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Thursday, August 5, 2010
Thursday, April 22, 2010
A Day to Rally Around Our Planet
Today is the 40th anniversary of Earth Day. It began in 1970 as the idea of Senator Gaylord Nelson (D., Wisconsin) to heighten awareness of the growing toxification of the earth. It was a heady time. A million people marched in New York alone. We did that back then. We marched in the streets by the hundreds of thousands in those days to bring awareness to issues and demand change. And it worked: civil rights, gay rights, women's rights, animal rights; we marched to bring an end what many of us thought was an unjust war on foreign soil. And in 1970 we rallied for the first time to march for the earth.
Because by then some troubling truths were becoming obvious. Only eight years before, Rachel Carson had sounded the alarm on DDT and pointed to the growing numbers of pesticides that were being sprayed willy nilly not only on our food crops but on our streets, in our yards, our parks and wild lands. And it was taking an unexpected toll. In many parts of the country, we lost the sound of birdsong in the spring. Our birds were being killed by these sprays being on the trees in which they nested or in the seeds or earthworms they ate and their young weren't surviviving because the shells on their eggs were too thin to sustain life.
And it began to dawn on us: if all that airborne, invisible junk was killing our birds, what was it doing to us, to our children, to the animals that we called food, to the chain of events we call life?
We were just beginning to understand that nature works in cycles just like the calendar, just like humans do, just like our crops and seasons, and that when you interrupt or try to micromanage that cycle, unpredictable consequences ensue. (We used to know these things. Nature was our, uh, nature.) So we marched. But marching wasn't enough. Today we pollute our lands with not hundreds of chemicals but 80,000 of them. Our mortality rate in this country is going in the wrong direction (moving us from 41st to 48th worldwide since last year alone according to the CIA Factbook).
We have to wake up and mobilize, to poke each other into action, to shout it out in all our social media networks, put documentary after documentary about the decline of our food and our health in our faces, demand accountability from the very agencies that are supposed to protect us from the bottom line zealots of for-profit corporations. Today we realize that marching for individual rights was important but now we must march for the very rights of species to survive. It's not about the rights of individuals anymore. It's about the rights of all of us to breathe, eat healthy food and drink water that will not maim or toxify us. The numbers are against us. And the clock is ticking.
Time, it turns out, is another critical nonrenewable resource.
How do you wake up? You do it one day at a time, one action at a time. This is the birthing time of the year for Mother Earth. Clear out a little space in your yard and roll in some organic cow manure. Plant some heirloom seeds. Water it. Watch it grow. Don't use chemical fertilizers or pesticides. Weed it yourself. Eat what you grow and thank the earth for providing it to you. If you don't have a yard, ask a friend if you can share a space. Everyone can do something. (Read Mel Bartholomew's Square Foot Gardening if you don't believe me.)
It's not just the planting and eating that's important. It's you touching the earth, reconnecting with the skin of the planet that sustains you, that thousands of times each day fills your lungs with the oxygen that keeps your brain alive and your heart beating. That's you down there in that handful of earth. It's where you came from and it's where you'll end up when that heart-lung action ceases. Gardening puts you back in touch with a life force that's part of you. And you're part of it. It connects you and by connecting you, it reminds you of who you are. You're an earthling, a child of this planet. We all are.
So get out there and fight for your Mother.
Happy Earth Day everyone!
P.S. For 150 or so other ways to connect, check out our book, REUNION: How We Heal Our Broken Connection to the Earth. (You can click on the title to order it.) It's out! Ted Carter and I thank you--and we'd like to think Mother Earth will too.
Because by then some troubling truths were becoming obvious. Only eight years before, Rachel Carson had sounded the alarm on DDT and pointed to the growing numbers of pesticides that were being sprayed willy nilly not only on our food crops but on our streets, in our yards, our parks and wild lands. And it was taking an unexpected toll. In many parts of the country, we lost the sound of birdsong in the spring. Our birds were being killed by these sprays being on the trees in which they nested or in the seeds or earthworms they ate and their young weren't surviviving because the shells on their eggs were too thin to sustain life.
And it began to dawn on us: if all that airborne, invisible junk was killing our birds, what was it doing to us, to our children, to the animals that we called food, to the chain of events we call life?
We were just beginning to understand that nature works in cycles just like the calendar, just like humans do, just like our crops and seasons, and that when you interrupt or try to micromanage that cycle, unpredictable consequences ensue. (We used to know these things. Nature was our, uh, nature.) So we marched. But marching wasn't enough. Today we pollute our lands with not hundreds of chemicals but 80,000 of them. Our mortality rate in this country is going in the wrong direction (moving us from 41st to 48th worldwide since last year alone according to the CIA Factbook).
We have to wake up and mobilize, to poke each other into action, to shout it out in all our social media networks, put documentary after documentary about the decline of our food and our health in our faces, demand accountability from the very agencies that are supposed to protect us from the bottom line zealots of for-profit corporations. Today we realize that marching for individual rights was important but now we must march for the very rights of species to survive. It's not about the rights of individuals anymore. It's about the rights of all of us to breathe, eat healthy food and drink water that will not maim or toxify us. The numbers are against us. And the clock is ticking.
Time, it turns out, is another critical nonrenewable resource.
How do you wake up? You do it one day at a time, one action at a time. This is the birthing time of the year for Mother Earth. Clear out a little space in your yard and roll in some organic cow manure. Plant some heirloom seeds. Water it. Watch it grow. Don't use chemical fertilizers or pesticides. Weed it yourself. Eat what you grow and thank the earth for providing it to you. If you don't have a yard, ask a friend if you can share a space. Everyone can do something. (Read Mel Bartholomew's Square Foot Gardening if you don't believe me.)
It's not just the planting and eating that's important. It's you touching the earth, reconnecting with the skin of the planet that sustains you, that thousands of times each day fills your lungs with the oxygen that keeps your brain alive and your heart beating. That's you down there in that handful of earth. It's where you came from and it's where you'll end up when that heart-lung action ceases. Gardening puts you back in touch with a life force that's part of you. And you're part of it. It connects you and by connecting you, it reminds you of who you are. You're an earthling, a child of this planet. We all are.
So get out there and fight for your Mother.
Happy Earth Day everyone!
P.S. For 150 or so other ways to connect, check out our book, REUNION: How We Heal Our Broken Connection to the Earth. (You can click on the title to order it.) It's out! Ted Carter and I thank you--and we'd like to think Mother Earth will too.
Wednesday, March 3, 2010
Our food under fire—again
Right now, there’s a storm brewing across the organic dairy farms of America because the USDA is about to decide once and for all whether to allow Monsanto to sell genetically modified alfalfa seed. If you like knowing you can always get things like milk, butter, cheese, and ice cream that didn’t come from cows fed in the hideous animal concentration camps called CAFOs (concentrated animal feeding operations) and pumped full of hormones and antibiotic cocktails—that end up in your system, by the way—listen up.
