The holiday is rooted in the late nineteenth century, when labor activists pushed for a federal holiday to recognize the many contributions workers have made to America's strength, prosperity, and well-being. -US Department of Labor
I’ve been reflecting on “the many contributions workers have and do make to the strength, prosperity and well-being” of our world. We have to think more globally these days, don’t we?
I’ve watched a “reality” tv show called “Undercover CEO” in which upper management would pretend to be fellow workers in the trenches with the people who make their companies function. Of course, it was set up by the tv producers to make a good story, but often they’d discover people who do their jobs and do them well. People who cared about what they did. People who gave a damn about their fellow workers and getting the job done. People who had lots of ideas about how it could work better because they were the ones attempting to meet company goals.
Unfortunately when we see companies whose goals are profit first, we see what happens then. We’ve seen the decimation of the middle class and of labor unions. Because egos and temptations for power and wealth trouble all humans, labor unions were not all that well-managed either. But to celebrate working people who just want to do a good job in decent working conditions, make their contributions and provide a good living for their families is important. Is Labor Day that? Or is it just a day off at the end of summer, a last chance to have a BBQ, beach day?
We find ourselves in times of radical change. It’s hard to know what to work for, isn’t it? Many of us are seeing through the status quo, the power brokers, the people who run things all for power, wealth: what makes me healthy and wealthy, how can I turn a profit in a debtors society?
How many stories have we heard in which the self-serving way of being ends you up like Scrooge? Yet that’s what the world and all its industrial complexes and institutionalized support systems of those complexes tell us: we’re individuals and have to fend for ourselves.
Nothing could be further from the truth. With every week that goes by something new is discovered about our interconnection and interdependence. Our sense of strength, prosperity and well-being comes as we “do unto others.”
It’s often a labor of love. It frequently involves some sacrifice we willingly offer — of time, energy, talent, and simply showing up to contribute.
Be the Change You Want to See in this World.
Be in the world but not of it.
These phrases jump to mind as we look at the world and wonder, what are we to do? It’s an inside/outside job, the two working together to bring about the changes we want in our lives, and in our world. It involves work and sacrifice for a greater cause. It’s not easy. It’s often heroic. Much of what we do goes unnoticed.
What works on our behalf without ceasing? Within our own beings, and as part of Life, the creative dynamical aliveness and Love of our true nature, of the Presence within us is ceaselessly active. Even when we sleep.
Life Is a Labor of Love.
We are This Life and Love in action in the world, even when we don’t know it. We are quite confused with these misconceptions about individuality and identity. That confusion occludes our awareness of what “doeth the works” day in and day out ceaselessly. That’s real good news, isn’t it?
So we dedicate time, energy to our inner work and we embody what we discover and bring it to life in how we live, interact, work. Part of our inner work is to tell the truth about our experience, to honor the intelligence of our systems when we’re informed by some kind of suffering in contrast with harmony, ease and delight.
How many of us go to jobs we hate because we feel we have to, have no choice? It’s a hard kind of prison to live in, isn’t it? While that may say something about us, it also says something about our society, our country and our world. We are intra-connected with it all, and our attitudes, feelings, thoughts and how we do what we do enter the field and have their effect on the workplace and living atmosphere of our world. It’s hard to trust and investigate our unhappiness and discover the way to change things, isn’t it? Yet it’s vitally important.
It’s where this conscious love comes in, the intelligent loving presence that indwells our being. Most of us are out of touch with it’s communications even though it’s speaking constantly — in one way or another.
We would like to have strength and health, prosperity, and well-being in our lives. Our strength wanes when we get up day after day to do something we don’t want to do. So does our health. If we define prosperity not in dollars and cents, but by the experience of ease and flow, harmony and grace, having and being enough to meet our lives well — we question the daily grind, don’t we?
Part of life these days involves confronting the monstrous within and without. We’d like to have peace and a sense of well-being at the end of the day, to sleep well — what is that worth to us and our loved ones? What are we willing to do for that?
What does Love want to do?
Yes, after sleeping in, resting up, vacationing, and relaxing, getting well, having our systems up and functioning again and being able to recover from being disconnected from so persistently we can ask. To move our lives in the direction of fulfillment; to offer something of value to our world requires strength. It calls forth from within us spiritual resources of courage, willingness, compassion, a sense of connection within and without and trusting the guiding principle at work throughout our systems and life itself.
We live in a materialist paradigm that puts profit ahead of people, planet and presence. The correct order is presence, people, planet and profit. We profit in so many ways when we reverse the order getting our priorities straight so Love can function freely in and through us. This Love can change not only our lives, but in many ways, reach out and make contact, touch the world in such a way as it all changes. Even a small incremental change that has the creative life impulse in it has a much bigger effect than we know. Nothing we experience is disconnected from the whole, even as real as our isolation seems.
After my big awakening to the transcendent levels of our consciousness, since I was still embodied on earth, I wanted to understand how this vast untrammeled beingness functioned in such a little person, a temporary speck of dust in the wind.
If I, of myself, am nobody, know nothing, have nothing, do nothing and all is at the mercy and benevolence of the higher power, how does that get lived? How do bills get paid? It involved living a mystical life without a monastery or particular religion. Staying true to what is revealed and realized took me through many trials and tribulations. I wouldn’t change a moment of it, though. All the fears faced, all the deep impressions, beliefs, aspects of personality developed to get through a childhood of extreme deprivation in many ways has led to incredible riches of spirit.
