We are waking up to what is. The depth of our racism blew me away, especially the part that was in me. My kids point it out when I used words with coded meaning. “Mom, saying it was a black man was not necessary for the story.” But saying no malice intended is no longer good enough. Most older people in this country are unaware racists, and denying it only confirms it. Acceptance that we are begins our healing.
Edith Andersen
Welcome to my blog of ruminations and essays.
An email from Amazon invites me to set up a book club using the Amazon platform. It got me thinking about the impact books could have on us. What if we treated our book club selection as a sacred reading to open communications with ourselves to better understand who we are?
Reading allows us to exit our microcosm and see the world through the eyes of those whose lives differ from our own. Isabel Wilkerson’s book, Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents, is one such opportunity.
The rising of consciousness, the next evolutionary step, moves us away from wars and hate towards awareness and compassion. There are no ten-step programs or best-selling books to teach us what we already know. It’s work we do on ourselves. While I don’t know any fully enlightened beings, I know people working to be a better version of themselves. I, too, seek to evolve into a better edition of Edith.
The hard work of doing is rarely the stuff of heroic biographies of leading men. It is the story of ordinary Americans who were finally pushed far enough that they put themselves on the line for this nation’s principles.
