your choice

Although it’s much easier to use a positive experience as inspiration – perhaps becoming a compassionate, kind and encouraging teacher because that is what you learned from your home environment -  any negative experience can become an inspiration as well.  

Take Malala Yousafzai, the young Afghani activist who the Taliban shot when she was 15 in an effort to nip her fierce advocacy for women’s education, which was threating their supremacy, in the bud.  She could have withered during her grueling recovery period but instead the experience propelled her onto the world stage. In 2014 she became the youngest Nobel Peace Prize recipient at age 17 and a louder and more passionate advocate for women’s empowerment through education than she could have ever been in her small village back home.  Or take the many sexually harassed and abused boys, girls and women who are speaking up publicly in ever greater numbers.  They are taking so much pushback from those who want to hide their vile actions that have been condoned for too long.  Nevertheless the #metoo and #metooincest movement has snowballed in such a short amount of time thanks to these courageous people who turned a negative experience around to spread awareness and prevent such behavior from being pushed under the cultural rug any longer.  

It really is about what you make of the experiences life throws you.  You can take a crushing experience high or low, you can wither or thrive, you can come out in the open or keep it all under the rug.  In the end it’s less about the experience itself than what you make of it. Up to you.  It’s a choice.

on being political

A few years ago, a friend told us he wasn’t into politics.  Even Michelle Obama recounts in her recent biography Becoming how much she resisted her husband’s ever deeper involvement in politics because she wasn’t “into politics.”

“Being into politics” doesn’t exclusively mean being educated, interested and opinionated regarding the history and politics of your country.   You don’t have to run for office to “be political.”  

Simply becoming aware of the repercussions of your own lifestyle choices and the underlying beliefs they come from makes you a bit political.  Your and my lifestyle choices, bundled with those of millions of others, eventually express themselves in some legislation or absence thereof, some movement or absence thereof, some shift or absence thereof.  Choosing the digital version of your newspaper results in less logging and joins the sustainability movement towards better stewardship of our planet when millions do it (full disclosure: I am guilty of reading the paper paper).   Inspecting your own internal biases and becoming aware of America’s baked-in racism or voter suppression in all its forms, eventually expresses itself in political shifts when you, me and others no longer tolerate it.

You become political when, instead of throwing your arms up in frustration because you believe that one voice doesn’t make a difference, you actually make a change somewhere in your life.  You become political when you vote and encourage others to vote instead of simply complaining.  Being political means taking action instead of sitting back.  Kennedy said it so clearly: ”Ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country.”  When you turn your beliefs into actions, such as reducing animal abuse by refraining from buying a fur coat or purchasing solar panels or an electric car as a form of turning away from fossil fuels and towards renewable energies, you are “political.” Inaction, on the other hand, maintains the status quo, in your own life and on a larger scale through all the others who don’t budge either.  Ultimately, that’s political too because things remain the way they are now.  Hence, it’s really difficult “not to be political.”

like an orchestra

When I recently listened to a classic orchestral piece on my car radio it struck me how the sound of so many different instruments melds into one, and how that one complex sound can only be achieved if all hundred or so musicians play together in total harmony, unison and synchronicity.  Take away the brass instruments, or ten violins, or a particular instrument that is crucial to one particular segment, and the whole is diminished.  One instrument on its own can never do what an orchestra does.  The whole is so much greater than the sum of its parts, and individual parts shine more brightly in the context of the composite whole.  

Through Suzanne Simard’s work with forest ecosystems for example we are beginning to realize that trees are less competitively Darwinian and individualistic, and exist within a mutually beneficial and cooperative mycorrhizal network of nutrient distribution from mother trees to seedlings rather than existing in isolation.  Take the big mother trees away and new seedlings suffer.

How is it that we humans have come to think of ourselves as distinct and separate, from one another and from nature?  Maybe the pandemic has brought to the forefront that we exist within a network of interdependence.  How dependent we are of postal workers, healthcare professionals, supermarket staff, bus and subway drivers, warehouse workers and delivery drivers to keep the whole running.  How dependent we are of our network of friends and family to keep us mentally sane, and how difficult isolation is.  We can accomplish so much more when we get together around common goals than if we go it alone.  We feel so much more grounded and settled, emotionally nurtured and embraced, in company.

Interdependence is not a sign of weakness but strengthens the whole and furthers a common cause exponentially.  Regardless, for example, of what your stance is on vaccines, the huge effort to bring a Corona vaccine to market within a year could only be accomplished through the work of a huge interdependent network of scientists and government efforts all working in unison towards a common goal.  Alone we are powerless at the enormity of the challenges of climate change.  But in the spring, when the earth stood still during the worldwide lockdown, we saw how fast pollution can be reversed.  

