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[In her own inimitable way, Joanna Macy counsels us
to stop trying to escape our despair, and instead, discover the
power IN it because "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."--CB]
Reprinted from YES MAGAZINE
I f you’re really paying attention, it’s hard to escape a
sense of outrage, fear, despair. Author, deep-ecologist, and
Buddhist scholar Joanna Macy says: Don’t even try.
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 heartmind 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. |
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