The Spiritual Warrior - How Can We Really Prepare?

Bitumen.  A dirty word for a dirty business. 

It's been announced recently that the "Northern Gateway" plan to ship Alberta tar sands via pipeline through the north has been aborted.  While this is good news it also means the field is narrowing for the bitumen bastards to concentrate on the Kinder-Morgan pipeline twinning that would see tarsands piped to Burnaby and loaded onto tankers bound for China.  The Salish Sea increasingly becomes the target for every potential of spills and leaks.

I can feel it coming.  My bones are dry, my skin creeping and my mind full of scenarios ranging from peaceful protest to out and out action.  No wonder, we flow with the ocean tides and are married to the great salty way through our very design.  

How can I prepare to be a spiritual warrior?  I look at the tenets of healing: kindness, compassion, understanding, truth and  knowledge.  Where is the separation point between passion and compassion?  Is there one?  And does the big picture of kindness extend to willingly laying oneself down on Mother Earth to blockade a pipeline?  To whom are we being kind to then....Mother Earth Herself I suppose and to our present and 7th generation.

How far am I willing to go?  I don't have much to lose.  I'm dirt poor, have no stake in 'working for the man' nor do I rely on 'the man'.  A jail cell wouldn't be THAT much smaller than my government housing.  Really, I only have things to gain through active protest.  I'm in a good place to be on the frontlines, so to speak....not that i consider the frontlines to be the be all and end all for it's not, in circle, the ones behind the scene baking banock or posting on Facebook are every bit as important and you can't have one without the other.  

But how do I apply spirituality to it all?

As far as I can figure out, spirituality in these cases of fighting the 1% is knowledge itself. Knowledge that the system is wrong, corrupt, bankrupt of soul and good, clean, solid alternatives exist for everything from energy and economics to the very way we conduct ourselves and greet our neighbours.  In fact, it extends to how we greet our 'enemies' , for I don't believe I have enemies and I don't believe I fight....I feel more like I work, and can easily extend my hand to a corporate head or even Stephen Harper himself.  

We do after all hold different opinions and while I think I'm right, they think they're right. They have families and friends they love and are surviving this world the best they know how and ditto.  The difference is that they don't now they're causing so much hurt and pain.  So can I 'lead by example' and possibly demonstrate a different kind of compassion or an unknowing compassion , because 'they' display all sorts of compassion in their fellowships of church and state.

I'd be a fool to think that I could be successful in such an endeavor when, like so many of us so called spiritualists, just haven't worked out all our stuff yet.  I've been walking the spiritual road for a good part of 30 years now and still feel like I'm in kindergarden a lot of the time.  

So what do I do?

Believe.  Hope.  Do. 

It's that simple yet the paradox is always there, the trickster ever present.  Temptation only a bite away.

While I know it's going to take huge disaster and system implosion and yes, that one nuclear bomb to shake people out of their shoes and into softly walking moccasins, if I'm chosen to survive I have SOME answers and SOME truth and SOME knowledge and I must be prepared not to judge, say, a lone man walking what's left of the streets who was a corporate head.  He will be more lost than me.

It's those who have everything to lose who perceive me as the enemy.  Strange perception, a 5'4" grandmother with arthritis in her hips is on their hit list.  Who are these people, I continually ask myself?

Now that I've laid a good deal about myself on the line in the persuit of spiritual preparation I can only hope that some kind Elder will come along and guide me.  Yes, I'm prepared to have them say, "you're totally off your gourd", but more likely they will point me in the correct direction.  

Perhaps that is the best way to prepare, to be guided.  I open myself to that. 

Hiy Hiy.