Small Axe

Accountability, compassion, and Bob Marley & The Wailers

Greetings lovely friend,

Please remember to stay rooted in love, compassion, and wisdom as much as is possible given your conditions. Each of us is engaged in a unique set of personal challenges that are incomparable, and we all simultaneously occupy space in this same world, rife with it's own set of challenges. It is all too easy to harden our hearts to the struggles we face within ourselves, and therefore the struggles we share collectively.

One of the big themes we see in a variety of settings these days is accountability (or the lack thereof). We see government officials attempting to hold each other to account for the impacts of their decisions. We see individuals attempting to hold governments accountable for the impacts of their decisions. We see it in celebrity culture (read "cancel culture"). We see it in our work and personal lives. We see it in our friendships and families through our boundary setting, or the hard conversations that come when boundaries aren't set or honored. We see it with ourselves when we do things that are not in line with the values we think we have, or we discover that we don't know what our values are yet. We see it when we attempt to reckon with the shared history and it's impact on our present lives. We see it when we attempt to envision what the future will be like for those who have yet to take birth yet. We see it when we take stock of our current climate crisis, and the inevitable ways that life on this planet is undergoing drastic changes, and the consequences on human and animal life are as yet unknown to us.

Accountability is built into nature as consequences. Everything that happens in existence from our vantage point (being part of existence) follows cause and effect. So from our vantage point consequences are just the effects of whatever has happened already. We are constantly dealing with consequences, and therefore must have a coherent sense of how to integrate accountability into our everyday lives. Here is a short segment from July's Satsang that's all about accountability and compassion:

Inspired by Bob Marley & The Wailers - Small Axe