Climate Change

Dear Moonscriber,

This MoonLetter often refers to last week's MoonLetter. So if this is your first issue, you may wish to start there.

Once again, I was blessed to hear Joanna Macy speak to a public audience, this time in Oxford.

Joanna listed various aspects of climate change that are no longer debated amongst the (respected) scientific community. Aspects that were about real observations, and not just computer models.

These facts, Joanna said, are generally quite hard for us to take in. But only we can change our lifestyle. A recent poll showed that 90% of Americans are aware of climate change and consider it important. But it didn't make the Top 10 list of urgent issues. Very interesting, this distinction between urgency and importance.

Why, she asks, is climate change so hard for us to really take in?

1. Climate change seems so remote to us because of the time lags. Warming experienced now is due to fossil fuel use in the last century. Our use of these fuels now will not be felt until much later. This is a creeping problem. A creeping disaster. Slow in onset, but of long-term consequence and subtle cumulative processes. Once we see the symptoms, it's too late – as we've seen in case after case.
2. Climate change seems so remote to us because of the geographical distances. Those producing the most carbon emissions are quite distant from those experiencing the biggest effects.
3. The media exaggerate the degree of uncertainty (at least in America), therefore confusing the public. Individuals are left with a sense of possible overwhelmingly frightening impacts, and have no clear sense of how to respond. A case in point: The UK's Chief Scientific Adviser, Sir David King, said that climate change is a far greater threat to the world than international terrorism. In response, U.S. lobbyists at a recent UN conference on disasters called him an alarmist with ridiculous views who knows nothing about climate change.
4. The problem is too vast. There's just too much. "I can't do anything about this. I'm in a hurry: I haven't got time to deal with it."

And fear is a lousy motivator–and so is guilt. It's counterproductive to overload people with information. This triggers the fight, flight or freeze response–none of which are appropriate responses to this crisis.

How do you get people excited and enthusiastic about doing something to prevent something from happening so that things can stay the same?? Success, in this case, would be in averting something.

What if, instead, we were called to something positive, to a life-sustaining civilization? Called forth on a great adventure!

We do not know if we will survive. The very nature of an adventure is not knowing the outcome. True joy, in fact, is not needing to know the outcome. To convey the quality of this response to the climate crisis, Joanna read Drew Dellinger's "Love Letter to the Milky Way":

I want to tell you about love.
There are approximately one trillion galaxies
I want to tell you about
In the milky way there are about a hundred billion stars
I want to tell you
Love is the breath of the cosmos
I want to write a love letter to the milky way
Everything is an expression of the galaxy
My thirty trillion cells, the four noble truths, the eightfold path,
The five precepts, the seven energy centres of the body,
Everything is the milky way including my lover, and every kiss of every lover who's ever lived.
The deep sky, the ubiquity of spirit, the DNA of dreams, the interlocking patterns of the cosmic constellations,
cosmos and justice are synonymous with beauty
But parts of the milky way don't give off light
Sometimes it feels I've got ground zero in my heart
the dark sun bleeds shadows
The dark sun leaves shadows on everything
The forecast calls for scattered to broken skies.
If there wasn't so much love there wouldn't be so much pain
It's like love is the nervous system of the universe, bringing us joy and sorrow
I inherit the voice of the milky way in my dreams, the entire galaxy revolves around a single drop of wine
Your skin, the texture of the cosmos
The religion beyond religion
I want to know you like the wind knows the canyons
Or the rain knows the rivulets
Lightning is continuously striking in a hundred places every moment
The universe spills through our dreams
The future belongs to the most compelling story
Even the word love is not adequate to define the force that wove the fabric of space time
If we could sense everything at once,
like Krishna entering history with all the memory of his past incarnations,
Then I could tell you about love.

Joanna referred again to how this is the third revolution–the first two being agricultural and industrial. And she spoke of the three ways we can see this happening: holding actions, new Gaian structures, and shifts in consciousness.

But just knowing that this revolution is underway doesn't mean it'll succeed. We do not need a guarantee of success. Joanna then read Sue Silvermarie's poem, A Thousand Years of Healing.

A Tibetan Buddhist prophecy, 12 centuries old, Joanna says to us, describes people called Shambhala warriors. [And here I quote from her book Coming Back to Life.]

There comes a time when all life on Earth is in danger. Great barbarian powers have arisen. Although these powers spend their wealth in preparations to annihilate one another, they have much in common: weapons of unfathomable destructive power, and technologies that lay waste our world. In this era, when the future of sentient life hangs by the frailest of threads, the kingdom of Shambhala emerges.

You cannot go there, for it is not a place; it is not a geopolitical entity. It exists in the hearts and minds of the Shambhala warriors... Nor can you recognize a Shambhala warrior when you see her or him, for they wear no uniforms or insignia, and they carry no banners. They have no barricades on which to climb to threaten the enemy, or behind which they can hide to rest or regroup. They do not even have any home turf. Always they must move on the terrain of the barbarians themselves.

Now the time comes when great courage–moral and physical courage–is required of the Shambhala warriors, for they must go into the very heart of the barbarian power, into the pits and pockets and citadels where the weapons are kept, to dismantle them. To dismantle weapons, in every sense of the word, they must go into the corridors of power where decisions are made.