The organic dairy industry is a thriving one ($1.4 billion business annually). Its dairy cattle eat alfalfa for much of the year. At Organic Valley, the largest organic farmer cooperative in the U.S., for example, the cows eat a totally organic diet that averages 32 pounds of certified organic alfalfa per day—60% of their diet. If genetically modified alfalfa is approved, its inevitable pollen drift would eventually contaminate and destroy the natural organic alfalfa crops and seed stocks that these cattle depend on.
Certified organic animals cannot eat genetically modified food. Ingesting GM’d forage would result in the decertification of organic dairy farmers. Organic alfalfa is already expensive and hard to find and if existing stocks are contaminated by GM’d alfalfa, it would be even harder for organic farmers to find enough grain to feed their animals.
Genetically modified organisms (GMOs) are plants that have had one or more elements of their DNA altered—to add pesticide to them, for example. In the case of Monsanto’s premier GMOs, which are basically delivery systems for one of Monsanto’s biggest selling pesticides, RoundUp, the seeds are made to be RoundUp resistant, or as their naming convention refers to it, “RoundUp Ready.” RoundUp, by the way, is a glyphosate, a pesticide ingredient that has been listed as “the third most common cause of pesticide illness in farm workers. It is the most common form of reported pesticide poisoning in landscape gardeners.” (That quote, along with a lot more troubling news can be found here.) It is also a known carcinogen. Being “RoundUp Ready,” means it’s impervious to RoundUp because its DNA has been altered to make it pesticide friendly. When it sprouts and RoundUp is sprayed on it, the weeds around it—and many unintended targets in the soil—will die, but the sprout won’t. It’s RoundUp Ready and able to thrive in a pesticide pool. In this case, it will grow into the genetically altered alfalfa that ends up going into the gut of ruminant dairy cows.
While Monsanto insists that proper “stewardship” would minimize pollen contamination of non-GM’d alfalfa, farmers who have been watching the pattern of GMOs know the drill. "The USDA cannot ensure GMO alfalfa can be grown without cross-contaminating other crops, so it should not be allowed and it is not needed. Farmers have been growing alfalfa successfully for a hundred years," says Organic Valley CEO George Siemon. This also threatens non-organic farmers who choose not to grow GM’d crops.
Alfalfa is the third most valuable crop in the U.S. ($8 billion per year, grown on more than 21 million acres) and fourth most widely grown (behind corn, soy and wheat). Besides dairy cows, it’s used as feed for beef cattle, pork, lamb, sheep, and by bees for honey production--and also shows up as the proverbial alfalfa sprouts. Alfalfa plays a pivotal role in crop rotation because it helps prevent nitrogen leaching and helps maintain nutrient levels and organic matter in soil. It’s also the first perennial seed to be proposed as a GE crop and it has a huge pollination radius—it drifts far and wide.
Fred Kirschenmann is the Iowa Leopold Center Distinguished Fellow and a farmer in North Dakota. “Alfalfa is a perennial with a three-mile pollination radius, so farm buffers won't work," he said. "It is impossible to contain." But its capacity to carry its contamination long distances and basically take over any competing non-GM’d alfalfa is only part of the story.
It’s also impossible to know what the long-term effects of eating GMO’d food are likely to be. Before GMOs were initially approved in the mid 1990s, even scientists at the FDA were alarmed at what they were seeing in tests being run, but their opinions were ignored and approval moved forward. (If you really want to dig into this nasty history of GMOs, fasten your seat belt and read Jeffrey Smith’s books, mentioned at the end of this blog entry.) “Any politician or scientist who tells you these products are safe is either very stupid or lying,” says Geneticist David Suzuki. “The experiments have simply not been done.”
Fred Kirschenmann echoes that. "We still don't know the long-term effect of GM crops on the health of animals and people," he says. "It took us 40 years to find out that CFCs were blowing a hole in the ozone."
In a matter of a few years, Monsanto’s GMO’d seed has garnered 95% of the market share of soy grown in this country and 80% of the corn. In Canada there’s no organic canola industry at all. (And it’s hard to find in the U.S.) It was wiped out by GMO’d varieties that contaminated it by cross pollination and sometimes by simply falling off farm trucks that passed on roads and blew into fields and took root. Because Mother Nature is so efficient, windblown seed pollen can end up anywhere. And does. A test strip of GMO’d wheat blew from its spot in western Canada and ended up contaminating wheat growing in several spots in Europe.
Monsanto has been successfully—mostly without us being able to know it—shoving GMOs down our throats since they were first approved under false pretenses in the mid-90s. Pitched as the food that would end hunger, be drought and pest resistant, and reduce pesticide use while surviving the rigors of climate change, GMOs have been a huge flop, have weakened the diversity of our heritage seed stocks, and posed risks to our environment that are incalculable. (Monsanto’s claims that its products require less pesticide was shot down by a 2009 study that showed that during its 13-year examination, the use of RoundUp ready seed increased herbicide use by 383 million pounds.) HRH Charles, Prince of Wales, an ardent environmentalist, has called GMOs the "biggest environmental disaster of all time."
Considering their deep prevalence in our food chain, they’re also a well-kept secret. Monsanto refuses to label GMOs—and it can—because in many states it’s actually against the law to label a food as a GMO because of so-called food libel laws mandated by interest groups after the famous case between Oprah and the Cattleman’s Association (the CA lost). Monsanto doesn’t want us to know when and if we’re eating GMOs because it knows from surveys that most people wouldn’t eat them if they were offered a choice. No such laws exist in the EU where GMO labeling is required, and they are banned in places like Ireland and Egypt. In many African nations they are not allowed even as free food aid.
These GMOs pose absolutely no advantage to you the consumer. They’re not cheaper, more nutritious or safer. In fact they’re the opposite, not only because of the unknowns associated with their safety but the downstream externalities, the real costs to us, our bodies and our planet. The stage on which this is being played out isn’t just about alfalfa. It’s about our right to participate as consumers—to know what we’re eating and whether it’s safe for us and our families—and to demand accountability of our government agencies to do their jobs and look out for our health, not the interests of the corporations whose only interest is a healthy bottom line.
For Monsanto, getting this approval is win-win. There is no down side. They not only will be able to sell their seed but if the past is prologue, they’ll be able to reap the benefits of this uncontrolled pollination. It’s happened before. One of the most famous cases comes from a Canadian canola grower named Percy Schmeiser who was sued by Monsanto for patent violation. Monsanto had discovered plots of its proprietary RoundUp Ready canola growing in Schmeiser’s fields. Schmeiser, a lifelong seed saver who had carefully collected 50 years worth of heritage canola seed, had not planted Monsanto’s seed. It had simply blown onto his farm from elsewhere and taken root. His own crops were contaminated and his heritage seed stores ruined. Nonetheless, Canada’s Supreme Court ruled that it didn’t matter how the seed got onto his farm; he was liable. Monsanto won. This story has been repeated hundreds of times with American farmers.
Today, March 3, is the last day the USDA is taking comments from consumers about whether or not to deregulate GMO alfalfa and release it into our food systems and into the world’s air currents. Contact them and your elected representatives. It’s easy. Just press a couple of keys on your cellphone or computer keyboard. This is huge. It matters to you and the generations that will eat the food produced by the soils that will harbor these crops. Let’s not condemn them to unknown and unknowable dangers and our planet to further contamination and unwanted agents of change.