A whole orchestra can produce a gloriously complex, powerful, and magical listening experience in a way an individual violin simply cannot.

imagine!

Last year we began a new ritual in our Thanksgiving proceedings, taking turns reading the Native American Six Nations’, or Haudenosaunee, Thanksgiving address.  The address is an ode to the natural world that sustains us, and without which we literally would not and could not exist, a fact that often disappears under the layers of our material machinations and self-absorption.

Even though Thanksgiving is over, the message is more relevant than ever and will haunt us until we grasp the true underlying cause of climate change, our disconnection from the natural world. My social media stream was full of pronouncements of gratefulness over the past week, mostly for family, friends and the community at large.

But the bigger picture is even more important.  We need to respect, no revere, Nature again, the way indigenous people always have.  Because Nature has lost its sacredness in our mind it’s become a commodity we can exploit.  The soil that grows everything we eat, the air we breathe to sustain us, the water we consume, the sunshine that grows our plants and trees and warms our planet, are all so valuable and life givingly essential.  We’re literally dead without them.  Or when Nature deteriorates due to our doing, we become sick.  However, when Nature thrives in abundance and balance, we thrive in turn.  

Clean air and water, rich soil, enough rain, although not too much, enough sunshine, although not too much, and thoughtful and sustainable human activity make for a balanced ecosystem.  Let’s be grateful and reverend for our planet earth we are so intricately embedded in and not take it for granted.  Thankfulness must extend beyond Thanksgiving, and Nature must become sacred again in our minds in order to counter and reverse climate change.   Imagine, it all starts in the mind.

valuing our resources

Trash and waste, whether in the form of pollution or garbage, are leftovers in an open linear system, a system which is unsustainable in the long run and no longer viable.

When we honor and respect our resources and acknowledge that all raw materials ultimately come from the earth and are finite one way or the other, we become more vested in how we use them.  Shifting to sustainable and circular systems leaves less waste, preferably little or none at all (here an earlier post on zero waste).  This is where recycling with its Reduce-Reuse-Recycle tenet comes in, and the various ways in which we can apply those principles.

One of our most essential resources is water because the total water amount on earth is finite, while our population and water needs have grown exponentially.  In a linear system wastewater is considered waste.  But in a circular system it is reused after having been cleaned and purified.  Israel, a desert country, has put regulatory government mechanisms in place over the past 70 years that have made it water independent with surplus (!), and an agricultural force to contend with.  Israel’s agriculture shifted to water conserving drip irrigation, the country desalinates sea water for drinking, cleanse its wastewater for reuse in agriculture, puts a price tag on water by charging for its consumption, and swiftly detects and repairs over 90% of its water leaks to prevent waste, as described in Seth’s Siegel’s Let There Be Water.   Israel is a shining example and pioneer on how to value and manage resources responsibly, something all other countries must learn to do swiftly. 

On a related note, we are just starting to come around to managing better the trash from the stuff of our material culture (here an earlier related post).  This is how the Repair Café and Fixit Revolution, thoroughly researched and entertainingly narrated in Repair Revolution: How Fixers are Transforming Our Throwaway Culture, arose in the past two decades, a counter movement to the post war effort of ramping up production and consumption via built-in obsolescence.  Buying it cheap and throwing it away when it no longer works, and products such as single-use plastic bags and containers, have left us with enough trash to drown in.  Besides reducing, reusing, and recycling, we now need to add repairing to our Rs in becoming more conscientious and responsible consumers.  Repair that lamp, replace that zipper, bring the shoes to the cobbler.  Just fix it!

In our shift to a more sustainable culture with more sustainable consumption patterns let’s keep our beautiful planet earth in mind that provides us with everything we need to exist as long as we care for it.  Our earth is all we have.  We must nurture, not trash it, so it can be beautiful and healthy for us, so we can be beautiful and healthy.

color blindness and rainbows

Arrogance is when you don’t know what you don’t know but think you know.  While that needs to be met with compassion, it has big consequences if you’re in a position of power or authority.  Charles Eisenstein wrote a brilliant new essay, The Banquet of Whiteness, in which he considers racism and other cultural beliefs under the broader umbrella of arrogant whiteism.  He unpeels our hubristic blind spot of perceived superiority and rightness we are literally not aware of because we come from a place of majority consensus and relative power (the term echo chamber has been used).  Hence the perpetuation of racism.  Hence the hunkering down on outmoded ways of looking at certain cultural patterns.  Hence our narrow way to think and do science. Hence the worldwide monoculturalization of Western beliefs with which we are suffocating the rest of the world (see an older related post - pizza every night?).

