Where we find ourselves now is a unique moment in time in which the ability to dig deep into this internal arsenal to express our full collective selves as the mighty and powerful agents of justice, freedom, and love that we are is available to us en masse. We can wait for a messiah, preacher, guru, or President to part the raging sea of conservatism or we can disarm the resistance with our capacity for charismatic conversion. Who needs to win when you can win over?

Transitions are the doorways to change. Choosing to engage in transition and enter each doorway as consciously as possible but with a willingness to not know what’s on the other end is makes that change intentional. To have continued on with folks that I had a felt sense belonged somewhere else would have been to opt for convenience over integrity, thus dishonoring this work—as Khalil Gibran named: my love made visible in the world—at its core.

Rev. angel Kyodo Williams speaks about the challenges leaders should face.

Rev. angel Kyodo Williams shares about leadership and brings out examples of some good leaders.

New York City — September 11-12, 2001. The devastation of this day is staggering beyond measure. The ground has fallen out beneath us America. Let us all find the wisdom to see this unspeakable tragedy as a doorway to meaningful change, as a precursor to collective transformation. If we do not accept this challenge if we are not brave and unrelenting in our demand…the loss of thousands of lives will not be merely unspeakable, they will be in vain.

This is, more often than not, the nature of deep practice: It isn’t convenient. It doesn’t fit your schedule. It doesn’t conform to your whim. It isn’t selectable for good days instead of bad. In short, it isn’t a hobby…it’s a practice…Now is not the time to hold out. Not on your commitments, not on your practice, and not on change. Change IS on the horizon and the best thing about it is that, at this moment, we can’t actually make out what it’s going to look like. Like much of the unknown, that’s either a mark of real danger or real hope. I’m opting for the latter, but practicing comes what may.

Together we are the Jedis of Justice. We are The Ones that We have Been Waiting for to illuminate the Matrix and reveal the passage out of Babylon. We are the Agents of Transformative Social Change. X-Agents for short. (Yea, I know, but X-Men was already taken and it’s chauvinist anyway…)

Negotiating relationships of any kind–with God, Country, or Lover–is a temperamental and intensely personal affair. I admit I don’t feel left out of those nasty divorces in which the state gets to have a say in who gets to keep everything from the cars to couches to kids.