Take a look around and you might notice something. For one thing, Summer is coming!

Here in the United States, people are talking on lawns in the suburbs and the newspapers don’t make much sense. Weddings are being planned and the cost of margarine went up again.

Children are going to Spring Carnivals and being tested in quiet classrooms. The end of the Fiscal Year is almost upon us and hands are being shaken and wrung. They say it will be a bad year for apples.

In the midst of it all, the beautiful dreamers are waking up and finding their ways to the parks again. They are making plans for travels and parties and they are marching in the streets.

They are even renting buses!

In support of the global revolution of the human heart and the reclamation of what is possible within the world, Mindful Occupation is committed to offering support for sustainable collaborative activism.

Working from the principles of mutual aid, Mindful Occupation seeks to foster opportunities for solidarity building, story and skill sharing, peer support, and collective networking.

We’re looking to empower ourselves to support one another in the process of effective revolution and to create opportunities for resolution, celebration, and reclamation.

Although many are familiar with mindfulness, many are not. To those who do live mindfully, the practice can mean many different things. Mindfulness is, to some, a highly individualized attunement to the truth of the world that surrounds us. Some associate mindfulness with a distinct shift in perspective and objectivity, an awareness of vast relation and a renewal of meaning or lack thereof.

A big part of mindfulness is intentional reflection and orientation to our relationship with the world internal and the world external. We cannot be in the present if we are lodged in any corner – internal, external, past or the future.

However, it is helpful to be aware of all that brought us to this point and all of the ways that we wish ourselves forward. It is from these things that the here and now, so fleeting and full, is constructed. It is from this space held in the midst of it all that we can begin to be truly attentive and boldly conduct ourselves in accordance with the best of what we’ve learned and full of hope for what is possible. It from this space that we create our futures.

That being said, as we launch Mindful Occupation, it’d be nice to consider what we have accomplished and where it has brought us.

We have done the world an invaluable service in helping to raise awareness of the effects of corporate and military domination on the quality of our lives, economies and cultures.

We have offered powerful models for effective change and have changed the landscape of language and possibility.

We have laughed and cried and we have yelled and celebrated. We have sang and we have clapped our hands and we have raised our fists. We have shared meals and we have shared cells. We have made infinite stories and have, in fact, changed the course of the world.

The 99% is going to win. That is where we have been and it is where we are now and it is where we are going.

By establishing safe and supportive spaces and an ethos of mutual aid, Mindful Occupation will encourage and mentor sustainable activism, provide opportunities for collective and personal empowerment.

We hope that this resource will be used to strengthen activist communities and support cohesion in outreach and actions.

The first big print run of Mindful Occupation: Rising Up Without Burning Out is coming up soon and Drafts are already being used to organize Mindful Occupation groups to support Summer actions and movement building.

If you’d like ideas or support in starting a Mindful Occupation group, feel free to let us know.

Mindful Occupation Tip:

Are the birds singing? Listen.

In conjunction with our first large print run of the Mindful Occupation booklet, we have relaunched our website. You can now read the text of the booklet through the navigation bar at the top of the screen, keep us churning out copies by donating, join the discussion on our own Mindful Occupation forum over at the Icarus Project and download screen-readable and/or print-ready PDFs of the booklet to do with as you wish. Thanks for checking us out. Take care of each other.

M/O forum page: http://theicarusproject.net/forums/viewforum.php?f=112

M/O Facebook page: http://www.facebook.com/MindfulOccupation

PDFs, etc: http://mindfuloccupation.org/publications/

Onwards towards a better world…
EricS