My Earth Day dream earlier this year marked a shift in me.
In my dream, I am at the cabin, on a cruise ship going around the lake. I learn it will remain on the lake and keep taking people on cruises, and I realize the destruction it will cause over time. The lake and the forest around it will die. I feel it as if this natural area is my body, and as if my body is this natural area.
Since then, I have felt these types of things – the suffering of people and destruction of nature – in a far more visceral way. I feel it in my bones.
It’s a good shift. Where I before could hold it at an arm’s length distance, I am now unable to. I feel it as if it’s happening in my own body, and as if Earth now is my body. It’s not abstract. It’s immediate, apparently inevitable, and very visceral.
There is a small stream in me that is despondent from this more visceral experience. And another movement responding to it finding a deeper and equally visceral trust in the larger whole. In the inherent wisdom of the processes of the Earth, life in general, and the divine as all. The two go hand in hand.
Note: As I write this, I am at the cabin, sitting outside looking over the lake. Feeling the breeze. Hearing the sounds of the waves hitting the shoreline.
While I have been here this summer, I have experienced a mix of concern over the loss of life here (fewer insects, missing ant hills, far fewer swallows nesting, fewer birds in general, no bats at night and so on), I have felt the loss in my bones, I have experienced the immense value and divinity of even the smallest forms of life, I feel the small stream of despondency in me, and the deepening felt trust in life – no matter what happens.
There is a very real possibility that we, and Earth as a whole, is heading for major disasters. Climate change, combined with general loss of natural ecosystems and biodiversity, combined with toxins throughout nature and our own bodies, combined with economic and social systems inadvertently designed to destroy nature, combined with our own inability (or lack of will) to do what’s needed, does not bode well. Already, large parts of nature are dying off, and significant parts of humanity are impacted by it. And humanity may be the next to experience such a die-off. We don’t know.
What we know is that we need to redesign how we have organized all parts of society to take ecological realities into account. We can do it. We know how to do it. We have faced major challenges in the past, eventually – when avoidance is no longer possible – made it a priority, and found solutions. The question is at what cost? What will our delay cost? What will it cost us, nature, and future generations?
And what will we gain? Will we become more aware of Earth as, literally, our own wider body? Will designing systems that take ecological realities into account become second nature? Will we find a deeper sense of connection with all life? Will we include the interests of ecosystems, non-human species, and future generations in our decision making?