What you can do TODAY:
The organic dairy industry is a thriving one ($1.4 billion business annually). Its dairy cattle eat alfalfa for much of the year. At Organic Valley, the largest organic farmer cooperative in the U.S., for example, the cows eat a totally organic diet that averages 32 pounds of certified organic alfalfa per day—60% of their diet. If genetically modified alfalfa is approved, its inevitable pollen drift would eventually contaminate and destroy the natural organic alfalfa crops and seed stocks that these cattle depend on.
Certified organic animals cannot eat genetically modified food. Ingesting GM’d forage would result in the decertification of organic dairy farmers. Organic alfalfa is already expensive and hard to find and if existing stocks are contaminated by GM’d alfalfa, it would be even harder for organic farmers to find enough grain to feed their animals.
Genetically modified organisms (GMOs) are plants that have had one or more elements of their DNA altered—to add pesticide to them, for example. In the case of Monsanto’s premier GMOs, which are basically delivery systems for one of Monsanto’s biggest selling pesticides, RoundUp, the seeds are made to be RoundUp resistant, or as their naming convention refers to it, “RoundUp Ready.” RoundUp, by the way, is a glyphosate, a pesticide ingredient that has been listed as “the third most common cause of pesticide illness in farm workers. It is the most common form of reported pesticide poisoning in landscape gardeners.” (That quote, along with a lot more troubling news can be found here.) It is also a known carcinogen. Being “RoundUp Ready,” means it’s impervious to RoundUp because its DNA has been altered to make it pesticide friendly. When it sprouts and RoundUp is sprayed on it, the weeds around it—and many unintended targets in the soil—will die, but the sprout won’t. It’s RoundUp Ready and able to thrive in a pesticide pool. In this case, it will grow into the genetically altered alfalfa that ends up going into the gut of ruminant dairy cows.
While Monsanto insists that proper “stewardship” would minimize pollen contamination of non-GM’d alfalfa, farmers who have been watching the pattern of GMOs know the drill. "The USDA cannot ensure GMO alfalfa can be grown without cross-contaminating other crops, so it should not be allowed and it is not needed. Farmers have been growing alfalfa successfully for a hundred years," says Organic Valley CEO George Siemon. This also threatens non-organic farmers who choose not to grow GM’d crops.
Alfalfa is the third most valuable crop in the U.S. ($8 billion per year, grown on more than 21 million acres) and fourth most widely grown (behind corn, soy and wheat). Besides dairy cows, it’s used as feed for beef cattle, pork, lamb, sheep, and by bees for honey production--and also shows up as the proverbial alfalfa sprouts. Alfalfa plays a pivotal role in crop rotation because it helps prevent nitrogen leaching and helps maintain nutrient levels and organic matter in soil. It’s also the first perennial seed to be proposed as a GE crop and it has a huge pollination radius—it drifts far and wide.
Fred Kirschenmann is the Iowa Leopold Center Distinguished Fellow and a farmer in North Dakota. “Alfalfa is a perennial with a three-mile pollination radius, so farm buffers won't work," he said. "It is impossible to contain." But its capacity to carry its contamination long distances and basically take over any competing non-GM’d alfalfa is only part of the story.
It’s also impossible to know what the long-term effects of eating GMO’d food are likely to be. Before GMOs were initially approved in the mid 1990s, even scientists at the FDA were alarmed at what they were seeing in tests being run, but their opinions were ignored and approval moved forward. (If you really want to dig into this nasty history of GMOs, fasten your seat belt and read Jeffrey Smith’s books, mentioned at the end of this blog entry.) “Any politician or scientist who tells you these products are safe is either very stupid or lying,” says Geneticist David Suzuki. “The experiments have simply not been done.”
Fred Kirschenmann echoes that. "We still don't know the long-term effect of GM crops on the health of animals and people," he says. "It took us 40 years to find out that CFCs were blowing a hole in the ozone."
In a matter of a few years, Monsanto’s GMO’d seed has garnered 95% of the market share of soy grown in this country and 80% of the corn. In Canada there’s no organic canola industry at all. (And it’s hard to find in the U.S.) It was wiped out by GMO’d varieties that contaminated it by cross pollination and sometimes by simply falling off farm trucks that passed on roads and blew into fields and took root. Because Mother Nature is so efficient, windblown seed pollen can end up anywhere. And does. A test strip of GMO’d wheat blew from its spot in western Canada and ended up contaminating wheat growing in several spots in Europe.
Monsanto has been successfully—mostly without us being able to know it—shoving GMOs down our throats since they were first approved under false pretenses in the mid-90s. Pitched as the food that would end hunger, be drought and pest resistant, and reduce pesticide use while surviving the rigors of climate change, GMOs have been a huge flop, have weakened the diversity of our heritage seed stocks, and posed risks to our environment that are incalculable. (Monsanto’s claims that its products require less pesticide was shot down by a 2009 study that showed that during its 13-year examination, the use of RoundUp ready seed increased herbicide use by 383 million pounds.) HRH Charles, Prince of Wales, an ardent environmentalist, has called GMOs the "biggest environmental disaster of all time."
Considering their deep prevalence in our food chain, they’re also a well-kept secret. Monsanto refuses to label GMOs—and it can—because in many states it’s actually against the law to label a food as a GMO because of so-called food libel laws mandated by interest groups after the famous case between Oprah and the Cattleman’s Association (the CA lost). Monsanto doesn’t want us to know when and if we’re eating GMOs because it knows from surveys that most people wouldn’t eat them if they were offered a choice. No such laws exist in the EU where GMO labeling is required, and they are banned in places like Ireland and Egypt. In many African nations they are not allowed even as free food aid.
These GMOs pose absolutely no advantage to you the consumer. They’re not cheaper, more nutritious or safer. In fact they’re the opposite, not only because of the unknowns associated with their safety but the downstream externalities, the real costs to us, our bodies and our planet. The stage on which this is being played out isn’t just about alfalfa. It’s about our right to participate as consumers—to know what we’re eating and whether it’s safe for us and our families—and to demand accountability of our government agencies to do their jobs and look out for our health, not the interests of the corporations whose only interest is a healthy bottom line.
For Monsanto, getting this approval is win-win. There is no down side. They not only will be able to sell their seed but if the past is prologue, they’ll be able to reap the benefits of this uncontrolled pollination. It’s happened before. One of the most famous cases comes from a Canadian canola grower named Percy Schmeiser who was sued by Monsanto for patent violation. Monsanto had discovered plots of its proprietary RoundUp Ready canola growing in Schmeiser’s fields. Schmeiser, a lifelong seed saver who had carefully collected 50 years worth of heritage canola seed, had not planted Monsanto’s seed. It had simply blown onto his farm from elsewhere and taken root. His own crops were contaminated and his heritage seed stores ruined. Nonetheless, Canada’s Supreme Court ruled that it didn’t matter how the seed got onto his farm; he was liable. Monsanto won. This story has been repeated hundreds of times with American farmers.
