Living in the Time of the Great Divide

Samantha Wallen
Jul 22, 2017 · 3 min read

We are living in what I call the time of the Great Divide.

The Great Divide is outside of us. It is the division between Democrat and Republican, America and the rest of the world, right and left, blue and red, black and white, rich and poor, us and them, me and you.

I feel it when I read the news or the email from the school district super intendant saying that someone sprayed the N-word on the gym wall because our high school has a Black Principal. I know it as I scroll through my social media feeds and see that this is just one of many, many, many incidents like it happening throughout this country.

I hear it as I listen to conversations at my local café as I drink my morning tea, “I just don’t get those people…” A statement that comes from each side. I taste it when the bile rises from my belly when there isn’t enough money in my bank account to pay the rent as I live in a town full of Teslas, BMWs, and elaborate homes only millionaires can buy.

I am intimate with it in my living room as my spouse, my two grown children, and I yell at each other after watching a short film about a Muslim woman trapped in an abusive relationship. Our words and the jumble of feelings behind them get sucked into the Great Divide and never reach each other. They get lost in the space between us as we try to get each other to see our point of view and to agree on the things we already agree on.

The Great Divide is outside of us because it is within us. It is the deep chasm of our own separation. It is the separation of our heads from our hearts, our souls from our breathing bodies, our divinity from our everyday lives, and our truth from a common reality.

We can’t reach each other because we can’t reach ourselves.

This separation has us stuck in anxiety, fear, uncertainty, confusion, and misinformation where we withhold the truth of who we really are. We feel if we move from the safety of our own position, our rooted identity, we might fall into an unknown abyss.

But, you see, this is how the Great Divide works. This is how it feeds itself and grows its vast division. When we are afraid to move, to go toward the edges of ourselves we withhold our expression, our generosity, our knowing, our curiosity, our compassion, and our capacity to create something different. We stay stuck trying to hold our positions on the “right” side of things.

This Great Divide is affecting our social and our individual wellbeing. It is responsible for every inequity and oppression.

What this time of the Great Divide is really asking of us is to walk the valuable space between. For it is in that deep chasm, that seemingly long distance between one thing and another, one human and another, that we actually find the realness of each other.

It is our pathway to wholeness, to a possibility of healing the division.

The first step is to walk the space between your head and your heart. This is how you go to the edge of yourself. This is how you walk through the territory of your own position and peer over the edge into the space of unknown connection and possibility.


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100 Naked Words

Est. May 2016. 100 vulnerable words, one day at a time. Every day.

Samantha Wallen

Written by

Founder/CEO WriteInPower, poet, writer, book coach, social justice disciple, steam-punk time traveler tending to where value, core wounds, and brilliance meet.

100 Naked Words

Est. May 2016. 100 vulnerable words, one day at a time. Every day.

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