Discuss: Snap into Action for the Climate

Julianne, Thanks for your grounding words. 

I read an essay by Derrick Jensen recently where he drew the distinction between hope and love.  It was in Orion.  I have some friends who worry about me when I say I feel hopeless. They think I’m done for.

Jensen: “Frankly, I don’t have much hope. But I think that’s a good thing. Hope is what keeps us chained to the system, the conglomerate of people and ideas and ideals that is causing the destruction of the Earth.  Many people are afraid to feel despair. They fear that if they allow themselves to perceive how desperate our situation really is, they must then be perpetually miserable. They forget that it is possible to feel many things at once. They also forget that despair is an entirely appropriate response to a desperate situation.

…..I want to accomplish something in the real world.
Why?  Because I’m in love. With salmon, with trees outside my window, with baby lampreys living in sandy streambottoms, with slender salamanders crawling through the duff. And if you love, you act to defend your beloved. Of course results matter to you, but they don’t determine whether or not you make the effort. You don’t simply hope your beloved survives and thrives. You do what it takes. If my love doesn’t cause me to protect those I love, it’s not love.”

Derrick is offering an embrace of our emotional complexities as humans.  As a life-long conservationist and activist, I sometimes find myself laughing and crying in the same breath.  My range of my emotions can be truly staggering.  I don’t think it is a form of mental illness (?).  It is a response to pathetic, preposterous, absurd, shameful, desperate—- yet entirely laughable——situation into which we have put ourselves and this earth. 

I do not use the word laughable lightly. I use it to point out that as cosmic dust, if we can step back for a moment and not take our humanity quite so seriously perhaps we CAN have a good belly laugh.  It doesn’t me we laugh anything off.  It means we give ourselves a break.  We choose our attitude.  And if Victor Frankl did it, certainly we can.

Laughter and light-heartedness are the antidotes to the real nemesis in all this:  Fear.

Love, laugh, cry, laugh some more—- and do whatever we can for what we love. Haha!

And just like we teach our children:  honor all feelings.  We can argue facts, science, the relative value of the left and right brains.  But we can’t argue each other’s feelings. 

As you say, Julianne, not all our values are the same but we are all in this together in how we process them.  Our work is in helping one another greet each day with grace. 

With love and laughs to all contributors, Paca

Excellent reference to Derrick Jensen’s words, Paca!  I’m familiar with that particular passage, and I heartily agree - I have also come to believe that “hope” as most of us so often experience it is far too passive a response, and it dangerously lulls us precisely because it requires nothing of us.

In much the same way that there is confusion in our understanding of “freedom” and “license,” wherein freedom carries with it a cognizant responsibility of the impact of our actions while license is the toddler’s response - I’ll do what I want because I want to, the rest of you be damned - there is this confusion between “hope” and “love.”

Love is a verb of action.

Derrick quite rightly identifies that in saying: “And if you love, you act to defend your beloved. Of course results matter to you, but they don’t determine whether or not you make the effort. You don’t simply hope your beloved survives and thrives. You do what it takes. If my love doesn’t cause me to protect those I love, it’s not love.”

And as Emma Goldman so succinctly summed up that value of laughter and the need to hold on to it while we are doing the work which demands so much of us, “If I can’t dance - I don’t want to be part of your revolution.”

Perhaps our most profound task at hand is to be rigorously attentive to the continual necessity of grounding ourselves by those things which infuse us with joy.

Several years ago I went through about a 3 year stretch that felt to be a personal re-enactment of Inanna’s descent to the underworld… and about halfway through it (not knowing, of course, at the time how far along in the process I might be) I realized if I didn’t take some active steps to address my attitude I was in danger of becoming hardened and embittered.

The process I came up with is something I’ve come to think of as the “Discipline of Joy.” >;-)  There are only two requirements: (1) I have to do it every day, and (2) I must overtly acknowledge to myself those things which bring me joy.

What I discovered was that joy resides in the smallest and most mundane of actions - a good cup of tea with a friend, playing with my beloved cat, the satisfaction of making my gifts for others, the appreciation of the quality of the light in the late afternoon.  And what I also realized, after being persistent in this practice over time, was that it came to sustain me more fully than I could have ever imagined.  The cumulative effect of both “noticing” and “appreciating” brought me to reside in a place of “gratitude.”