Today, March 3, is the last day the USDA is taking comments from consumers about whether or not to deregulate GMO alfalfa and release it into our food systems and into the world’s air currents. Contact them and your elected representatives. It’s easy. Just press a couple of keys on your cellphone or computer keyboard. This is huge. It matters to you and the generations that will eat the food produced by the soils that will harbor these crops. Let’s not condemn them to unknown and unknowable dangers and our planet to further contamination and unwanted agents of change.
What you can do TODAY:
- Contact the USDA with your comments by going here. (Sample: “I DO NOT support the deregulation of GMO alfalfa. Please reject Monsanto’s request. Thank you.”)
- Call your Senators and your Congressperson. Urge them to tell the USDA to reject Monsanto’s application to sell GMO’d alfalfa, or to even grow so-called test strips. Don’t know how to find them? Go here. Or call the U.S. Capitol Switchboard at (202) 224-3121 and ask for your Senators’/Representative’s office numbers.
- If you are on Facebook, click here to post the petition to your Wall.
- If you have a Twitter account, click here to automatically send a tweet about it.
- Learn more about GMOs (also called GE—genetically engineered—crops or seeds) and how they are affecting our seed stocks, our soil, our nutrition, creating trade imbalances with our global customers and how GM’d seeds are destroying lives in third world countries. Read Jeffrey Smith’s illuminating 10-part series here at Huffington Post. (You’ll find his amazing books mentioned there too.)
- If you’re planning to grow a garden this year, support organic heirloom seed companies like Seed Savers.
Wednesday, January 20, 2010
Reclaiming a spiritual birthright
(First posted on the Caroline Myss Facebook fan page 1/13/10)
Happy New Year everyone! And a special heartfelt thank you to Caroline (and David Smith) for offering me this forum to write about what’s happening on our beloved planet and how it affects our spiritual lives. My thanks as well to all of you who emailed me after my first newsletter. I appreciate your many kind comments, questions and support.
In the last newsletter I talked about how our first chakra, located in our tailbones, is the fundamental base of our energetic consciousness, the very foundation of what we could call our spiritual skeleton (what Caroline refers to as our “energy spinal column”). It is through this “root” chakra that our physical, social, emotional and immune systems merge with our primary connection to the earth and nature itself. When we objectify the earth and its creatures as mere things put here for us to use up, we shatter that connection. We are then out of balance at a very basic level and lose a vital sense of our relatedness to one another and the earth. We also shut ourselves off from an ancient capacity to see the earth clearly and understand it in ways we once could, automatically and intuitively. We feel the loss of this “second nature” keenly because it is a part of our spiritual birthright to be one with, in tune with, our earth. As the visionary ecologist Paul Hawken says, “We are nature.” We are it and it is us. When we find ways to reconnect to the earth—when we awaken to this truth—we also connect more fully to our spirits, gaining a deeper understanding of not only the earth but our own humanity.
“If you think of ourselves coming out of the earth,” said Joseph Campbell, “we are the consciousness of the earth. These are the eyes of the earth. And this is the voice of the earth.” It has always been so, and we are taught of our earthbound connection in some of the earliest stories we hear. In the book of Genesis, for example, the first human life form is created from dirt. The first two human beings set up housekeeping in a garden. It doesn’t get any more basic than that. We eat and drink the products of the earth. We breathe its oxygen. We sleep under its skies. We return to it when we die. There is no cycle of our lives that does not include it at every second. To be so disconnected from it as to have no sense of its presence everywhere in our lives is to lose one of the most primal balancing components of our bodies and spirits. And reconnecting begins with simple acts that teach us how to listen to and appreciate our intuitive brains, the invisible piece of us that once showed us how to work in harmony with the climate, the land and the resources of our planetary home. With our “earth consciousness” pointing the way, we can find these opportunities for awakening right in front of our faces and often they land in the cultural consciousness at just the right moment.
It’s no cosmic accident, for example, that it is during this period of the year that Native Americans call the “looks within” time—when we are both beset by alarming headlines about the state of our climate and the earth’s health and already craving the sight of green grass and the feel of warmer air—that a film like Avatar arrived on the world scene. As an eye-pleasing and exciting fable that uses advanced 3-D technology to literally deliver its brave new world into your lap while you watch, its initial success (it broke records by becoming the first film to gross over $1 billion in its first 17 days) may come from a deeper appeal.
Avatar’s director James Cameron sets his story on the planetary moon of Pandora, a place where the first chakra and its cosmic truth of All is One is intact and fully operational. It’s a bucolic world where rhythm, balance and symbiosis are fundamental, its inhabitants live in harmony with their planet, each other and all its life forms, and their most sacred spot is a giant tree not unlike one of our own giant sequoias (just MUCH bigger). This, the filmmaker seems to be saying, is what a conscious Eden looks like, what a true garden feels like, what congruence and connection with your planet means. Indeed, every life form on Pandora has a physical “connector” that lets it bond to other life forms. When the film’s hero leaps aboard a horse and connects the end of his hair braid to the animal’s, he’s jolted by the sensation that makes his eyes snap. This is what connection to their web of life feels like and how intimate their spiritual connections to the planet and each other are—and he likes what he feels. When interviewed last summer, Cameron said the fictional Na’vi people of Pandora “represent something that is our higher selves, or our aspirational selves, what we would like to think we are." In the film when the characters say, “I see you,” they model this higher self and its heightened level of awareness, where “see” means more than what their eyes are capable of capturing. They mean seeing through to the soul of the other, to the piece of something they both belong to and understand, their common connection to the planet that gives them everything. (As if to underscore the importance of “seeing,” it’s no accident that the film begins and ends with moments of awakening.)
Cameron and his vast technical production team used a technical process called stereoscopic filmmaking that enables a hyper-realistic science fiction story (“animation” doesn’t begin to describe the film’s look), in which scenes of the devastation and horror being wrought on the planet are so disturbing that I heard people groaning and even sobbing at what they saw. While film has always had the ability to transport us—and Avatar is certainly a great visual feast that’s just plain fun to look at—this film seems to have touched a significant chord. Perhaps it is the ultra-real vision of savage destruction of something as beautiful and benign as Pandora that hits too close to home. Or perhaps like Jake, the film’s protagonist—a hybrid being who straddles two worlds with opposing needs and values, we too long to exist in bodies that are more connected to our planet and a community that nurtures our souls. Like him, many of us are looking for our own individual path to that evolutionary rebirth that will help us recapture our own sense of belonging on the planet we call home.
What you can do
For those of us in the northern hemisphere January marks the real settling in of winter, the time to slow down, go within, cocoon and do our inner work. While many of us look out and see still, white, frozen landscapes, the truth is that beneath the surface, the earth is never busier, renewing itself in preparation for the riot of blossom and new life we call spring. It is now that animal young nestle and grow in the wombs of their mothers. It is during these months beneath the brown and snow-covered mantle of the earth, that life—much of it invisible—is in motion. But even in areas where the climate is milder and what’s visible changes little—as is true in the south and much of the west coast in the United States—this internal rhythm, set to the longer nights and shorter days, is part of the same cycle. Winter’s shift inward reflects more than mere temperature and weather. Rather it’s a recognition of an ancient sensual and internal pulse. January invites us to envision new beginnings and goals. With long periods of darkness slowly shifting to longer periods of daylight, it is the perfect time to pack in new sensations, to look at our relationship to the earth and resolve to deepen it by learning more about it, becoming more aware of its rhythms, and honoring its centrality to our lives.
