A New Model

      Hi friends, Yanika here. Sorry to be kind of a downer with this quote, but I saw it on facebook today and couldn't help sharing, what with all the bullshit in the air around these awkwardly staged "conventions" happening in our  country right now. As inspiring as certain speeches can be, they're just fanning our short-lived, wool-over-the-eyes, all-of-a-sudden-we-care flames, which could go out as quickly as the "yes we can" excitement. No, we can't, not as long as we continue to repeat the same cycles. Why give in to more illusion and promises while war continues? Why are we so comfortable living with such hypocrisy? And if we're not comfortable, what are we doing to create more ease and flow?
      
      Or are we just burning away, spiraling either up or down... while no one can hear the fizz and crackle of our transformation, whether evolutionary or destructive, because there's just so much distraction from truth. Truth is, it's time to truly care, and truly change. Not just continue to play the facade and use the same vocabulary, the same recycled dreams, the same shallow systems of profit and gain, the wealth of the few riding the calloused backs of the many - as long as we're comfortable. As long as we can drink away the weekend and zombie away the work-week. And no, I didn't just return from Burning Man, with a psychedelically-inspired fire under my butt to wreak my own version of hypocritical didacticism... maybe I'm just typing all this out to channel the fire in my heart, which aches, for my Mother Earth, and the destruction we continue to unload on her (that is, on ourselves, as we are part of her. We comprise her, and she us). 

      I can only give my love. I can only give my frequency. That's not so little, when it is amplified by our collective spirit... we all want to survive, thrive, live in peace, exercise our compassion and creativity... 
At some point in our lives, we've all been advised to not carry "the weight of the world on our shoulders." I must work for  MY happiness, even while children die daily in Syria, or as I walk by the man sleeping on the sidewalk on my way to yoga class, right here in the great land of AMERICA to which my family migrated in search of freedom. But wait. Really? Why is this ok? 

      I DO carry the weight... sorry, but I DO. I don't "mean" to.  I "try" not to. But how can we live in denial? I remember to breathe, and let it go. I dissolve into Oneness and try to allow balance. My life, my family, friends, art, health, consciousness, etc - is absolute bliss, heaven on earth I'd even call it. And that is my contribution. My joy. It is a luxury to live in joy. It  should be a birthright. And then what? I don't want to "start a non-profit," join an "organization," engage in "lobbying," or create wow-look-at-me-ART which will "change" your mind. I don't want to soap-box more paragraphs like this one in cyberspace where a handful of people will nonchalantly read it (out of boredom or morbid curiosity) and move right along to the next thing. 

      I can't "change your mind," I'm trying to liberate, build, and enhance my own, so that maybe it can fathom something which we haven't quiet stumbled onto yet? What is the "new model?" When and how will we "think" of it? It takes a quantum leap. Solutions can be right in front of us, but we're turned away, focusing on loose threads sewn by tangled sources... 

                                      “You never change things by fighting the existing reality.
               To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.” 
                                                                - Richard Buckminster Fuller