Crasses et Voluptés

Those of us who live in rapidly changing urban environments in crisis also need to do constant restoration work in our personal and social worlds. By of ourselves in terms of hybridity, creolite, or mestizaje - as the inheritors of millions of years of diverse biological development and thou sands of years of diverse cultural creativity, we can draw on an immense reservoir of strategies, images, and rituals for reinterpreting and changing the structures in which we live.

Our interpretive paradigms need to be relevant to the present and adequate to the actual situation in which we find ourselves, in the world and in our inner lives. They cannot be perfect and eternal, because perfect and eternal schemata, especially in the realm of identity and culture, eventually become oppressive as conditions change. Every moment must have the possibility of being spontaneously felt and spoken anew, as images arise in a living way within the psyche. Sometimes this means feeling, naming, or expressing doubt, ambiguity, or pain. Sometimes it means challenging dominant institutions and old, established customs. It means daring to speak the truth as we see it, in our own voices, from our limited perspectives.

Every second of time is an opportunity to develop rituals of restoration and redemption for ourselves and our communities. Whatever suffering, violence, and oppression we find in the world can be remodeled if enough people can be inspired to become forces for creativity or change. The whole idea that evolution is driven by competition for survival can be modified to include an intentional self-organizing process in the heart of life connected with coevolution. Life can also be about the recreation of form and meaning, and the possibility of healing. As biological organisms, we originate in this process as well as contribute to it. To work at creating meaning and integra tion in our lives may be our destiny. Daring to live spontaneously at the edge of chaos may be our closest approach; and the discovery of synchronicity and spirit in our own experience may be the nearest we can come to a healing source of energy.

 Helene Shulman