There are many good, entertaining and useful ways to take advantage of this “looks within” time of the year. Here are a few suggestions:
o CATCH UP on some of the fabulous books available on every green and earth-based topic you can imagine. If you are interested in how to see the earth anew, check out Paul Devereux’s brilliant book, Re-Visioning the Earth: a Guide to Opening the Healing Channels Between Mind and Nature. If you haven’t yet heard of or read any of the books that Michael Pollan has written, start now while there are only half a dozen to catch up on. Pollan, who writes regularly for the New York Times is a biologist who found his calling in teaching us how to look at our food differently, as if our health depended on it, which it turns out it does. His most recent three, Omnivore’s Dilemma, In Defense of Food, and his newest, Food Rules: An Eaters Manifesto have single-handedly changed the national discourse on nutrition. Bringing it to the Table: On Farming and Food by Wendell Berry is another good book written in celebration of good fresh food healthfully grown. If you want to think ahead to the fun you plan to have in your garden this spring, read Barbara Kingsolver’s wonderful Animal, Vegetable, Miracle.
o WATCH a documentary. There are so many out there with new ones becoming available monthly. It’s so much easier these days to make a film about something you believe in passionately. While there are still a good many films being underwritten by the studio system, lots of gifted documentarians aren’t waiting to be signed by big studios or even independents. They’re following their passions and getting their own works filmed, edited and distributed in small venues if necessary. Some recent good films are Dirt, The Movie, which tells the fascinating story of the declining state of our soil in the world, Trashed, which describes one of the fastest growing industries in the world (what we throw away in North America is eye-poppingly disturbing) and Food, Inc., an examination of the safety and viability of the food commonly available for mass consumption in markets today.
o CREATE something. Take a pottery class and work with clay. Learn to knit or weave fabrics. If you know how (or want to learn), build a birdhouse or bird feeder from recycled wood. Feel the joy of making something with your own hands out of materials that come from the earth and its creatures.
o SEE what you see. Madison Avenue used to have a term for an awakening that happened to a consumer who had just bought something for the first time. It was called “target attraction.” Once you buy something you’ve never had before—a new model car for example—suddenly you feel like you’re seeing that same model car everywhere. There were just as many of those cars out there before you bought yours; it just means they weren’t on your radar. Target attraction works for other things that come into your life anew. When you have a child, it seems there are suddenly babies everywhere. If you shave your head, the world seems much balder than before. As winter progresses, what’s on your earth radar? What keeps getting your attention? What seems to be everywhere you turn these days?
o CELEBRATE. The French philosopher Blaise Pascal said, “The least movement is of importance to all nature. The entire ocean is affected by a pebble.” Every effort you make to understand the place you live in nature—however you make that happen—opens a door. Inside every door lies the gift of insight. Enjoy it and be grateful for it. Then go do something else.
Happy New Year everyone! And a special heartfelt thank you to Caroline (and David Smith) for offering me this forum to write about what’s happening on our beloved planet and how it affects our spiritual lives. My thanks as well to all of you who emailed me after my first newsletter. I appreciate your many kind comments, questions and support.
In the last newsletter I talked about how our first chakra, located in our tailbones, is the fundamental base of our energetic consciousness, the very foundation of what we could call our spiritual skeleton (what Caroline refers to as our “energy spinal column”). It is through this “root” chakra that our physical, social, emotional and immune systems merge with our primary connection to the earth and nature itself. When we objectify the earth and its creatures as mere things put here for us to use up, we shatter that connection. We are then out of balance at a very basic level and lose a vital sense of our relatedness to one another and the earth. We also shut ourselves off from an ancient capacity to see the earth clearly and understand it in ways we once could, automatically and intuitively. We feel the loss of this “second nature” keenly because it is a part of our spiritual birthright to be one with, in tune with, our earth. As the visionary ecologist Paul Hawken says, “We are nature.” We are it and it is us. When we find ways to reconnect to the earth—when we awaken to this truth—we also connect more fully to our spirits, gaining a deeper understanding of not only the earth but our own humanity.
“If you think of ourselves coming out of the earth,” said Joseph Campbell, “we are the consciousness of the earth. These are the eyes of the earth. And this is the voice of the earth.” It has always been so, and we are taught of our earthbound connection in some of the earliest stories we hear. In the book of Genesis, for example, the first human life form is created from dirt. The first two human beings set up housekeeping in a garden. It doesn’t get any more basic than that. We eat and drink the products of the earth. We breathe its oxygen. We sleep under its skies. We return to it when we die. There is no cycle of our lives that does not include it at every second. To be so disconnected from it as to have no sense of its presence everywhere in our lives is to lose one of the most primal balancing components of our bodies and spirits. And reconnecting begins with simple acts that teach us how to listen to and appreciate our intuitive brains, the invisible piece of us that once showed us how to work in harmony with the climate, the land and the resources of our planetary home. With our “earth consciousness” pointing the way, we can find these opportunities for awakening right in front of our faces and often they land in the cultural consciousness at just the right moment.
It’s no cosmic accident, for example, that it is during this period of the year that Native Americans call the “looks within” time—when we are both beset by alarming headlines about the state of our climate and the earth’s health and already craving the sight of green grass and the feel of warmer air—that a film like Avatar arrived on the world scene. As an eye-pleasing and exciting fable that uses advanced 3-D technology to literally deliver its brave new world into your lap while you watch, its initial success (it broke records by becoming the first film to gross over $1 billion in its first 17 days) may come from a deeper appeal.
Avatar’s director James Cameron sets his story on the planetary moon of Pandora, a place where the first chakra and its cosmic truth of All is One is intact and fully operational. It’s a bucolic world where rhythm, balance and symbiosis are fundamental, its inhabitants live in harmony with their planet, each other and all its life forms, and their most sacred spot is a giant tree not unlike one of our own giant sequoias (just MUCH bigger). This, the filmmaker seems to be saying, is what a conscious Eden looks like, what a true garden feels like, what congruence and connection with your planet means. Indeed, every life form on Pandora has a physical “connector” that lets it bond to other life forms. When the film’s hero leaps aboard a horse and connects the end of his hair braid to the animal’s, he’s jolted by the sensation that makes his eyes snap. This is what connection to their web of life feels like and how intimate their spiritual connections to the planet and each other are—and he likes what he feels. When interviewed last summer, Cameron said the fictional Na’vi people of Pandora “represent something that is our higher selves, or our aspirational selves, what we would like to think we are." In the film when the characters say, “I see you,” they model this higher self and its heightened level of awareness, where “see” means more than what their eyes are capable of capturing. They mean seeing through to the soul of the other, to the piece of something they both belong to and understand, their common connection to the planet that gives them everything. (As if to underscore the importance of “seeing,” it’s no accident that the film begins and ends with moments of awakening.)