The thread that runs through all of these - freedom, love, gratitude - is personal responsibility. An awareness of the impact of my actions on others informs my freedom; the responsibility of working to defend my beloveds defines my tasks; the remembrance of gratitude for all that brings me joy keeps me humble - and getting up to start all over again each day.

Paca, I echo your love and laughter to all,
Julianne

Sometimes a tangential encounter suggests another way to express an important matter. Last evening I attended, over dinner, a meeting among faculty where I teach to share ideas to improve ourselves as instructors. And to be better acquainted as colleagues. The person next to me had a tattoo of a line of text, wrapping around her forearm. The script looked oddly familiar - I’d seen it in Nepal. Sanskrit, it read, ‘When you have come to know a thing objectively you must go beyond.’

Buddhism teaches non-attachment. The trick of course is in how that presupposes attachment and a consciousness of one’s attachment, on the path to non-attachment.

One might consider how in the same way to ‘go beyond’ objective knowing it may be required, first, to complete that very objectivity.

So it seems to me the discourse relative to the sciences and technologies, that appears here and in other Orion discussions, is important, a sine-qua-non.

To Bob, Paca and Julianne,

When a river arrives at an obstacle the water must find a way to flow around the obstruction, or be dammed. And even if dammed, it will either break through eventually and keep flowing, or it will stagnate and corrupt itself, if it doesn’t dry up first. But in order to support much life, one way or another the water will have to flow.
So, Paca and Julianne, far and away two of the most eloquent contributors to this particular conversation, saw fit to dam one portion of it, apparently so their preferred channel could swell. Paca threw up her hands, or so it seemed, exclaiming: “Academics! Jeez!” In the absence of any clarifying context I took this as a form of insult, in spite of her and Julianne’s proclamations of “love and laughter.” Am I just too sensitive? Probably.

I was aware that Bob and I were engaged in a modern version of a Medieval “disputatio”—a theological debate—and that it probably wasn’t everybody’s cup of tea. But so long as others were content to “lurk” in the background, I saw no reason not to continue wrangling with Bob. The point, as I saw it, was not to crush one another in a power struggle but to thrash out the terms on which we could finally balance our respective visions of knowledge and truth. I also know that Bob and I agree on many issues, probably far more than came to light—as Paca astutely pointed out. In fact, I was about to summarize the points of agreement between Bob and me when Paca slammed the door.

I find it ironic that Paca and Julianne are expressing viewpoints closest to my own, and yet I felt that they were in effect telling me to take a hike. It is also ironic to me that I feel a strange kind of kinship with Bob and his point of view, even though he and I might have seemed to be crashing around like a miniature King Kong and Godzilla. If my respect for Bob’s point of view was not evident, it should have been, and I apologize for the failure. But believe me, if I didn‘t think this conversation was very important, I wouldn’t be engaging in it. For me, the point is not to “win,” but rather to clarify some of the historical baggage we all have been carrying around for centuries. Why? Because the baggage is a big part of what prevents us, generally, from “snapping” awake to meet the burgeoning planetary crisis.

Whether we like it or not, we Westerners all breathe the air of science, on the one hand, and Christianity on the other, and we all swim in a sea of technology. It doesn’t matter whether we believe in either one or not, whether we agree or disagree. We are all saturated by both, and together they constitute a profound conflict in the Western soul. How are we to heal this conflict unless we face it? And how can we face it unless we find ways to give voice to it? And once we have given voice to it, are we not then subject to experiencing the conflict to the fullest degree? That is probably why most people prefer to ignore or avoid the conflict. Too uncomfortable. And the more people seek avoidance, the more will that inner dividedness be projected onto “enemies” out in the world. This is a basic principle of psychology—not the academic kind, but the psychology of practical life.

My own “credo” is quite similar to Paca’s, and to Julianne’s as well, although obviously we are different. But I think we all possess the same conflicting qualities we see in people around us. That’s the problem, and the potential, if only we can realize it. As Marie-Louise von Franz once put it: “Show me your friends and enemies, and I’ll show you who you are.”

With love and compassion,

Paco

Greetings Bob, Paco, Julianne (and whomever else is still reading),

May I try this again?  First apologies for my comment which was taken as an insult.  Blogging (or whatever this is) lacks body language.  Thus, my attempt adding the smiley face. I was trying to be too familiar and should have realized my comment could be taken differently. 

