quotations on awakening at the end of this article
My other half sent me a $25 credit I can use to loan someone as part of a microfinancing approach (a birthday present.) This is through kiva.org an incredible manifestation of the idea that Muhammad Yunus started.
As I signed up as a site member, the form asked me for my occupation. In the past, I've answered with a number of responses-- executive or entrepreneur or inventor for my small business futurehealth.org, counselor, from when I worked in the mental health field, or biofeedback practitioner, from when I used to work in that field as a practitioner, writer when I've functioned as a freelancer in the past or editor or journalist, more recently.
But today, I thought about what I've been across many of those "occupations, and I typed in "Awakener" because I realized that through most of my life, my work has been aimed at waking people up.
It feels so good to have founded a community that is filled with fellow people who share the same occupation.
Now, the dictionary definition of awakener as someone who awakens. That is not what I am talking about. Well, actually, my concept of the occupation of awakener is one in which we do the work that produces the dictionary definition-- people who wake up.
Do you volunteer for an NGO, non-profit, grass roots politics? Do you write about issues that people need to know about? Are you an educator, therapist, marketer, minister or coach? Try it on for size. See if or how it changes your approach to what you do and how you see yourself. It's just started to do its work on me.
I read this to my brother-in-law. He commented that it's not an occupation you'll see listed-- that I'll have to check off other.
Yet there are literally millions of people-- many millions, maybe billions-- who are on the awakener's path.
Seven years ago, I had an insight and realized that STORY is the biggest business in the world, except perhaps, for transportation and the energy sources involved, an that the world of story involvies movies, books, newspapers, television, cable, magazines, lawyers, politicians, ministers, corporate consultants, marketers, knowledge manager, therapists, scientists-- all creating narratives-- as well as storytellers, screenwriters, novelists,mythologists, linguists, philosophers, critics and poets.
I discovered, through conversations with leaders in those fields, that there had never been a conference that brought together people from all these fields. So I organized the first one and it was one of those blind wise men and the elephant moments, where people discovered they were all looking at different parts and aspects of story.
Blind Wise Men and Elephant Images by Rob Kall
My point is that sometimes we humans do some things, a real lot of us do them and we don't see, don't realize that there are millions of us doing the same thing and finally we do wake up. WAKE UP. And usually someone helps us to wake up. And that's what this is about. If the US and the world are to survive the literal war against humanity that corporatism is perpetrating in the name of profits, we must wake up-- first ourselves and then those around us.
In his visionary book, Blessed Unrest, Paul Hawkens describes how there are hundreds of thousands of people engaging in a bottom-up revolution that IS waking huge masses of people up.
There are millions of bloggers who are speaking truth to power, waking people up. Arianna Huffington, Markos Moulitsas Zuniga (Dailykos) Josh Marshall (talkingpointsmemo.com) are all opening up venues where people who practice the occupation of awakener can do their good work. And there are all those professions and lines of work I listed above.
