So comes the Spring.
After a winter that seemed to have been 8 months long, the snow is melted, the buds are peeking out of their barked slumbers, the sun bathes in the blue sky, and our heavy coats are finally being hung in the back of the closet.
It's a time of renewal. Of rebirth. Of growth. Of change.
With the new year, we all look ahead at the year with wishful thinking and thin promises about how we're going to make this year better, or make us better. But it is with the Spring that we truly begin to enact the smallest of these changes.
This winter, I heard the phrase that we are all either activists, or inactivists.
And it has hit home more than ever.
Over the past 7 years or so, I have very consciously been finding ways to perform and lend my music to causes that I feel strongly about. Music is my weapon. It is my soothing balm. It is my smile. It is who I am, and how I am best equiped to help, to make a difference.
But I'm beginning to think that alone is not enough.
Which is why i started the Love Initiative.
Its still to get its feet under it, but it will. It's got a big task ahead of it: to foster and spread kindness and Love throuhgout our communities. And it's a task that will take more than one to achieve.
"I am just one man who needs you here/ I crawl out from my shelter cuz I need you here."
Love.
Love.
As in "love your neighbors as yourself."
As in "treat others as you'd like to be treated."
As in "This is my commandment, that ye love one another. [Jesus, In John 15:12]"
As in "unity."
I've been asked, and I've asked myself "what can i do?" What can we do as individuals angered by the lack of Love and kindess we see towards our fellow brothers and sisters of all species? What can i do to change this? To stop it?
I don't know.
Yelling at and hitting people over the head with the images of cruelty will not accomplish the goal. No ill words will achieve anything other than ill. No lasting revolution has or will come about by fore - be it words or actions.
I don't know.
Honestly.
But Im gonna die trying to light the night sky.
I know the change I want to see, and I am trying to become it.
Ahimsa.
All life is sacred.
Unity.
And if I can do it, so can you.
And you can do it.
And if you can do it, then we are not alone.
From a certain point onward there is no longer any turning back. That is the point that must be reached. - Franz Kafka.
I am stepping across that line...
