How to respond to a world in crisis: Inner and Outer Transformation

Oh Son of Spirit! Noble have I created thee, yet thou hast abased thyself. Rise then for that which thou was created. Bahá’u’lláh

Recently, my teenage daughter and I were in the hammock and she was feeling life was not fair. That’s not surprising for adolescents to ponder, and I also know this usually has a background story, so I asked her why. She said her white friends don’t have to worry about racism, about their father or brother being pulled over and getting hurt, and that doesn’t seem fair. She’s right, it’s not fair and yet, it’s not that they don’t have to worry about racism, they do, they may not know they do and that is dangerous.

For me life has been about transformation, since I was eight-years-old I began to consciously think about how to transform my life. It started with a dream.

My parents divorced when I was three and by the time I was eight, I had been shuttled back and forth between my mother and her New England, Anglo family and my Bolivian-Quechua Indian dad and his family in California. Neither had remarried, and both had strong roots with their brothers, sisters, aunts and uncles and so by default did we. To say it was confusing to be shuttled back and

forth between cultures is an understatement — it was traveling between worlds…