Being all the richer for it, I am incredibly wealthy to have found a life that is not mine, but is lived with meaningful purpose still undergoing radical change. To Be the Change one discovers what changes and what doesn’t.
It’s not an easy journey which is why I’ve been led to offer compassionate companionship to those engaging in the work of inner/outer transformation. My wealth is an inner life that is abundantly expressive and endlessly creative.
I’ve kept the amount needed to live low, though the world keeps raising the cost of living. What’s needed finds its way to me, and the challenges work out for the best at some point. It’s where my broken trust has been being restored. Over years of taking leaps of faith staying true to and following the highest truths that made themselves known to me, I’ve discovered how the Presence has been with me always, and provided for my needs in surprising ways.
That’s all actually not of my doing, though I may have believed it was. The willingness, the capability, the impeccability, the capacity to stay with my experience and engage deeply and essentially with whatever arises in my life have come from decades of investigation, spiritual psychological somatic work with a living appreciation for what Is. It’s a life dedicated and devoted to the truth and making it real in daily living.
It’s Love’s Labor at work, ceaselessly.
Without it, all that it is, I’ve got nothing. That’s a strange invitation, isn’t it? To invite you into a life of faith, to what our real hope Is, to Love. Every day, Love invites us to let it engage with our lives. We do have to unlearn how NOT to allow it to do so. That takes some real undoing! It’s an amazing wondrous adventurous way to live.
We need One another to stick with it because it runs contrary to the prevailing paradigm of this world. It’s something to release the conditioning that ends our being of this world, yet remaining involved deeply in it, in Life. Being This world, together, in conscious connection, something mysterious that’s in our midst is mighty and is in action, making a difference.
That same something is responding in you even now to what’s written here. By remaining aware, noticing our inner unfolding, and what is aware and cares for our inner experience responds orgainically and naturally. We don’t do it.
We are absolutely supported in our vision for a better life and better world, one we’d like to live in all the time. We are given the means with which to bring it forth in how we live, moment to moment. Love is so inclusively real, it meets us in our frustration, our pain, our sorrow, our unquenched thirst and hunger for something that satisfies.
Love works right through us whenever we engage with what we really care about selflessly. That doesn’t mean martyrdom, it means without the selfish orientation of the ego. Love continues to reveal when that’s at work because it’s selfishly oriented, caring more about getting than giving. It’s a fine line that requires the discernment of non-judging Presence. We all have unmet needs to tend to, and that gets well taken care of too. It’s not self love, self care in the way that’s often misunderstood. The Love that loves us ceaselessly is also at work revealing how we don’t love, as well as how we are so loved!
Our world and our lives need radical change of consciousness, a transformation of ourselves. Be ye transformed by the renewing of your mind scripture says. It’s true. How does the mind get renewed? Getting quiet and allowing Infinite Intelligence to gain access to our systems is a good start.
What to do when hating your job and have to go to work? When there’s a no to something, there’s a yes to something else. The deeper roots of what causes hate in us, discovering that, is also an act of love that is working to free Its conscious life from that toxic energy. We can’t force ourselves to love when we don’t — that’s not our truth. We can’t put a positive spin on the monstrous in us and in our lives and world. We can face it with the courage and compassion of an open heart.
In stillness, not moving in the face of having such a strong vitriolic feeling we stem the emotional tide. In really finding out more about the experience of hating something or someone, without judgement but just wanting to know more about the experience, discovering what generates it leads to our freedom.
When we truly understand what generates our unloving feelings they tend to dissipate. When we are caught in them, we need help. Help comes in unexpected ways, through different avenues, some are internal some are external. Our genuine ask gets response.
To Be the Change
To Be the Change requires the willingness to do whatever it takes. That’s what we see in people we admire, who are our heroes. Some days, we can’t come up with it, can we? In those times, doing whatever it takes means asking for help, it means humility, it means recognizing we are not isolated individuals who have to do it ourselves, in means drawing on an inner resource we don’t know we have. We have an inner reSource that is Omnipresent Omnipotent and Omniscient; that is working ceaselessly toward the fulfillment of sacred life as everything — including Human beings such as us.
We don’t know what Love’s / our right action is in any given moment until we arrive in that moment. Our presuppositions often prove to be inaccurate. It’s what makes life an explorative adventure.
We don’t know but have faith in the infinite indivisible invisible that is the very realm in which we live, move and have our beings. A true life of Love means to do whatever it takes to get in touch with the living Presence within that is everywhere. It means that when we don’t feel it, we take the leap of faith that we’ll be held, carried through it, and released from it. It sure doesn’t look like it at times, for periods of our lives. It takes real strength to get through that, and Presence provides us the means.
Being Love’s Labor Activists in Today’s World
Being Love’s labor activists in today’s world means we recognize Love in action in and through us, even at moments, as us. We allow the infinite guiding intelligence to care for us and prepare us for Love’s work in and through us. We set up our lives that it might be so, giving ourselves time to be with our experiences, to learn a variety of skillful means with which to live as true nature intended for us, in conscious union with who/what we are.
When we are perceiving that what is IS everything, everyone regardless of their convincing distressed disguises even as monsters, we find Love helps us find a way. The way is to Love, to let Love love inclusive of all, Omnipresent.
WE are the Love we are waiting for.