## Metadata - Author: [[Stephanie Kaza]] - Full Title: A Wild Love for the World - Category: #books ## Highlights - Attention to gratitude and beauty—to what, in the words of the Buddha, “gladdens the mind”—helps one unfreeze reactivity and attend to what is painful, based on a rhythm of moving back and forth between relaxed or joyous states and painful states. The trauma worker Peter Levine calls this “pendulation - the essential leadership quality of courageous agency—the power to act on behalf of the whole of life - For many years, the question I carried was: What is meaningful work on the way down? - And all of us who believe ourselves protected at a safe distance, on higher ground, will come to learn what Joanna has taught all along—the radical interrelatedness of all beings and all things. We will find that whatever safety—real or imagined—we thought would guard us from the physics of reality, will fall away and leave us naked. - Every society shapes its members into a personality structure congruent with the continuation of that society. In an eco-destructive society, this means we are forced to repress or marginalize the wrenching pain we feel over the wasting of the earth in order to be the cheerful consumers of it - No matter how difficult life on Earth becomes, we will only be able to withstand these times by sharing ourselves with one another. If nothing else, we can bear witness together and not suffer in isolation as the dominant culture prefers - “What is your relation to the land?” we asked Alcibiades. “We cannot speak of our relation to the land because we are the land. We are the land made human. They have tried to turn us into persons. But we have chosen to remain natural as part of the earth - We need the world to teach us who we are—not in an ontological sense but rather, as Macy says, “to guide us home to our vast true nature.” Because, like everything else, we are not limited to the labels we assign ourselves. We are not big, nor are we small; we are not all-important, nor are we insignificant. So why get bloated about our achievements or collapse into complacency? We are citizens of the great nature of infinite contingency and everything we do matters