Cameron and his vast technical production team used a technical process called stereoscopic filmmaking that enables a hyper-realistic science fiction story (“animation” doesn’t begin to describe the film’s look), in which scenes of the devastation and horror being wrought on the planet are so disturbing that I heard people groaning and even sobbing at what they saw. While film has always had the ability to transport us—and Avatar is certainly a great visual feast that’s just plain fun to look at—this film seems to have touched a significant chord. Perhaps it is the ultra-real vision of savage destruction of something as beautiful and benign as Pandora that hits too close to home. Or perhaps like Jake, the film’s protagonist—a hybrid being who straddles two worlds with opposing needs and values, we too long to exist in bodies that are more connected to our planet and a community that nurtures our souls. Like him, many of us are looking for our own individual path to that evolutionary rebirth that will help us recapture our own sense of belonging on the planet we call home.
What you can do
For those of us in the northern hemisphere January marks the real settling in of winter, the time to slow down, go within, cocoon and do our inner work. While many of us look out and see still, white, frozen landscapes, the truth is that beneath the surface, the earth is never busier, renewing itself in preparation for the riot of blossom and new life we call spring. It is now that animal young nestle and grow in the wombs of their mothers. It is during these months beneath the brown and snow-covered mantle of the earth, that life—much of it invisible—is in motion. But even in areas where the climate is milder and what’s visible changes little—as is true in the south and much of the west coast in the United States—this internal rhythm, set to the longer nights and shorter days, is part of the same cycle. Winter’s shift inward reflects more than mere temperature and weather. Rather it’s a recognition of an ancient sensual and internal pulse. January invites us to envision new beginnings and goals. With long periods of darkness slowly shifting to longer periods of daylight, it is the perfect time to pack in new sensations, to look at our relationship to the earth and resolve to deepen it by learning more about it, becoming more aware of its rhythms, and honoring its centrality to our lives.
There are many good, entertaining and useful ways to take advantage of this “looks within” time of the year. Here are a few suggestions:
o CATCH UP on some of the fabulous books available on every green and earth-based topic you can imagine. If you are interested in how to see the earth anew, check out Paul Devereux’s brilliant book, Re-Visioning the Earth: a Guide to Opening the Healing Channels Between Mind and Nature. If you haven’t yet heard of or read any of the books that Michael Pollan has written, start now while there are only half a dozen to catch up on. Pollan, who writes regularly for the New York Times is a biologist who found his calling in teaching us how to look at our food differently, as if our health depended on it, which it turns out it does. His most recent three, Omnivore’s Dilemma, In Defense of Food, and his newest, Food Rules: An Eaters Manifesto have single-handedly changed the national discourse on nutrition. Bringing it to the Table: On Farming and Food by Wendell Berry is another good book written in celebration of good fresh food healthfully grown. If you want to think ahead to the fun you plan to have in your garden this spring, read Barbara Kingsolver’s wonderful Animal, Vegetable, Miracle.
o WATCH a documentary. There are so many out there with new ones becoming available monthly. It’s so much easier these days to make a film about something you believe in passionately. While there are still a good many films being underwritten by the studio system, lots of gifted documentarians aren’t waiting to be signed by big studios or even independents. They’re following their passions and getting their own works filmed, edited and distributed in small venues if necessary. Some recent good films are Dirt, The Movie, which tells the fascinating story of the declining state of our soil in the world, Trashed, which describes one of the fastest growing industries in the world (what we throw away in North America is eye-poppingly disturbing) and Food, Inc., an examination of the safety and viability of the food commonly available for mass consumption in markets today.
o CREATE something. Take a pottery class and work with clay. Learn to knit or weave fabrics. If you know how (or want to learn), build a birdhouse or bird feeder from recycled wood. Feel the joy of making something with your own hands out of materials that come from the earth and its creatures.
o SEE what you see. Madison Avenue used to have a term for an awakening that happened to a consumer who had just bought something for the first time. It was called “target attraction.” Once you buy something you’ve never had before—a new model car for example—suddenly you feel like you’re seeing that same model car everywhere. There were just as many of those cars out there before you bought yours; it just means they weren’t on your radar. Target attraction works for other things that come into your life anew. When you have a child, it seems there are suddenly babies everywhere. If you shave your head, the world seems much balder than before. As winter progresses, what’s on your earth radar? What keeps getting your attention? What seems to be everywhere you turn these days?
o CELEBRATE. The French philosopher Blaise Pascal said, “The least movement is of importance to all nature. The entire ocean is affected by a pebble.” Every effort you make to understand the place you live in nature—however you make that happen—opens a door. Inside every door lies the gift of insight. Enjoy it and be grateful for it. Then go do something else.
Why Copenhagen should be on your spiritual radar
(Originally posted on http://www.myss.com/ and Facebook on 12/8/09)
This week Denmark becomes the epicenter of the world for eleven days, when thousands of people from around the globe—including spiritual, social, scientific, entrepreneurial and political leaders—gather in Copenhagen to engage in an unprecedented undertaking. Their task: to reach a consensus about how to address the warming of the planet while there is still enough time for something meaningful to be done. And as they know so well, the clock is ticking.
Each of us has a very deep stake in the outcomes there. Why? Because, while the news sound bites may center on the various countries’ carbon dioxide emissions targets or what energy alternative may be the most efficient and cost-effective, there’s a much deeper truth unfolding. Copenhagen isn’t just the stage on which the nuts and bolts of the solutions to global warming are being hammered out. It can also be seen as a confluence of two sides: the disciples of reason and intellect joining forces with the disciples of spirit and intuition—much like the left and right sides of our brains—meeting in a country that models how commerce and consciousness about the ecology of the earth can coexist—and thrive. It is also a highly cosmically significant event because it represents the first time that a key mystical principle has been recognized on a global scale.
In the language that Caroline Myss has brought to the world through her teaching about the human energy system, Denmark’s Climate Change Conference will promote the cosmic truth of our first chakra: All is One. What affects one affects the whole.
This truth resides in our spiritual energy systems, and it is an invisible one. But its power lies in the fact that it is now directing us to some very visible world consequences being played out in the great planetary drama of global warming and climate change. Ever more rapidly and undeniably, we are beginning to see the stark reality of this very real drama—in what is happening to our ice masses, our water resources, our exhausted and overworked soil, our polluted air, and our dying oceans—and it is taking a toll on us. Psychotherapist and author Miriam Greenspan addressed this when she said that the condition PTSD isn’t restricted to soldiers and civilians caught in the grip of war and whims of vicious storms. It resides in the collective unconscious now. At some level, no matter how “normal” the world seems, tumultuous change and fast shifting sands move with dizzying speed beneath our feet. And we all know it; we sense it, even if we cannot yet articulate it.
