How do we ask the questions?

It's been a good day - a day in which I remembered to slow down, to check in, to take care of this body as I begin a new week.  I needed to re-cultivate the mindful awareness I so easily fall out of.  This is what I do: I fall into and out of mindfulness, and always, always, always I return.  It takes the simple things to bring me back.  Chopping vegetables tonight was what did it.  Standing in a hot kitchen with the fan going, chopping tomatoes and peppers and cucumbers, knowing these things are going to nourish me this week, there is a sense of "rightness" about it all.  A sense that this is what I need to be doing, as my body sighs in appreciation of the rhythm I create.  There you are, it seems to say.  Welcome home.

I have a post I want to write about Trayvon Martin, and about compassion, and about justice, and about intersectionality, and about how as much as you try to deny it, this stuff really does impact you.  We are all connected.  Have I said that enough in the past 14 days?  We are all connected.  Injustice for one person affects us all.  All oppression is connected.  Like many, I am angry, and disappointed, and sad, and confused, and...well angry again about this outcome.  But, unlike many people smarter and more politically minded than me, I don't yet have the words put together to write about it.  I will.  Just not yet.

In the mean time, one of my favorite hymns has been going through my head today.  I can't find a great YouTube video of it, so for those of you unfamiliar, you're going to have to imagine.  The first verse and chorus are as follows:

We'll build a land where we'll bind up the broken

We'll build a land where the captives go free

Where the oil of gladness dissolves all mourning.

Oh, we'll build a promised land that can be.

 

(Chorus)

Come build a land where sisters and brothers,

Anointed by God, may then create peace:

Where justice shall roll down like waters,

And peace like an ever flowing stream.

 

What will it take for us to build this land?  What is it that we need to be doing to ensure that we are doing our parts?  What is it that I need to be doing to ensure that I am doing my part?  What am I doing currently that contributes to the fact that we live in a world where injustice continues to occur with regularity?  What can I do to change?  And you...what can you do to change?  How do we ask these questions of ourselves?  How do we ask them of one another?  How do we take these questions and live into an answer?