60 Seconds for Motivate Your Monday: We Are the Ones We’ve Been Waiting For to Change Things

Hello to you listening in Hamburg, Germany!

Coming to you from Whidbey Island, Washington this is Stories From Women Who Walk with 60 Seconds for Motivate Your Monday and your host, Diane Wyzga.  

We are living in a time of historic upheaval. But what if this currently confusing, chaotic, confounding, cultural churn is stumbling toward change that reveals the hidden roots of social injustice for what they are so that we can reconfigure for good?

How easily the safeguards can be leaped. And they have been. We can clutch our pearls and bemoan the times we live in; or, we can invite our feelings of hopelessness to give way to action, to repair, restore, and renew out of the ashes of the old ways. We are responsible for making change because we’re the only “sentient force” that can.

Question: What one small grand gesture are you committed to take on behalf of what you love and care for?

These words from the Irish poet Seamus Heaney may motivate and sustain you wherever your feet touch the ground, whatever progress you are intent on making today.    

“History says, Don’t hope

On this side of the grave...

But then, once in a lifetime

The longed-for tidal wave

Of justice can rise up

And hope and history rhyme.” [“The Cure at Troy” Seamus Heaney]

BONUS: Seamus Heaney reads his poem, The Cure at Troy

The Cure at Troy (full text)

"Human beings suffer

They torture one another,

They get hurt and get hard.

No poem or play or song

Can fully right a wrong

Inflicted and endured.

 

The innocent in gaols

Beat on their bars together.

A hunger-striker’s father

Stands in the graveyard dumb.

The police widow in veils

Faints at the funeral home.

 

History says, Don’t hope

On this side of the grave…

But then, once in a lifetime

The longed-for tidal wave

Of justice can rise up,

And hope and history rhyme.

 

So hope for a great sea-change

On the far side of revenge.

Believe that a further shore

Is reachable from here.

Believe in miracles

And cures and healing wells.

 

Call miracle self-healing:

The utter, self-revealing

Double-take of feeling.

If there’s fire on the mountain

Or lightning and storm

And a god speaks from the sky

 

That means someone is hearing

The outcry and the birth-cry

Of new life at its term.

It means once in a lifetime

That justice can rise up

And hope and history rhyme. [From "The Cure at Troy: A Version of Sophocles' Philoctetes"]

You're always welcome: "Come for the stories - Stay for the magic!" Speaking of magic, I hope you’ll subscribe, share a 5-star rating and nice review on your social media or podcast channel of choice, bring your friends and rellies, and join us! You will have wonderful company as we continue to walk our lives together. Be sure to stop by my Quarter Moon Story Arts website, check out the Services, arrange a no-obligation Discovery Call, and stay current with me as "Wyzga on Words" on Substack.

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