Clearly the challenges the change agents in Copenhagen face are monumental. It is no secret that there is tremendous opposition from the many political and economic interests who have a vested interest in maintaining business as usual, no matter the cost to the earth. But more and more, other voices are piercing that fog and increasingly they are coming from spiritual leaders. In late November the Dalai Lama wrote of the urgency of addressing global warming. It should be “number one” on the list of critical global issues, he said. “As far as the natural environment is concerned, we have a two-fold responsibility; firstly to take greater steps to care for our world and, secondly, to undo the serious environmental degradation that has resulted from incorrect human behaviour.” Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf affirms this. “Among the duties of a proper Islamic state today,” he said, “is to act and to make its decisions in such a manner that the environment is not adversely impacted.” The late Father Thomas Berry put an even finer point on it when he said, “No nation has a future if the planet does not have a future.” What these wise men are acknowledging is a truth that politicians have yet to grapple with but it is one that a finely-tuned soul sees with instant clarity.
All is one.
How did we get to this place, where we are so blind that we have become not only complacent about living on a planet that is dying under our feet but—in a disheartening number of cases—even want to fight to maintain that condition at status quo? Where does such madness come from? It comes from having a shattered first chakra, from being disconnected from our material “rootedness.” It is here at the bottom of our tailbones—the foundation of what Myss calls our “energy spinal column”—that the connections of our physical, social, emotional—even our immune—systems merge with our primary connection to the earth itself. When we sit on the earth, we are literally plugging our energy systems into the earth—the original power station.
This root chakra is the filter of every transaction and the gateway to the rest of the chakras. It tells us whether we fight, flee or relax when someone or some task approaches. It tells us who to trust and when we’re safe. It tells us when we are in danger and in the millennia before fire departments, civil defense warning horns and The Weather Channel it told us how to listen to the land, to sense coming storms, even to smell fire in the air. Our first chakra ties us to the earth, to nature. When we lose that connection, when it shatters—through neglect, indifference or a refusal to acknowledge its centrality to our lives—we are out of balance at a very basic level of survival, safety and sanity. We literally lose a critical sense of how we are related to one another and the earth. Over the last century as more of us moved from rural to urban areas, we slowly lost our connection and closeness to nature and the earth, becoming numbed to the havoc being wreaked on our planet and the illness of pollution that is slowly suffocating us all.
We are connected to the earth and to each other by every element in our environment. In Beijing, for example, as much as 80 percent of cancer deaths are related to the highly polluted air, with lung cancer the leading cause of death. On any given day, as much as one-fourth of the air pollution in Los Angeles comes from what has blown eastward from the Chinese mainland. Likewise, the toxic residues pumped skyward from our coal-burning plants can end up in the lungs of children in Europe and Asia. What happens to the earth happens to us. And what happens to one happens to all.
This is how our broken first chakra affects us. This is how it is playing out in the environmental crises we find ourselves surrounded by. But this is no time to sit idly by. Gandhi said to be the change you want to see. He knew that the human tendency is to wait for others to fix things. Waiting is spiritually lazy. We must become engaged and fix things too, starting with ourselves and the way we view and honor the earth that sustains us. We must understand that in the end the earth will endure. It is not the earth that needs us; it is humankind that needs the earth.
Keep Copenhagen on your spiritual radar for the next two weeks. Someday it may be remembered as the spot on the planet where a new kind of consciousness began to emerge, where a dimension beyond ego and self-interest first revealed itself and where the seeds of healing first took root and trumped the profit motive, giving birth to the cosmic human, caught like a snapshot in that week in December at the beginning of the end of the age of Hydrocarbon Man.
What you can do
The great German philosopher Goethe said, “Knowing isn’t enough; neither is being willing. We must do.” This is reflected in the single most common question that clients ask me: “What can I DO?” We all want for our actions to have some meaningful connection to the spiritual journeys we find ourselves on. We want to be mindful, as awake as we can consciously be. Whatever we can do to heighten our awareness in turn enlarges our vision so we can see more deeply. Seeing more deeply is the first step in healing a broken first chakra:
o EDUCATE YOURSELF: There are dozens of books and thousands of articles and websites that can explain in great detail how global warming is caused and how its effects are seen in every aspect of our lives, from stronger storms and longer wildfire seasons to more widespread drought and loss of vital nutrients in our soil.
o ASK QUESTIONS: Learn what’s happening in your own region. Call your agricultural extension service at your state university (in the U.S.) and ask for data that describes weather, rainfall, temperature and soil trends within a 50-mile area of where you live. Talk to the elders in your church or community. Ask a local farmer how life on his or her farm has changed in the last five decades—how the soil is different, how the quality of food has changed, how the relationship between the farmer and the land has evolved.
o BE DISCERNING: Whether you agree or disagree with someone who insists global warming is a myth, find out who pays his or her salary. The data available about the facts of global warming are overwhelming. But by all means, explore the rhetoric on both sides. Know why you believe what you believe. Question the character assassination and scare tactics of those who condemn holistic changes to the norm. This is one reason we can trust the work of NGOs (nongovernmental organizations). They are working for the good of the community and for the good of mankind, for intrinsic values and issues outside of themselves or a profit motive.
o KNOW YOU’RE IN GOOD COMPANY: We’re all in this together. As Einstein once said, the idea that we are separate from one another is an illusion. Everyone matters and everyone’s efforts count. Just like prayer, there is power in numbers. The more threads in a net, the stronger it is.
o DON’T GET DISCOURAGED: To paraphrase Voltaire, don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good. The slowest beginning is still a beginning. Remember the riddle of the Chinese gardener. His employer asks him, “When is the best time to plant a tree?” The gardener says, “100 years ago—but the second best time is today.” The same applies to the environmental crises we face today. The best time to start was thirty years ago but the second best time is right now.
o WANT TO DO MORE? Consider going to one of the next large gatherings of experts in issues affecting the environment, whether you want to be part of the actual solution or simply support others who are embracing that responsibility. Look into the international meeting of experts—and concerned world citizens—being held in Washington, D.C. in late February, 2010: http://www.worldforum.org/
o REMEMBER: Loving the earth you live on IS part of the solution. (For more about the Copenhagen conference, see http://en.cop15.dk/)
NEXT: How a shattered first chakra robs you of your spiritual birthright.
This week Denmark becomes the epicenter of the world for eleven days, when thousands of people from around the globe—including spiritual, social, scientific, entrepreneurial and political leaders—gather in Copenhagen to engage in an unprecedented undertaking. Their task: to reach a consensus about how to address the warming of the planet while there is still enough time for something meaningful to be done. And as they know so well, the clock is ticking.
Each of us has a very deep stake in the outcomes there. Why? Because, while the news sound bites may center on the various countries’ carbon dioxide emissions targets or what energy alternative may be the most efficient and cost-effective, there’s a much deeper truth unfolding. Copenhagen isn’t just the stage on which the nuts and bolts of the solutions to global warming are being hammered out. It can also be seen as a confluence of two sides: the disciples of reason and intellect joining forces with the disciples of spirit and intuition—much like the left and right sides of our brains—meeting in a country that models how commerce and consciousness about the ecology of the earth can coexist—and thrive. It is also a highly cosmically significant event because it represents the first time that a key mystical principle has been recognized on a global scale.
In the language that Caroline Myss has brought to the world through her teaching about the human energy system, Denmark’s Climate Change Conference will promote the cosmic truth of our first chakra: All is One. What affects one affects the whole.
