Join us tomorrow night for a workshop based on the work of Joanna Macy!
The Spiral Path: A Map for Personal Empowerment
Wednesday, April 3
7-9pm at The Living Centre, 5871 Bells Road , Middlesex Centre
Facilitated by Lorenna Bousquet-Kacera
The Greatest Danger
posted Feb 01, 2008
How do we live with the fact that we are destroying our world? What do
we make of the loss of glaciers, the melting Arctic, island nations
swamped by the sea, widening deserts, and drying farmlands? Because of social taboos, despair at the state of
our world and fear for our future are rarely acknowledged. The
suppression of despair, like that of any deep recurring response,
contributes to the numbing of the psyche. Expressions of anguish or
outrage are muted, deadened as if a nerve had been cut. This refusal to
feel impoverishes our emotional and sensory life. Flowers are dimmer and
less fragrant, our loves less ecstatic. We create diversions for
ourselves as individuals and as nations, in the fights we pick, the aims
we pursue, and the stuff we buy.
Of all the dangers we face, from climate chaos
to permanent war, none is so great as this deadening of our response.
For psychic numbing impedes our capacity to process and respond to
information. The energy expended in pushing down despair is diverted
from more crucial uses, depleting the resilience and imagination needed
for fresh visions and strategies.
Zen poet Thich Nhat Hanh was asked, “what do we most
need to do to save our world?” His answer was this: “What we most need
to do is to hear within us the sounds of the Earth crying.”
Cracking the Shell
How do we confront what we scarcely dare to think? How do we face our grief, fear, and rage without “going to pieces?”
It is good to realize that falling apart is not such
a bad thing. Indeed, it is as essential to transformation as the
cracking of outgrown shells. Anxieties and doubts can be healthy and
creative, not only for the person, but for the society, because they
permit new and original approaches to reality.
What disintegrates in periods of rapid
transformation is not the self, but its defenses and assumptions.
Self-protection restricts vision and movement like a suit of armor,
making it harder to adapt. Going to pieces, however uncomfortable, can
open us up to new perceptions, new data, and new responses.
Speaking the truth of our anguish for the
world brings down the walls between us, drawing us into deep solidarity.
That solidarity is all the more real for the uncertainty we face.
In our culture, despair is feared and resisted
because it represents a loss of control. We’re ashamed of it and dodge
it by demanding instant solutions to problems. We seek the quick fix.
This cultural habit obscures our perceptions and fosters a dangerous
innocence of the real world.
Acknowledging despair, on the other hand, involves
nothing more mysterious than telling the truth about what we see and
know and feel is happening to our world. When corporate-controlled media
keep the public in the dark, and power-holders manipulate events to
create a climate of fear and obedience, truth-telling is like oxygen. It
enlivens and returns us to health and vigor.
Belonging to All Life
Sharing what is in our heart brings a welcome shift
in identity, as we recognize that the anger, grief, and fear we feel for
our world are not reducible to concerns for our individual welfare or
even survival. Our concerns are far larger than our own private needs
and wants. Pain for the world—the outrage and the sorrow—breaks us open
to a larger sense of who we are. It is a doorway to the realization of
our mutual belonging in the web of life.
Many of us fear that confrontation with despair will
bring loneliness and isolation. On the contrary, in letting go of old
defenses, we find truer community. And in community, we learn to trust
our inner responses to our world—and find our power.
You are not alone! We are part of a vast, global movement: the epochal transition from empire to Earth community. This is the Great Turning. And the excitement, the alarm, even the overwhelm we feel, are all part of our waking up to this collective adventure.
As in any true adventure, there is risk and
uncertainty. Our corporate economy is destroying both itself and the
natural world. Its effect on living systems is what David Korten calls
the Great Unraveling. It is happening at the same time as the Great
Turning, and we cannot know which way the story will end.
Let’s drop the notion that we can manage our planet
for our own comfort and profit—or even that we can now be its ultimate
redeemers. It is a delusion. Let’s accept, in its place, the radical
uncertainty of our time, even the uncertainty of survival.
In primal societies, adolescents go through rites of
passage, where confronting their own mortality is a gateway to
maturity. In analogous ways, climate change
calls us to recognize our own mortality as a species. With the gift of
uncertainty, we can grow up and accept the rights and responsibility of
planetary adulthood. Then we know fully that we belong, inextricably, to
the web of life, and we can serve it, and let its strength flow through
us.
Uncertainty, when accepted, sheds a bright light on
the power of intention. Intention is what you can count on: not the
outcome, but the motivation you bring, the vision you hold, the compass
setting you choose to follow. Our intention and resolve can save us from
getting lost in grief.
During a recent visit to Kentucky, I learned what is
happening to the landscape and culture of Appalachia: how coal
companies use dynamite to pulverize everything above the underground
seams of coal; how bulldozers and dragline machines 20-stories high push
away the “overburden” of woodlands and top soil, filling the valleys. I
saw how activists there are held steady by sheer intention. Though the
nation seems oblivious to this tragedy, these men and women persist in
the vision that Appalachia can, in part, be saved and that future
generations may know slopes of sweet gum, sassafras, magnolia, the
stirrings of bobcat and coon, and, in the hollows, the music of fiddle
and fresh flowing streams. They seem to know—and, when we let down our
guard, we too know—that we are living parts of the living body of Earth.
This is the gift of the Great Turning.
When we open our eyes to what is happening, even when it breaks our
hearts, we discover our true size; for our heart, when it breaks open,
can hold the whole universe. We discover how speaking the truth of our
anguish for the world brings down the walls between us, drawing us into
deep solidarity. That solidarity, with our neighbors and all that lives, is all the more real for the uncertainty we face.
When we stop distracting ourselves by trying to
figure the chances of success or failure, our minds and hearts are
liberated into the present moment. This moment then becomes alive,
charged with possibilities, as we realize how lucky we are to be alive
now, to take part in this planetary adventure.
Joanna Macy wrote this article as part of Stop Global Warming Cold,
the Spring 2008 issue of YES! Magazine. Joanna is a scholar of
Buddhism, general systems theory and deep ecology, whose latest book is
World as Lover, World as Self. She lives in Berkeley, CA. www.joannamacy.net.
