience, we consider the most central sources of hatred and condemnation that not only fuel division but can ultimately lead to the most unfathomable atrocities including human genocide, extinction of species and environmental devastation. We see also how a commitment to forgiveness—at the deepest level—can render us immune to the poisonous temptations of counter-judgement and resentment no matter how justified those positions may seem. Through examples and insights of humans just as common and flawed as the rest of us, we see how very possible it is to be liberated from our own self-inflicted oppression not by conquering anyone or anything outside of us, but by transcending our own limiting judgements that keep us locked in prisons of disconnect from those in the world around us.

Whether through adopting a “god‘s eye view” (as in the Persian Bug in the Rugstory) to more fully appreciate the beautifully intricate landscape of a challenging situation, or "circumambulating” an issue (a la Buddhist and Jungian wisdom) to experience it from different angles, seeing through the lens of others (even and especially our greatest ‘enemies’), peering more inward than outward to confront our own deeper sources of strife, or utilizing the power of compassionate curiosity as a way to “walk in another's shoes”... always available to us is some shift in perspective and new way of relating to someone or something we hold a limiting judgement about. This willingness to see things differently can provide the key to freedom from even the most deeply entrenched feelings of wrongness at every level: global, organizational, within our local communities and families, between humans and the natural world of which we play an integral part and, ultimately, within ourselves. The transformative magic of seeing things differently is not that the situation or those involved necessarily change, but that we change through a willingness to shift our viewpoint. And when we change, very often they change as well, and in the middle is where we meet.

Perhaps the greatest bits of wisdom to be gleaned from the examples on offer here is this: Change is an inside job.As our own internal rifts are addressed, real steps towards bridge-building with others may then be taken and, through this process, new and much greater adventures may be embarked upon.

The fare for such a journey?: A surrendering of all preconceived notions. Because… the more limiting assumptions we give up, the more wisdom we have to gain.

In Truth, Beauty and Goodness,

B. Monique

Find the full issue 18: Bridging the Rift journal post here.