This truth resides in our spiritual energy systems, and it is an invisible one. But its power lies in the fact that it is now directing us to some very visible world consequences being played out in the great planetary drama of global warming and climate change. Ever more rapidly and undeniably, we are beginning to see the stark reality of this very real drama—in what is happening to our ice masses, our water resources, our exhausted and overworked soil, our polluted air, and our dying oceans—and it is taking a toll on us. Psychotherapist and author Miriam Greenspan addressed this when she said that the condition PTSD isn’t restricted to soldiers and civilians caught in the grip of war and whims of vicious storms. It resides in the collective unconscious now. At some level, no matter how “normal” the world seems, tumultuous change and fast shifting sands move with dizzying speed beneath our feet. And we all know it; we sense it, even if we cannot yet articulate it.
Clearly the challenges the change agents in Copenhagen face are monumental. It is no secret that there is tremendous opposition from the many political and economic interests who have a vested interest in maintaining business as usual, no matter the cost to the earth. But more and more, other voices are piercing that fog and increasingly they are coming from spiritual leaders. In late November the Dalai Lama wrote of the urgency of addressing global warming. It should be “number one” on the list of critical global issues, he said. “As far as the natural environment is concerned, we have a two-fold responsibility; firstly to take greater steps to care for our world and, secondly, to undo the serious environmental degradation that has resulted from incorrect human behaviour.” Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf affirms this. “Among the duties of a proper Islamic state today,” he said, “is to act and to make its decisions in such a manner that the environment is not adversely impacted.” The late Father Thomas Berry put an even finer point on it when he said, “No nation has a future if the planet does not have a future.” What these wise men are acknowledging is a truth that politicians have yet to grapple with but it is one that a finely-tuned soul sees with instant clarity.
All is one.
How did we get to this place, where we are so blind that we have become not only complacent about living on a planet that is dying under our feet but—in a disheartening number of cases—even want to fight to maintain that condition at status quo? Where does such madness come from? It comes from having a shattered first chakra, from being disconnected from our material “rootedness.” It is here at the bottom of our tailbones—the foundation of what Myss calls our “energy spinal column”—that the connections of our physical, social, emotional—even our immune—systems merge with our primary connection to the earth itself. When we sit on the earth, we are literally plugging our energy systems into the earth—the original power station.
This root chakra is the filter of every transaction and the gateway to the rest of the chakras. It tells us whether we fight, flee or relax when someone or some task approaches. It tells us who to trust and when we’re safe. It tells us when we are in danger and in the millennia before fire departments, civil defense warning horns and The Weather Channel it told us how to listen to the land, to sense coming storms, even to smell fire in the air. Our first chakra ties us to the earth, to nature. When we lose that connection, when it shatters—through neglect, indifference or a refusal to acknowledge its centrality to our lives—we are out of balance at a very basic level of survival, safety and sanity. We literally lose a critical sense of how we are related to one another and the earth. Over the last century as more of us moved from rural to urban areas, we slowly lost our connection and closeness to nature and the earth, becoming numbed to the havoc being wreaked on our planet and the illness of pollution that is slowly suffocating us all.
We are connected to the earth and to each other by every element in our environment. In Beijing, for example, as much as 80 percent of cancer deaths are related to the highly polluted air, with lung cancer the leading cause of death. On any given day, as much as one-fourth of the air pollution in Los Angeles comes from what has blown eastward from the Chinese mainland. Likewise, the toxic residues pumped skyward from our coal-burning plants can end up in the lungs of children in Europe and Asia. What happens to the earth happens to us. And what happens to one happens to all.
This is how our broken first chakra affects us. This is how it is playing out in the environmental crises we find ourselves surrounded by. But this is no time to sit idly by. Gandhi said to be the change you want to see. He knew that the human tendency is to wait for others to fix things. Waiting is spiritually lazy. We must become engaged and fix things too, starting with ourselves and the way we view and honor the earth that sustains us. We must understand that in the end the earth will endure. It is not the earth that needs us; it is humankind that needs the earth.
Keep Copenhagen on your spiritual radar for the next two weeks. Someday it may be remembered as the spot on the planet where a new kind of consciousness began to emerge, where a dimension beyond ego and self-interest first revealed itself and where the seeds of healing first took root and trumped the profit motive, giving birth to the cosmic human, caught like a snapshot in that week in December at the beginning of the end of the age of Hydrocarbon Man.
What you can do
The great German philosopher Goethe said, “Knowing isn’t enough; neither is being willing. We must do.” This is reflected in the single most common question that clients ask me: “What can I DO?” We all want for our actions to have some meaningful connection to the spiritual journeys we find ourselves on. We want to be mindful, as awake as we can consciously be. Whatever we can do to heighten our awareness in turn enlarges our vision so we can see more deeply. Seeing more deeply is the first step in healing a broken first chakra:
o EDUCATE YOURSELF: There are dozens of books and thousands of articles and websites that can explain in great detail how global warming is caused and how its effects are seen in every aspect of our lives, from stronger storms and longer wildfire seasons to more widespread drought and loss of vital nutrients in our soil.
o ASK QUESTIONS: Learn what’s happening in your own region. Call your agricultural extension service at your state university (in the U.S.) and ask for data that describes weather, rainfall, temperature and soil trends within a 50-mile area of where you live. Talk to the elders in your church or community. Ask a local farmer how life on his or her farm has changed in the last five decades—how the soil is different, how the quality of food has changed, how the relationship between the farmer and the land has evolved.
o BE DISCERNING: Whether you agree or disagree with someone who insists global warming is a myth, find out who pays his or her salary. The data available about the facts of global warming are overwhelming. But by all means, explore the rhetoric on both sides. Know why you believe what you believe. Question the character assassination and scare tactics of those who condemn holistic changes to the norm. This is one reason we can trust the work of NGOs (nongovernmental organizations). They are working for the good of the community and for the good of mankind, for intrinsic values and issues outside of themselves or a profit motive.
o KNOW YOU’RE IN GOOD COMPANY: We’re all in this together. As Einstein once said, the idea that we are separate from one another is an illusion. Everyone matters and everyone’s efforts count. Just like prayer, there is power in numbers. The more threads in a net, the stronger it is.
o DON’T GET DISCOURAGED: To paraphrase Voltaire, don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good. The slowest beginning is still a beginning. Remember the riddle of the Chinese gardener. His employer asks him, “When is the best time to plant a tree?” The gardener says, “100 years ago—but the second best time is today.” The same applies to the environmental crises we face today. The best time to start was thirty years ago but the second best time is right now.
o WANT TO DO MORE? Consider going to one of the next large gatherings of experts in issues affecting the environment, whether you want to be part of the actual solution or simply support others who are embracing that responsibility. Look into the international meeting of experts—and concerned world citizens—being held in Washington, D.C. in late February, 2010: http://www.worldforum.org/
o REMEMBER: Loving the earth you live on IS part of the solution. (For more about the Copenhagen conference, see http://en.cop15.dk/)
NEXT: How a shattered first chakra robs you of your spiritual birthright.
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