Justice isn’t something “out there”, it's something we create by embodying our ideals ♎

It’s tempting to think that the world out there has some sort of inherent justice. 

But since that often doesn’t square with our experience, we resort to feeling cheated, angry, defensive.

That’s when we abandon our ideals. 

It could be as ‘minor’ as blaming someone for not “seeing” or “understanding” us. Or as ‘major’ as how we relate to our favorite projection screen… the American presidential election, Israel/Gaza, rich people, etc. We become the oppressors we’re so incensed at. We make others wrong (so we can feel right). We forget their innocence (so we can feel ours). It perpetuates cycles of violence. We can judge ourselves for that. I often do.

Or we can step into love.

First, loving ourselves. We’re human. We’re half run on lizard-machinery. Of course we’re on the drama/fear triangle! We see injustice everywhere we look — we’ve got to keep projecting our guilt out. Otherwise we’d have to feel the horror of our own (apparent) choice to leave the Garden of Eden—to (apparently) separate from our source. (self) Forgiveness doesn’t let us off the hook. It lets us cut through attack-defense cycles to see clearly what the heck is actually going on, and therefore respond appropriately.

Then. When we’re properly loved up (and probably not before), we can ask ourselves what justice asks of us. It never asks us to take on the weight of the world. That just adds more imbalance, and justice asks for integrity. Sometimes boundaries, apologies, accountability, system changes are required. But it never asks for cruelty, or even punishment—a boundary set for love, from love, is an invitation into intimacy. It changes everyone it touches.

Some of us rely on theories of karma and afterlives to balance the scales. Let’s not use them to avoid facing the raw reality that the scales don’t feel very balanced, and the raw potential of each of us contributing to humanity being Gaia’s love organ.

With love, Jordan