Film by:
Velcrow Ripper
Film Review by:
Diane Babcock
A Murmuration of Hearts in Revolution
Starting with a strange question
When Velcrow Ripper asked the question, “How can a crisis on the planet become a love story?”, he was amazed at the answer and you will be, too.
After a prior project led him to study the aftermath of the ground zeros of the world, he worried the economies and ecologies were collapsing to a point of the earth itself becoming a ground zero. Then, once he looked more closely he started to see a pattern in the connection between crisis and love. It seemed there was first a yearning and separation followed by a coming together in the process of a relationship and this time it was between humanity and nature.
Awakened through suffering
Through the people he interviewed while filming Occupy Love, he learned the depth of human suffering can cause an awakening, which can lead to extreme action that can birth a revolution. It is well-accepted that we are all living in the age of awakening and so far we’ve been doing in our own time, but since the occupy movement that has all changed.
The collective consciousness is now wide awake to the current system called neo-liberalism that enslaves us to the rules of the market and keeps in service to debt. It reminds me of the hundredth monkey effect that can take generations, except this is an explosion of millions of human minds ‘getting it’ in three weeks – and it’s still growing!
If you’re wondering what we all ‘got’, it was a loud and clear message from the earth calling all of us to action in the face of our climate crisis. It really brings new meaning to the phrase “that person is really down to earth” – and it’s a wonderful thing. With so many of us being connected to the earth by the force of love it brings us together in a powerful synergy that we can use to make the shift from a hierarchal to a lateral system.
Our common ground
The occupy movement is about everyone loving the same thing and it’s a peaceful activism that is about forming connections and coming together. In this case it is that we love our world and we reject the way the dominant system of power is failing to provide for that world on every level. For the past two centuries we have been slaves to the ego and acquisition of the self-serving kind to the point that we are merely ‘managed’ by governments that in turn serve only the banks.
Today, many don’t want to be ignorant anymore, as we can see where it brought us: which brings us to what to do next. Bolivia’s pluri-national democratic system was highlighted, as it is driven by the direct participation of all members of society, so we can see that democracy is most important. The fact is, we also have democratic system, but it has been corrupted to the point of endangered unless we act fast to revitalize it.
A stronger cornerstone
Through the occupy movement the world now has the basis of an empathic civilization and from there we can overcome our challenges with climate change, sustainable energy resources and economic paradigms. We just need a greater shift of the collective consciousness – much like the murmuration of the starlings. Isn’t surprising that the starlings are one of the most pestilent of birds, yet their murmuration is an example of what nature requires of us? We can become one with movement and collectively move to break through these crises with our strength of our united vision where the privileged few do not own the 1% and all are awakened from the egoist nightmare.
Velcrow started out looking for the perfect love story, but in the end he found the revolution of the heart as being the greatest, and not in spite of, but because of its messy imperfections. Our evolving love for our earth will keep breaking our hearts until more of us pick up the phone and take the call from Mother Nature instead of putting her on hold.