Guide Us Back to Love

From the sea of fire and confusion
I invite the ancestral heart to sing
And guide us back to love

Dear Friends,

What is it that is nourishing your life energy in this moment? How are you staying grounded in love and compassion during this time of great uncertainty and polycrises? How are you caring for your precious heart? How do we speak loudly against discrimination and injustice while embodying the peace, diversity, equity, and inclusion we wish to see in our society?

I want to encourage you to invest your time and energy in those practices that remind you who you are and that help you reconnect with your humanity and spiritual wholeness. It is my humble wish that my musical offerings could be part of your practice of grounding, renewing, healing, and transformation.

I continue to practice with these questions as we witness and experience the unfolding greed, fear, and delusion in our federal government and society. This administration is manipulating the collective consciousness with chaos and uncertainty while unleashing centuries of white supremacist and colonial conditioning. Rather than recognizing our common humanity and need for healing and repair, those in power are seeking to dehumanize us based on gender, race, nationality, and political orientation.

We must rehumanize ourselves, recognizing our interdependence not only with one another but with our nonhuman relatives as well. We must remember our wholeness.

I am answering these questions with lots of prayer and meditation, by taking refuge in spiritual community, and by making and sharing my voice as a singer, songwriter, and Dharma teacher. How inadequate it can feel to speak my truth to power as a folk singer who is no big deal!

Yet I know that each voice crying out for justice and compassion is important. Every expression of love for humanity-that recognizes our true nature of interbeing-is helping us to wake up, as a country and as a species. And we need a collective awakening. We need to be reminded who we are as human and spiritual beings with an immense power to create love, safety, and healing. We can transform the toxic inheritance of white supremacy and colonization, benefiting us all.

As a manifestation of community love and support, I am so excited to announce my upcoming album release, Learn to Love Again, with my band the Community Gardeners on the Summer Solstice. We will be celebrating with an album release concert at The Ark in Ann Arbor on June 27th. More than just a concert, this gathering will provide an opportunity for us to recognize and embrace our shared humanity, and will water seeds of awakening, peace, and love in all who attend. We will then send that love out into the universe and continue to nurture it in our society. 

We will be joined by guest singer songwriter and friend Elisabeth Pixley-Fink and fellow Dharma teacher and spiritual mentor Barbara Newell, who will lead a guided meditation. Come join us in an embodied experience of healing community.

May we continue to nurture our capacity for love and compassion, that we may be the change we wish to see in the world.

With you in this practice,

Joe