Honoring Aleksei Navalny
By Jennifer Browdy
Originally published on her Substack, Writing to Right the World, Jennifer Browdy is my writing coach and editor at her press, Green Fire Press. She has thought deeply about how we must be wise and courageous citizens of our global world.
Why did Aleksei Navalny go back to Russia, back into the jaws of Putin’s beast?
Did he climb willingly on to the cross of martyrdom, making a final sacrifice for his cause of a free Russia?
We will never know.
But what is sure is that his spirit lives on in the minds and hearts of people everywhere who yearn for freedom from oppression.
He joins the pantheon of so many other martyrs, some famous and some unknown, all of whom died because they stood up for their ideals and refused to back down when threatened.
What dictators don’t seem to understand is that killing a leader like Navalny only succeeds in spreading his message more powerfully, sending out shock waves that roar through mass consciousness and provide the sparks that fuel a million more fires of resistance.
Navalny’s memory, living on in each of us who remember him with gratitude, becomes a seed, a spark, a self-replicating positive mind virus that can spread from person to person across this globe exponentially faster than ever before in human history.
One Navalny dies; tens of thousands more leap up to carry the spark of his activism forward into the future he laid down his life to improve.
Change happens at the speed of thought and thought happens pretty fast these days.
Every human spreads ideas like a mushroom spreading spores or a dandelion spreading seeds. We don’t know where or how our ideas will land; the important thing, for those who consider ourselves worldwrights,* is to keep our spirits up, our hope alive, and our voices loud and clear and strong, insisting that every living being on this planet has the right to flourish in a mutual reciprocity of right relations.
We live in a time when “freedom” has become a code word for the right to greedily trample on others for individual gain.
I reject that kind of freedom.
What we need in the 21st century is not independence, but radical interdependence, the recognition that we humans are part of a harmonious web of life that draws on the freely flowing energy of the Sun and teeming abundance of the Earth to make good lives for all inhabitants of our planet.
My work with small groups of students in my leadership, writing & public speaking classes does not feel like enough; and yet I know that as each person leaves my classes with new ideas, inspiration and practical tools to speak their truths more eloquently, the ripples will continue to spread through our human consciousness matrix, changing the future one person at a time.
As long as each of us picks up a thread of the mantel of justice and stitches it into the warp and woof of our own lives, Aleksei Navalny’s life and death will not have been in vain.
* Worldwright is a word I coined, taking off from the word “playwright.” Playwrights write plays; worldwrights write to right the world. Read more about the worldwrights I admire in my book Purposeful Memoir as a Quest for a Thriving Future.
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