New to blogging, perhaps it was not my place to insert my thoughts into an exchange between two people.  However, I wasn’t lurking.  I was reading your exchanges (between other commitments) and trying to process what you were both saying.  I attempted to offer what I felt was some needed glue:  the point that we need BOTH: science and spirituality, facts and emotions, logic and creativity, technology and nature—-and that the breaking down of these dualities is beneficial to our future.

Paco referred to the exchange between he and Bob as “wrangling” and honestly that is how it was beginning to feel to me.  I was hoping to offer a different course for the river to flow (nice metaphor, Paco), and certainly did not intend to slam any doors.
All this raises a good point.  As we move forward in uncharted territories and rapid change we will need to continually assess how well we are communicating with each other.  I saw this exchange similar to a dinner party conversation amongst friends, where anyone was free to jump in reaction to what others were saying to each other—and that the conversation might move in a different direction as a result.  At that particular point in the evening, I needed to move toward an exploration of common ground.  Perhaps I was being too casual in my attempt.

We all come to this communication space with different needs, expectation, and styles.  Rarely do we have ground rules for dinner parties – other than the unspoken rules of social behavior.  However, perhaps some understanding of participants’ communication styles and needs for empowering conversation is worth exploring in a context like this. Civil discourse is a good thing and will be increasing important to our survival.

My best, Paca

To Paca, Paco, Julianne, too,

First, I consider myself the LEAST eloquent of posters. That out of the way, Paca, it may help if you know that the way my email reader mangles things, your ‘smiley’ appeared as an incomprehensible mash of two strange characters. It was days later when I came to re-read yours and other posts on the Orion site that I realized what you had intended there.

That said, and with good will, I was also intrigued at your next line, ‘I am not sure all this parsing is necessary.’

I’d like to return to what you added immediately after that, which to me also is at the heart of things, but first, again with almost a wink, I had to notice that the rest of THAT post of yours amounted to one heap ‘o’ ‘parsing’!

But your next two sentences are for sure ones I agree with: ‘Dare I say I see more agreement than disagreement here.  Let’s focus on the common ground.’

And to which I can’t help but repeat, ‘Yes, and the Angels AND the Devils are in the details.’ In the point of this discussion I responded to what I read, and that was a series of statements, from several posters, that rejected the sciences and technology. I don’t think I was misreading, and anyone can go back and read over the posts that appeared before mine.

At any dinner conversation one parses, to use that word, the direction and motives of the various participants, and shapes his or her intervention accordingly. I find it seems my lot to become devil’s advocate quite often, here at Orion especially. That said, I cringe at Paco’s choice of ‘wrangling’ - that seems a little harsh.

When I hear empty enconiums to ‘common ground’ I ask myself ‘but where is the commonality?’ So I felt it important to stress the role of science and technology. Paco has replied with a similar declaration, so you now may say that he and I, I suppose, are ‘on the same page’.

And I hope - this is my defect as a human being, to be so hungry for this acknowledgment - I hope that I may have been heard, in what I had previously written about my own witness to the importance of ‘both’ worlds. And to each, in balance.

Dear friends - Paco, Bob, Paca, *and* whomever else is out there, there are so many thoughts / responses jostling around in my head (and heart), having just gone back and reread all the latest correspondence all of a piece…

And I’m rather wild to contribute, but I notice a curious hesitancy to dive right in, and instead a compelling urge to go dig in the dirt of my garden and quite literally ground myself before I return to our discourse.  So I’ll come back later today, having had an internal grapple with myself about what I might hope to contribute, and in the meantime go commune with nature with an intention of gleaning some clarity about the priorities at hand.

The one thing I do want to say before grabbing that spading fork, however, is how grateful I am to all of you for the willingness (and fortitude!) to hang in for the depth of this conversation.  I, too, feel that what we’re engaging in has great value in illuminating at least one potential way to come together from our both disparate *and* common cosmologies and that can only be good thing!

With love and my hands in the dirt,
Julianne

Touche, Bob! 

Okay, that does it.  I hereafter swear off the smiley face. Besides, it reminds me too much of Wal-Mart.

More later, after hopefully hearing from Paco. In the meantime, I’ve got to run and go look up the definition of enconiums.

Wink, Paca