June 13, Saturday

Kadyn and Grandma - 9 months


It's sometimes shocking for me to think that I have three grown children who are nearing middle age. In my heart of course they are still my children and I want to protect them from a world gone mad. Like every parent I want for them a world that is safe and supports them as they make their way through life. I also have a grandchild Kadyn who is 14 months old. Of course he is beautiful, smart, loving and full of joy and amazement. I want his life to be good, for there to be enough clean water and air and healthy food, loving people and opportunities to make a profound connection to this Earth and all her blessings. Like you, I want this inheritance for every child. I do not want their lives to be burdened with seemingly uncontrollable global calamities. Yet the reality is that the world we are passing to the next generations is in deep trouble. Most environmental leaders agree the planet will survive. But the survival of human life on Earth is tenuous. This is not what we want to hear. We don't even want to think about it. Yet if we are serious about our concern for the children, we need to look deeply at the human dilemma.

The unthinkable issue of the survival of human life on Earth does not seem as yet to have a name that we all recognize. There are many people talking about and working on smaller pieces of this problem, but only a few brave leaders are naming the beast and actually facing it. Two of these visionaries whose work I have studied, Marshall Vian Summers and Joanna Macy, approach the subject of the possible end of human life in very different ways. Their teachings are equally compelling and equally necessary. I am tempted to simplify things and call these approaches the Masculine and the Feminine even while acknowledging that is over simplification.

In his pending book Great Waves of Change, Marshall Vian Summers identifies 7 great waves of change which individually or collectively could inundate the human race and much of life on this planet. The waves he sees are: 1. Economic hardship and instability, 2. Peak oil and declining resources, 3. Climate change and catastrophic weather, 4. Escalating worldwide conflict, 5. Loss of arable land and fresh water, 6. Collapse of biodiversity and 7. Destruction of the natural environment.

Summers is a teacher who does not pull any punches. While I do not agree with everything he says, I do admire his ability to look right in the eye of the monster. Other social change leaders often use vague language when speaking of the challenges that face humanity at this time or concentrate on only one of the issues like global warming thus never addressing the absolute dire nature of our circumstances. Summers does not mince words when he speaks of the probable consequences of the collective effect of these "great waves of change". As he states in this book, economic collapse may lead to failed states, military take-overs of governments; declining resources of course may lead to all out world war and the ultimate destruction of life; weather change may lead to loss of millions of acres of land thus creating hundreds of thousands of refugees, famine, disease and again conflict. The list goes on. Each of these changes has terrifying consequences. We all know this in the back of our hearts somewhere but we don't often let that knowledge come out into the light.

There is an unwritten social rule especially in the US: don't talk about anything that brings up the fear, "no downers". I am not suggesting that we all get together and talk endlessly about how bad things are. I am suggesting that our addiction to keeping things pleasant is getting in the way of identifying the problems and working together to fight for our lives, or more accurately the lives of our children and grandchildren. Because there are so many things going on at once, no one person or group has "the" answer. Marshall Summers has devoted his life to a teaching that comes through him but is not from him by his own report. This teaching is aimed at helping people listen to their inner Wisdom specifically for the purpose of making the necessary contribution that only they can make toward the ultimate solution of the human dilemma. He says,

The first great challenge is to face the great challenge without insisting on solutions, without fighting against the truth of what you see, without blaming other people or expecting someone else to take care of the problem for you.

Yet from what I have observed most people are not able to take the news straight up and then get to work on the problem as he suggests.

This is where the work of Joanna Macy is absolutely brilliant. She also has devoted her life to helping people see how bad things are for us, to grieve the loss of the safe world we wanted, to accept the world that we have and then to roll up our sleeves and get to work on whatever piece of the solution we can see and manifest. In the book she wrote with Molly Young Brown, Coming Back to Life: Practices to Reconnect Our Lives, Our World, they put forward a map for transformation of our human culture, what she calls a "Great Turning.. an epochal shift from a self-destructive industrial growth society to a life-sustaining society." According to their map, the transformation of our world starts right in our own heart. The path leads from the broken heart to the joy of working together to first envisioning the world we want for our children and then working together to manifest that world.

This book is filled with tools to help us heal our hearts, find our own vision and skills, overcome our lethargy and pain and get down to work. Like Summers who uses the practices in Steps to Knowledge to get people ready to listen to their own inner inner knowing, Macy and her students use the practices in Coming Back to Life as preparation for the work of change. In Chapter 7 which is entitled "Despair Work: Owning and Honoring Our Pain for the World" they relate a short anecdote of the Zen poet and teacher Thich Nhat Hahn. He was asked,

What do we need to do to save our world? His questioners expected him to identify the best strategies to pursue in social and environmental action, but Thich Nhat Hahn's answer was this, " What we most need to do is to hear the Earth crying."

Macy's work helps us not only to hear the Earth's cries, but our own cries and screams of fear as well.

This book, which summarizes 20 years of work is filled with exercises and activities to bring up the fear and the pain and heal it. Whether one uses these practices or some other avenue for healing, it seems necessary to face the fear and heal the pain before you start to confront the beast. Otherwise the work is overwhelming and you may be lead by your fear rather than your inner knowing. Fear and pain unrecognized and unconscious is what got us into the situation we are in. It is time we faced the fear.

Personally I feel that Marshall Summer's teaching has a great danger of returning us to the fear. I am sure in the hands of a very adept student the fear can be transformed with his work. For me Joanna Macy's work is more suited to my nature. There are many paths to the door of inner knowing and fearlessness. Each of us must find our own and then join with others to do our work. It is imperative. As both of these visionary teachers tell us, this work is not just our challenge, it is our opportunity. But as we all have experienced, you can't even take advantage of an opportunity unless you are ready.

Somehow I can't just leave it here without talking about the mystery of it all. So far it all sounds cut and dried. Learn this and do this and then all is well. The fact is as I see it, we do not even know who we are or where we are going or why we are here. We may be seeing just a tiny grain of sand in the entire sand painting of life. We have to keep putting ourselves back in perspective. Poetry is always good for this. Many poems could help us here but for some reason I immediately thought of this poem by Ranier Maria Rilke. I want to share it with you.

The Man Watching

I can tell by the way the trees beat, after
so many dull days, on my worried windowpanes
that a storm is coming,
and I hear the far-off fields say things
I can't bear without a friend,
I can't love without a sister

The storm, the shifter of shapes, drives on
across the woods and across time,
and the world looks as if it had no age:
the landscape like a line in the psalm book,
is seriousness and weight and eternity.

What we choose to fight is so tiny!
What fights us is so great!
If only we would let ourselves be dominated
as things do by some immense storm,
we would become strong too, and not need names.

When we win it's with small things,
and the triumph itself makes us small.
What is extraordinary and eternal
does not want to be bent by us.
I mean the Angel who appeared
to the wrestlers of the Old Testament:
when the wrestler's sinews
grew long like metal strings,
he felt them under his fingers
like chords of deep music.

Whoever was beaten by this Angel
(who often simply declined the fight)
went away proud and strengthened
and great from that harsh hand,
that kneaded him as if to change his shape.
Winning does not tempt that man.
This is how he grows: by being defeated, decisively,
by constantly greater beings.

by Rainer Maria Rilke

One thing I want to do in July when I go to visit Kadyn and his parents is to introduce him to poetry. I think he's going to need it.