Facing This Moment Together
#11 in Making Sense of the Chaos
There are moments in history when the ground shifts beneath your feet. What once passed for normal gives way to uncertainty. We try to keep going as before, but something within us knows: the old story is no longer viable.
This is one of those moments.
When I began writing this Making Sense of the Chaos series, my intention was not to dwell on catastrophe or amplify despair. It was to help us sense the deeper awakening moving through the turbulence. To recognize that what looks like collapse from one angle may be initiation from another. That the forces tearing at the seams of our world may also be revealing, with brutal honesty, what was never sustainable to begin with.
This does not excuse the violence. It does not soften the suffering. It simply situates it within a larger story of humanity’s initiation: our collective reckoning from a system organized around the love of power, and the necessary emergence of a civilization rooted in the power of love.
We are living inside that threshold now.
The End of Normal
The normal we knew is gone.
The normal where we can go about our business and think these atrocities are happening elsewhere is gone. The normal where you can expect to safely run to the store, drop your kids off at school, or hang out in parking lots looking for work is gone.
The recent actions of I.C.E.—including the killing of innocent U.S. citizens and the ongoing deaths of immigrants in detention—have stripped away whatever remained of the illusion that our system is benign. Masked men enforcing fear with weapons is not an aberration. It is the expression of a dominator culture built on control, hierarchy, and dehumanization.
For many, this reality is nothing new. People of color have long lived with the terror of a routine traffic stop. Entire regions of the world have known this oppression through war, occupation, and displacement.
What is new is that those who once felt protected by distance and privilege are now feeling the tremor reach their own streets
What This Moment Is Asking
So the question becomes: how do we meet this moment without hardening, collapsing, or turning away? What does it mean to live consciously when the old order is clearly failing? How do we serve as both hospice workers for a dying system and midwives for what is being born?
The old story is indeed old, but what is new is our ability to organize and respond.
There were no cell phones in Nazi Germany. There was no internet. Citizen organization was next to impossible. Our governments went to war, millions of people died, and we hoped for the best.
We see this new story unfolding in Minneapolis—neighbors documenting reality as it unfolds, feeding, informing, and protecting one another. The polished lies of authority are exposed as the vulnerable on-the-scene videos of anguished people surface and spread.
The old façade is crumbling and the underlying unity is rising strong in the tens of thousands of people marching in the bitter cold, singing the songs of freedom, diversity, and justice for all.
Pay Attention
It isn’t pleasant to follow the news, but we must stay informed. It’s not every generation that gets a ringside seat to such a profound a transformation, let alone become a part of it.
Domination depends on numbness, denial, and resignation. Awareness—clear, sober, emotionally honest—is a form of resistance.
To face this crisis means allowing ourselves to feel the anger, grief, and fear without being consumed by them. Violence and atrocity must be named, called out, and held accountable. When met consciously, our emotions become energy for change.
And while it may be hard to sort out truth from fiction, do your homework. Compare the polished speeches of politicians to the anguished cries of those reporting from the ground on Instagram and Facebook, and it becomes obvious what is really going on.
Find Your Community
Isolation weakens us. Connection strengthens us.
Reach across lines that were meant to keep us apart. Make sure immigrants in your community know their rights, their resources, and their allies. Tend to your relationships.
The emerging paradigm organizes through connection, reciprocity, and care. Through listening. Through presence. Through the slow weaving of human bonds strong enough to hold fear without amplifying it.
Weave a field of heart-centered actions.
Plan Ahead
Love is not passive, nor is it naive.
Talk with your neighbors. Devise strategies. If I.C.E. comes to your town, what happens next? Who alerts whom? How do you protect the most vulnerable? How do you respond without panic, but with clear and grounded resolve?
Your tax dollars are a moral statement. Call your Senators who are voting this week on whether to keep funding I.CE.
Congressional Switchboard: (202) 224-3121
Listen for What Wants to Be Born
In times like these, spiritual practice is not an escape—it is the crucible of transformation.
Return to whatever helps you listen more deeply: meditation, prayer, time in nature, silence. Ask how you are being asked to serve. Guidance rarely shouts. It waits for our attention.
We are becoming something we have never been before. If you reach forward with your awareness, you can feel it—the pull of a future that holds a promise of possibility. This future lives in you. It moves through you. It depends on your willingness to listen deeply and respond.
I’ll close with the words of Barbara Marx Hubbard:
“Perhaps we are coming to the end of this world—the end of civilization as we have known it, the end of separate self-consciousness. And this is good. We are being instructed by failure: the failure of war to win, the failure of consumerism to satisfy, the rising seas responding to our destruction of nature. These evolutionary drivers may be the impulse that lifts our species to a higher order—or leads us to self-destruction.”
Which will it be?