New Perspectives

Like many humans alive right now, I feel fear and sadness over the state of the world often. When I listen to the news-- flavored as it is with negativity-- it delivers a blow to my gut and a constriction to my lungs, pain in the places I feel fear or grief. As you know, the main stream and alternative media are awash with bad news for our planet. You know the list...Countries at war, car bombs, climate change, peak oil, pandemic, floods, unemployment, corporate greed, agri-business monopoly, food contamination, nuclear testing, drought, disease, polluted waterways (life-blood poisoned), forests clear cut ( lungs asphyxiated ), mountains mined down (body broken), and on and on... I often think maybe I shouldn’t listen to the news, or read the news, or read at all....It is hard to take in, all this stuff. Like others, I really don’t want to feel this fear, this pain. I look at my two beautiful sons, and I wonder how I dared to bring them into this life at this crazy time. What is in store for them? What quality of life will they have? What quality of life will I have in five, ten years? I could just sink deep down into depression, knowing all that I know. Sometimes I do. How could you not, looking around you, hearing what you hear about life here and now? It’s a hard, hard time, and most say it will be getting worse. . .

Deep breath. Deep breath. Deep breath. I won’t be numbed. I won’t be paralyzed by all this. I am not hopeless. Like you, I am not helpless in the face of all this. I don't think that looking away from it all, averting our eyes and hearts, is the answer. We, as humans, are blessed by the power of consciousness. We can make choices based on what we notice and see and learn. When we notice we are afraid, we can take that as a signal that something needs to change. I can choose for myself, right now, light in place of darkenss.

This crazy destruction-filled world isn’t how it has to be. . . It isn’t how it has always been or will always be, either. Especially if we are willing to look. . . This is the first step towards choosing life.　
　
Putting Us into Context

Although it is all most of us have known of life, our industrial, technological era is but a blink in time. A flicker. Allowing a glimpse of this truth to penetrate our consciousness may offer some much needed perspective when we have fallen into despair. Seeing our culture from a distance, as though it is not the Only Way, can give a glimmer of hope, a vision of another way. I remember having a hard week one time in college. That weekend I took an airplane to see a friend. Flying high up above the world, which held me a bit hostage in my daily life, I was able to understand that my daily life wasn’t all that there is; that life is so much bigger than my personal troubles. The tiny roads below my window, the blocks of green fields, the tilt of the horizon, all of these things offered me widened perspective, a chance to see things differently.

I have recently been collecting some new forms of perspective. Below I offer you some timelines. These are metaphors collected from various thinkers. One may resonate with you more than another, therefore I provide a few. Take the time to read through them, allowing the imagery to surround you. Let them show you a glimmer of life only partly forgotten that still, somehwere in you, resides. . .

Timelines of Earth’s Life:

– Imagine that the Earth’s 4.6 billion year history is the former 108-story World Trade Center in New York. The bottom floor is the beginning of Earth. At floor 20 the first life appears (3.5 billion years ago). Halfway up oxygen breathing bacteria appear (2 billion years ago). Fish arrive at floor 98. Dinosaurs are on floor 104-107. Mammals show up on the top floor. Humans walk on two legs 3 inches from the top of the building. The Renaissance is in the top one- thousandth of an inch, less than even the last layer of paint. We can’t even see history since then.
( Thanks to Michael Shapiro of Ode Magazine, and to Peter Russell, author of Waking up in Time, who created this one.)

– Imagine that Earth’s life is condensed into one day– 24 hours. Earth birth is at midnight. At 5 pm the next day, comes organic life (until then having been purely geological). Mammals appear at 11:30 pm. Humans only appear at one second to midnight!
(Gratitude to Joanna Macy, Co-author of Thinking like a Mountain, among others.)

Timelines of Human Life on Earth.

– Condense all of the human story on earth into 24 hours. " Beginning at midnight until two O’clock in the afternoon, we live in small groups in Africa. We feel pretty vulnerable. We haven’t the strength of other creatures. But we have our remarkable hands... grunts and shouts...our capacity for language... Those days and nights on the verge of the forests, as we weave baskets and stories around our fires, represent the biggest hunk of our human experience. Then ....we move across the face of [the earth]. . . When we settle into agriculture...begin domesticating animals and fencing off our croplands and deciding that they could be owned as private property, when we build great cities with granaries and temples and observatories to chart the stars, the time is eleven fifty-eight. . . At six seconds to midnight comes a man called Buddha, and [then] Jesus. . . What now shapes our world – our industrial society with it’s bombs and bulldozers– has taken place in the last few seconds of the day we have known as humans." (Joanna Macy, pg 62-63, Thinking like a Mountain)

– "Visualize a distance of 100 feet; the length of a basketball court, plus 6 feet more. Imagine that this distance represents the last 1 million years of existence of the creatures who have become Homo sapiens. . . the last one-fifth of an inch of this hundred feet represents the length of time that we have lived in mass technological civilization, with the assumptions about life that and reality that you and I are taught to assume as ‘normal’. Not very long, and conceivably, not very normal."

