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Memorial Day 2012
This weekend we will honor those who have given their lives in the name and service of our country. This is our opportunity to stand together as grateful and proud Americans accepting the honor of personally protecting, nurturing, and ensuring the sustainability of the bodies, minds, and spirits of each living soldier who has, or will, return home.
Memorial Day is one of personal significance for many - and a collective significance for all Americans. It is a day we honor the sacred contribution of American warriors from past and present conflicts. Our hearts are filled with love and appreciation for the men and women who served us and this country with their minds, bodies, and spirits - ultimately giving the personhood they embodied in the name of our country. And, while they are in our hearts everyday, on this day we will stand with our heads bowed, honoring their sacrifices on our behalf.
Along with our desire to honor those who have died in the name of our country, I believe Memorial Day also represents an opportunity to focus our attention on America’s returning soldiers.
It is not enough to honor the dead. We must heal and recover the full personhood of those who served and lived.
This is a time when the concepts and ideas around the word “sustainability” are being bandied about in many theoretical and esoterical realms. Yet, this is the precise point in time for the broadness of all that sustainability could mean - that Americans insist sustainability be founded and supported at a personal, simple, and practical level.
We watched our soldiers go forward into roles and environments that would wound their hearts, minds, bodies and spirits. Our soldiers engaged in these conflicts in the name of protecting and sustaining the American collective’s values on foreign fronts.
Now those of us sitting on the domestic front, whether we supported the war or not, are called to engage - from a place of honor and gratitude – to protect and sustain every returning soldier’s heart, mind, body and spirit.
Now is the time Americans are called to hold these soldiers and their families in honored space, flowing toward them with every resource necessary - moving gently and lovingly toward the ones who fought for us – faciliting their reconnection to the depths of unique creativity that lies within them.
Now is the time to use every standard and alternative tool or method available to nurture, heal, re-engage and ensure the personal sustainability of these soldiers, their families, and the communities with whom they are reintegrating.
We know this effort is a critical building block to American sustainability. The very act of nurturing the individual soldier's sustainability – ensures we help them find, heal, and expand their personal and uniquely creative resources. In return, the healed bodies, hearts, minds, and spirits of these soldiers will contribute greatly to the store of creativity America has available to itself. And, this store of creativity is the very source of how America will build, rebuild, expand, and innovate our way through the evolution and broader questions of sustainability we are encountering at every level and segment of our world.
I invite every proud and thankful American to take the sacredness of this Memorial Day to renew and engage our hearts and minds toward the successful re-entry of every soldier to the fullness of their life here at home.
For those interested - check out Soldier's Heart to see the ongoing work Dr. Ed Tick has been doing with returning veterans from conflicts of the past 30 years. Truly, his is a vision powered by love.