The Shambhala warriors have the courage to do this because they know that these weapons are..."mind-made." Made by the human mind, they can be unmade by the human mind. The Shambhala warriors know that the dangers threatening life on Earth are not visited upon by any extraterrestrial power, satanic deities, or pre-ordained evil fate. They arise from our own decisions, our own lifestyles, and our own relationships.

So in this time, the Shambhala warriors go into training. ... The weapons [used in the training] are compassion and insight. You have to have compassion because it gives you the juice, the power, the passion to move. It means not to be afraid of the pain of the world. Then you can open to it, step forward, act. But that weapon by itself is not enough. It can burn you out, so you need the other–you need insight into the radical interdependence of all phenomena. With that wisdom you know that it is not a battle between "good guys" and "bad guys," because the line between good and evil runs through the landscape of every human heart. With insight into our profound interrelatedness–our deep ecology–you know that actions undertaken with pure intent have repercussions throughout the web of life, beyond what you can measure or discern. By itself, that insight may appear too cool, too conceptual, to sustain you and keep you moving, so you need the heat of compassion. Together these two can sustain us as agents of wholesome change. They are gifts for us to claim now in the healing of our world.

We should not be afraid of the suffering of our world. We turn from it because we don't want to be with a painful situation without knowing there will be a technical solution. But that's not where the truly creative response rests. Joanna now reads a Rilke poem, which she translated herself. [Will try to get the text for you.]

Can we respond to danger like that? she asks. Can we dance with the dangers that face us and allow it to lift us?

This is a response to climate change, too. It is deep...and means you are open. You are alive. And boy, watch out! Just watch out when the people of Planet Earth come alive!! Watch out when we taste our love and reach out to others!

Let climate change be the vehicle by which we create what is worthy and good.

Joanna's poem for this is another of Rilke's: "God speaks to each of us as he makes us and walks silently out in the night." [Will try to get the full text of this for you.]

So how can you take action on climate change? Joanna suggests the Study Action Group. She warns against doing this work alone. It's too much to bear alone.

1. Tell people you know: "I want to look at this issue and am wondering if you want to join me...?" Set a time limit (4-6 months), then set up a preliminary meeting. "But I'm not an expert!" you or they say. Good! Because the whole point is for non-experts to teach each other. (Use materials from COIN, for example.) Joanna has done this before for issues surrounding world trade agreements, nuclear waste, and, currently, depleted uranium.
2. Facilitatorship is rotated. Or each person gives a report on a reading.
3. Something is then produced collectively: a fact sheet, a public meeting, a tabling event (stall).
4. At the end of the agreed time period (4-6 months), ask again if people want to carry on. (In Joanna's experience, they always do!)
5. Each person gets a real sense of strength, pride. People back each other up.

Interconnectedness is not just a lovely spiritual thought or wish. We are in such big trouble now, Joanna warns, that this understanding of interconnectedness must come from our roots.

As the last public talk did, this meeting closed with Diane Di Prima's "Life Chant". (The audience says "May it continue" in unison.)

cacophony of small birds at dawn
may it continue
sticky monkey flowers on bare brown hills
may it continue
bitter taste of early miner's lettuce
may it continue
music on city streets in the summer nights
may it continue
kids laughing on roofs on stoops on the beach in the snow
may it continue
triumphal shout of the newborn
may it continue
deep silence of great rainforests
may it continue
fine austerity of jungle peoples
may it continue
rolling fuck of great whales in turquoise ocean
may it continue
clumsy splash of pelican in smooth bays
may it continue
astonished human eyeball squinting thru aeons at astonished nebulae who squint back
may it continue
clean snow on the mountain
may it continue
fierce eyes, clear of light of the aged
may it continue
rite of birth and of naming
may it continue
rite of instruction
may it continue
rite of passage
may it continue
love in the morning, love in the noon sun
love in the evening among crickets
may it continue
long tales by fire, by window, in fog, in dusk on the mesa
may it continue
the night music
may it continue
grunt of mating hippo, giraffe, foreplay for snow leapord
screeching of cats on the backyard fence
may it continue

without police
may it continue
without prisons
may it continue
without hospitals, death medicine: flu and flu vaccine
may it continue
without madhouses, marriage, highschools that are prisons
may it continue
without empire
may it continue
in sisterhood
may it continue
thru the wars to come
may it continue
in brotherhood
may it continue
tho the earth seem lost
may it continue
thru exile and silence
may it continue
with cunning and love
may it continue
a woman continues
may it continue
a breath continues
may it continue
as stars continue
may it continue

may the wind deal kindly with us
may the fire remember our names
may springs flow, rian fall again
may the land grow green, may it swallow our mistakes

we begin the work
may it continue
the great transmutation
may it continue
a new heaven and a new earth
may it continue
may it continue

Next week: the beginning of a seven-part series describing the two-day Joanna Macy workshop! It may be helpful for you to know that, in the end, I came up with a new way of offering these teachings to you, so you're not so overwhelmed by new ideas. So stay tuned for that in the last part of the series... :)

May you continue.
peace&love
heather