– "Over the course of 1 million years the human lineage has passed through some thirty-five thousand generations. The Industrial Revolution began just six generations ago."
( Last two, thanks to Chellis Glendinning. Found in her book "My Name is Chellis and I’m in Recovery from Western Civilization" pgs 13-14)

New Perspectives

It seems to me we’re kind of new to this industrial technological stuff. We’re new to this desecration of our life source, to this isolation and furious pace. No wonder it feels so frightening, so traumatizing sometimes. I fervently hope we as a species can make it through these times alive. I don’t know if we will. When I fall into media-driven fear, I feel doubtful. But at other times, more and more often these days, when I remind myself of the sweep of our history and the magnificence of our bodies and our minds and our spirits, I see something more intriguing and hopeful: I see we have the choice, collectively, to survive this time. We need to find new perspectives, new perceptions, and new stories to live by, to thrive by. We carry the wisdom to do so, passed down to us through thirty thousand generations of humans, in our very bones.

Introduction: Flickering Lives in Time

I have been thinking for years now of how I can be of service to the world. I’ve known the great need for a long time, but just recently am seeing how I may respond to that need in a way that is appropriate and fulfilling for me. Writing this blog is part of that response. Through writing here I hope to clarify for myself, as well as share with you (my family and friends, and people that I care about), some of my understandings about this time of great upheaval and turmoil in our world. I want to reflect not so much ( though perhaps a little!) on how we arrived at this convergence of crises, this precipice of disaster where the survival of life (or at least human life, among many other life forms) on this planet is tenuous at best. I, instead, will explore how to move through these challenges gracefully, choosing to really look at where we are as a culture, as a species. I am most interested in how our perceptions of ourselves ( collectively and individually) influence our actions, and how they have done so throughout time. I will write about how we can see this current moment in history not as a death, not a doomsday, but rather as a chance for truly realizing who we are and taking that knowing into our bones, allowing it to transform us and propel us into a way of being that is in concert with Life. I believe that this realization is the most necessary change that needs to occur so that we may continue to live on our cherished planet Earth.

This is big stuff, writing about this.... I’m not prepared for it. I don’t know the answers. I’m just a busy mom. A woman. I’m just a sister. I’m just a daughter. A friend. Lover. Human. A body, a mammal, a creature of blood and bones and brain, of hair and air and water, of heat, of fire, of carbon, of star dust. I’m life, watching itself, wanting to save itself, wanting to live.
Being in touch with life’s history empowers and energizes. John Seed writes, in his "Invocation", " Fill us with a sense of immense time so that our brief flickering lives may truly reflect the work of vast ages past and also the millions of years of evolution whose potential lies in our trembling hands." Our individual lives are brief, especially seen through the evolutionary lens. We may feel small compared to the vastness of time. Or we may, in looking at the evolution of the universe, see that we are that same life that burst forth at Big Bang, we are that cosmic dust, the same particles and fire that are the stars. Our personal lives, our bodies, minds, spirits are grounded in this moment. But we have only arrived here now by way of life birthing new life through grandparents and great-grandparents, ancestors so far back we can hardly stretch our minds back to then, when life first emerged on this planet, let alone that first flickering forth of the universe...
Yet, here we spin, living our daily lives. Most times we are oblivious to our connection with eons of history, with eons of life. We wash the dishes. We zip off to work. We drink and eat. We feel annoyed by our kids.We worry about things like the split ends in our hair, or the fact that our house looks imperfect, or our car is missing a hub cap. We forget that we are so much more than these small details. We don’t realize that our hands move across those dishes the same way our grandmothers did, and hers before her. Those hands that wiped tears and brought kindness and comfort to so many. Those hands that were once fins. Those tears that were once sea water. I try to remember this. I waver between feeling myself to be only my little personal life and that much bigger life, the life that is the same as a star. I flicker between selves. Most of us want something more than daily routines. We hope , perhaps, to shed some brightness of our own on our planet home. I sit here remembering what came before me. I sit here writing, giving this writing as my prayer, hoping our human lives on earth don’t flicker out before we have the chance to flicker into flame, brilliant, bold, vital like our life-giving sun-star.