On Sunday morning as I was eating my oatmeal with blueberries and honey, and sipping from a cup of french-pressed coffee, while sitting on the couch, feet propped on the center table, in our clean, quite house, I took the opportunity to watch a back log of podcasts from the Bill Moyers Journal. One of them was a conversation with Parker J. Palmer, founder and senior partner of the Center for Courage and Renewal. Their conversation centered on how to maintain spiritual wholeness even as the economy and political order seem to come apart. As I listened to it I could not help but be reminded of my relationship with happiness and reality.
In an earlier entry I disclosed my new appreciation of happiness. While it is a deeply private matter, it is also interwoven with public life. And our current public consciousness is much to ponder. It embraces, paradoxically, great optimism and pessimism. It is important to understand how we each are affected by politics and public policy. Conditions now demand that we as citizens pause to reflect on our role in Democracy and act accordingly.
Developmental Democracy, a model of Democracy that I greatly favor, and think is implicit in American Democracy, understands that "participation in political life is necessary not only for the protection of individual interests, but also for the creation of an informed, committed and developing citizenry. [And] political involvement is essential to the 'highest and harmonious' expansion of individual capacities" (Held, Models of Democracy).