When diversity is still a calculated numbers game of including a specific minimum percentage of non-white students or employees in an organization, when we still belittle other cultures’ worldviews and how those inform the people who live with them, when we still favor the one Western medical model over alternative, traditional or indigenous therapies regardless of effectiveness, we are still ideologically blind and biased.

Before the recent anti-racism movement hit me in the face, I believed that if all lives mattered it was inclusive enough to mean that black lives mattered under that larger all lives umbrella.  But looking at racism that way belittles and denies the need for people of color to be heard, to be emotionally supported in their slight and plight, and for us white people to shift our attitude and do something about it.  I just saw a very helpful post on social media that illustrates the point.  If you share with me that your mother just died, and I reply that all our parents die, I pass right over your feelings of sadness and make them irrelevant. 

When we truly become more accepting and integrative in our thinking, when we truly become more tolerant and broad minded, when we truly use the scientific method of asking a query and neutrally exploring all potential answers (instead of working towards those results we foresee within our own belief paradigm), when we truly look at our culture and actually admit what works and what doesn’t (without primary regard for profit), if we truly look at people’s merits, talents and capabilities regardless of skin color or other attributes we might judge somehow, we may find that the earth is not flat but round, or that we revolve around the sun, and not the other way round.  Then, our world would be a rainbow of diversity and creative human expression, a joyfully imaginative jumble of humanness in all its wonderful and potential expressions.   

That will be a great leap forward for humanity. 

a slow shift

Wednesday’s NY Times article “Twilight of the Imperial Chef” reports on cracks in the restaurant business’s “militaristic brigade system” and demanding star chef narrative.  There is increasing pressure from within to be less tolerant of erratic, autocratic and abusive (sexual and otherwise) behavior of fickle, eruptive and self-serving white male chefs, under the creative genius excuse.  Instead, it’s being increasingly acknowledged in an inclusive way that all restaurant staff, front and back house, chefs and helpers, are instrumental in getting a good meal on the table and creating a memorable customer experience.

In 2015 Danny Meyer’s Union Square Hospitality Group initiated a shift to fairer wages and offering benefits in the restaurant industry, with higher menu items and no required tipping, a big change for an industry where tipping transferred part of the waiters’ compensation from employer to customer.  It’s not been a unanimously adopted and totally successful model, but then such fundamental changes take time to be adopted widely.  

The MeToo movement has finally exposed the previously condoned, pervasive, sexually motivated, and  demeaning treatment of women by men in positions of power – inequality in favor of some and at the expense of others.  The Black Lives Matter movement away from racism is finally being acknowledged by its culprits, the whites who enslaved colored people, and former colonizers – a movement away from inequality in favor of a few at the expense of many others.  The pandemic has brought forth a greater interest in universal healthcare – a movement away from an unequal healthcare system that favors some at the expense of others.  The same can be said for many other emerging movements, whether education, environmental, or social related.  Notice what else is popping up once you pay attention to this new pattern.

All these patches of a new cultural quilt we are currently weaving together, are more We oriented and inclusive than the cultural narrative we seem to be exiting.  These movements regard your rights, as just as essential as my rights in an effort towards equality instead of wellbeing for some at the expense of others.  This is a huge shift away from the conservative Me-centered attitude with little regard for You, and we see the collision of both playing out politically on a grand scale right in front of our eyes and ears in real time.   Collectively, many seem to be waking up to the realization that it’s not ok if some are privileged at the expense of others, and we begin to understand that we can only truly feel good in our own skin if all people are taken care of equally.  It is very difficult for emotionally mature people to see others suffer. The emerging millennial values of transparency, authenticity, cooperation, meaning and value based living, and sustainability, espoused most noticeably by the 25-40 population segment, is who brings forth this new way of thinking because they live it.  Are you seeing it? 

carrots, not sticks

Non-violent communication has taught for decades that compassion works so much better than judging, bullying, intimidating, and coercing.  The former is a we-based or win-win way of communicating, while the latter is me, self-interest and win-lose based.  

Charles Eisenstein just released a very short essay on why our approach to environmental protection and activism in general, and the Amazon forest decimation in particular, has not worked too well thus far.  Our present approach has been to threaten us with the dire consequences of our inactions, but people just don’t respond well to that.  Fear-based communication results in cowering in protection, anxiety, freezing into inaction because it’s all so overwhelming, and not understanding how an individual could even make a difference in the face of the immensity of our problems. 

