Thrivability: What Will It Take?

I long ago came to the conclusion that the only purpose of a good answer is to take one into a deepening and a refining of the question. And given that I’ve been writing about thrivability of late, I felt my heart break yet further open as I just read this headline:
120 War Vets Commit Suicide Each Week
CBS news has done the research and

What they discovered is that in 2005 alone — and remember, this is just in 45 states — there were at least 6,256 veteran suicides, 120 every week for a year and an average of 17 every day.

Given that I had but minutes before been to the website for the Thrivability Institute, these questions I found there were still fermenting in my mind:

• How can we design our world in a way that honors all and that truly makes our individual and collective hearts sing?
• What does it mean to “honor all”?
• How can we each make choices in our daily lives that truly honor all?
• How can we live life as an expression of what we know to be the deepest and greatest part of ourselves?
• How can we empower each other?

Here is their vision statement:

We envision a world that is thriving – alive, expansive, pulsing with infinite creativity, possibilities and the sheer joy of being – in which global evolution is propelled by the conscious moment to moment choices of each individual exploring and expressing their unique passions and gifts, fully supported, reflected, and amplified in the presence of others.

Thrivability: What will it take? What will it take to re-story and re-create the world into a home worth leaving to our children?
What will it take to have a true and honest accounting of the costs of war? Who is going to count the immediate and generational infliction of pain and loss of life and the toxicity of fear mongering and polluted rivers and soil and hearts and potential hospitals and schools and roads and health care blown up in bombs… to create peace?
What will it take to know our neighbor as ourself?
I resist the temptation to reach for some cliché or even profound set of answers here, because the truth is this: I do not know what it will take for us to see our brother, let alone our neighbor, in the mirror. So let me leave you with more resources and questions to help with discarding our propensity for closing with answers.
Here is a link to what I consider to be Life’s Two Fiery Questions!
Also consider a book by Margaret J. Wheatley: Turning to One Another; simple conversations to restore hope to the future.
For an independent journalist’s take on ‘the war,’ consider Dahr Jamail’s Mideast Dispatches.
And finally, more questions from the Thrivability Institute:

• Who are you willing to be?
• What do you truly want?
• What brings you joy?
• What are your passions?
• Who are we collectively willing to be?
• What designs would allow us to fully thrive?

Thrivability: What will it take?
OK. In the midst of all I do not know, I do know this: Thrivability requires that we know and honor the wounds of war as wounds of the soul, as wounds of Spirit itself. Those vets coming home and killing themselves? They are but courageous and tragic mirrors calling out to us to awaken, calling out to us, to me and to you, to have the courage to do what it takes.
My friend at The Golden State blog has something to say about this as well, in his post Bombing Japanese Aircraft Carriers.