Hi everyone, one small correction: I forgot to indent the long quote from Indrajit Samarajiva, which begins "We keep piling on more and more information..." It's the tenth paragraph in the essay. I've fixed it in the archive. Thanks!
George Leonard once wrote, "Life has its own urges, and only so much patience with the status quo." Hopefully, as the new normals collapse under the weight of their own self-cannibalism, their residue will provide fertilizer for emergence of us humans to express a manner of creating wholeness with this planet. Thank you, Jason, for your encouraging service of awakening.
Oh, I forgot to mention Anicca, a Buddhist concept. Things change. Our best reaction to this may be to transfer our love for the old and passing world to the new one. To just love all being no matter how changed. Not a popular idea, but there's probably some wisdom in it. It isn't a counsel of passivity however; we still must honor our values and fight to uphold them.
One of the thoughts I almost included in this piece was an acknowledgement of the ordinary passing of the ten thousand things, and that we need to distinguish between that ordinary change and the extraordinary changes of the Anthropocene. But I figured folks would see that already.
I love that line about transferring our love of the old world to the new one, regardless of its diminished state. Maybe because of its diminished state, right? There's work to do, and love is part of that work. But yes, as you say, easier to say than do.
I don't want to seem a flatterer, but Jason you really are a tremendously good writer and your essays, along with Code Reds are much awaited in our house.
I was born in the slow time, and actually was a cloistered monk for a while, but the vows of stability I couldn't honor with my love of travelling in this beautiful world. When I traded robes for Levi's, and traveled, it was always to the quiet places, the empty land of silence and slow time, as far from the world of hectic busy minds as I could get. I'm still that way. At heart, one could say I am a 12th century Tibetan monk born in this speeded up, catastrophic time. But things may still work out for the best. I saw a black and white photograph of the beach near Newport, Oregon at the turn of the century (19th to early 20th) and it was unrecognizable: power lines, vehicles driving on the beach, an industrial landscape. But now it is pristine again, just the clean sands, beach grass, and wheeling gulls. So there's hope for us still.
Thank you very much, Michael. I can withstand a compliment or two...
I think we all have some of that quietude in us, though even for monks in can be hard to find.
And yes, absolutely, so much of the basic harm to landscapes and ecosystems heals when we step away, either by direct empathy or benign neglect. There's joy for me wherever I see grass and dandelions growing through the pavement. There are deeper harms - climate warming and ocean acidification, plastics and genetic modification, etc - that seem for now only healable on a time scale beyond our cognitive horizon. But as with your beach, there's a lot of hope to be found in taking care of the obvious while we work to figure out the impossible.
Once upon a time, I spent a few month per year in NZ, and saw the mollymawks (a type of small albatross) every time I made the crossing to one of my favorite spots in the world, Stewart Island. And it's a fun word to roll around on the tongue.
Stewart Island! I have friends who know of that place and love it too. If my worst fears are realized and the mid latitudes become uninhabitable, places like Stewart Island and even better the Campbells, will become last refuges for what's left of our species.
Hi everyone, one small correction: I forgot to indent the long quote from Indrajit Samarajiva, which begins "We keep piling on more and more information..." It's the tenth paragraph in the essay. I've fixed it in the archive. Thanks!
George Leonard once wrote, "Life has its own urges, and only so much patience with the status quo." Hopefully, as the new normals collapse under the weight of their own self-cannibalism, their residue will provide fertilizer for emergence of us humans to express a manner of creating wholeness with this planet. Thank you, Jason, for your encouraging service of awakening.
Thanks for the thoughtful comment. The hope here is to at least slightly reduce the prospects for collapse and cannibalism...
And wholeness, yes, that would be nice.
Oh, I forgot to mention Anicca, a Buddhist concept. Things change. Our best reaction to this may be to transfer our love for the old and passing world to the new one. To just love all being no matter how changed. Not a popular idea, but there's probably some wisdom in it. It isn't a counsel of passivity however; we still must honor our values and fight to uphold them.
One of the thoughts I almost included in this piece was an acknowledgement of the ordinary passing of the ten thousand things, and that we need to distinguish between that ordinary change and the extraordinary changes of the Anthropocene. But I figured folks would see that already.
I love that line about transferring our love of the old world to the new one, regardless of its diminished state. Maybe because of its diminished state, right? There's work to do, and love is part of that work. But yes, as you say, easier to say than do.
I don't want to seem a flatterer, but Jason you really are a tremendously good writer and your essays, along with Code Reds are much awaited in our house.
I was born in the slow time, and actually was a cloistered monk for a while, but the vows of stability I couldn't honor with my love of travelling in this beautiful world. When I traded robes for Levi's, and traveled, it was always to the quiet places, the empty land of silence and slow time, as far from the world of hectic busy minds as I could get. I'm still that way. At heart, one could say I am a 12th century Tibetan monk born in this speeded up, catastrophic time. But things may still work out for the best. I saw a black and white photograph of the beach near Newport, Oregon at the turn of the century (19th to early 20th) and it was unrecognizable: power lines, vehicles driving on the beach, an industrial landscape. But now it is pristine again, just the clean sands, beach grass, and wheeling gulls. So there's hope for us still.
Thank you very much, Michael. I can withstand a compliment or two...
I think we all have some of that quietude in us, though even for monks in can be hard to find.
And yes, absolutely, so much of the basic harm to landscapes and ecosystems heals when we step away, either by direct empathy or benign neglect. There's joy for me wherever I see grass and dandelions growing through the pavement. There are deeper harms - climate warming and ocean acidification, plastics and genetic modification, etc - that seem for now only healable on a time scale beyond our cognitive horizon. But as with your beach, there's a lot of hope to be found in taking care of the obvious while we work to figure out the impossible.
Mollyhawk - thank you for my word of the day.
Once upon a time, I spent a few month per year in NZ, and saw the mollymawks (a type of small albatross) every time I made the crossing to one of my favorite spots in the world, Stewart Island. And it's a fun word to roll around on the tongue.
Stewart Island! I have friends who know of that place and love it too. If my worst fears are realized and the mid latitudes become uninhabitable, places like Stewart Island and even better the Campbells, will become last refuges for what's left of our species.