Remember when your kids would jump around on your bed in sheer joy, and you’d say something like “Don’t do that” with a stern voice, and then would try again more insistently “Stop it immediately, or else!” Your kids probably kept happily jumping once you left the room.  Adults are no different.  We respond better when someone appeals to our cooperation with compassion.  Eisenstein writes, “Nobody can be scared into falling in love.”  

He makes a case for a shift to a life affirming vision of a beautiful healthy planet instead, one that is also service and community based.  There are many breathtaking nature documentaries out there (I like those without ominous narrative and music) that show our planet’s grandeur and sheer unending beauty, and which move my heart to tears and love for this amazing jewel in the universe we live on and are privileged to experience.  If you have travelled, you may even have been to such awesome places yourself.  That is the vision from which to heal our planet.  While it is something we need to envision and enact together, it needs to come from within each of our hearts.   Your heart.

When you begin to tread carefully to avoid stepping on a slug, not because someone said so but because it feels natural, when you begin to save all your trash for the trash can, when you are awed by an unfolding leaf or dew drop on the grass, when a waterfall’s scintillating magnificence makes you smile, when you can truly see how exquisite this planet is, your energy will shift to life affirming causes.  That’s home, that’s the place from which to start healing our planet and yourself.

the case for perfection

Why do we so relentlessly question nature’s perfection?  In general, we seem to want to improve nature because we don’t think it’s perfect.  We see the bugs on the lettuce as a pest to be eradicated rather than asking why.  When the climate goes haywire or a virus affects the entire planet many see it as an aberration of nature instead of asking how it happened. Who is the culprit, we ask.

Nature is perfect - resilient, beautiful, abundant, grand, powerful, adaptable, magical, and a mirror of our beliefs and actions. When we can’t see that because we’re disconnected from it and interfere with it in order to bend it to our own distorted interpretation of what should be, that’s when the trouble starts. The trouble can manifest as climate change, Covid-19, Japanese beetle infestation, bee colony collapse syndrome, drought, and so many other environmental issues.  It also manifests in ourselves as disease or psychological issues.  As a species, we live in a permanent state of discontent and want to improve everything around us, yet have lost the key to seeing where to start.  

When we reconnect with the spiritual nature of nature, and that of our own imbeddedness in it, when we begin to search for that potentially bigger picture we just can’t see as yet, when we learn to trust that there’s rhyme and reason behind life instead of uncontrollable randomness, it all becomes more reassuring.  The key is actually inside each one of us, not out there.  This is an invitation to go inward and reconnect with ourselves and the bigger picture, that we are one with nature, not apart from it, and that when we’re out of balance, nature as a consequence suffers that imbalance and shows it to us like a mirror.  

Each one of us, hence, has the tremendous and awesome task to reconnect,  inward and outward, with our own true nature from which everything springs.  When you shift, it shifts.  When I shift, it shifts.  

on reconnecting with nature

Lots of Japanese beetles are happily frolicking on my roses this year, making a bit of a mess along the way, and some other pest, probably a moth caterpillar, has been laying eggs in our pussy willow and mauling its leaves.

Whether Climate Change, Covid-19, the garden pests, or so many other things – we tend to think that nature is out of balance.  But the more consequential conclusion is that we are out of sync with nature. We look to the outside for the culprit, a symptom based approach with little interest for the underlying cause.  Having become our planet’s biggest monoculture with the greatest impact on shaping the environment, the responsibility squarely falls on each one of us to make amends in rebalancing our relationship with it.  

Without a true understanding of the myriad elements that make up an ecosystem, each one of them contributing something that feeds back into the regenerative cycle, we tend to interfere in a reactionary way without being able to anticipate the consequences.  Used to the idea of getting rid of bugs with a spray can, we are learning the hard way that Monsanto has been making a worldwide mess of the environment and our health with their glyphosate that’s now showing up everywhere, including inside our bodies.

So, I won’t add insult to injury, and add more poison to a fragile planet that needs healing.  Maybe the bats that are living in our cliff can use this new food source of beetles and pests, or maybe the pests will promote the multiplication of the bats, which is a good thing. Whichever way around it is, nature is far wiser than I am, and I will leave it to the bats and birds to eat the excess bugs in my garden, instead of pulling out the spray.  A wonderful documentary about the 7-year rehabilitation of an abandoned farm into a sustainable and thriving orchard, The Biggest Little Farm, shows how intricate a balanced ecosystem truly is, how many elements contribute to a thriving environment, and that we can regenerate and rebuild by making an effort to reconnect with nature in a deeper way.