To Better Understand the Echoes of What We Do and Say: What Would Happen If We Felt the Rivers of the Earth as the Veins of Our Body?

In a book titled In the Absence of the Ordinary: Soul Work for Times of Uncertainty, the author, Francis Weller, says “we can no longer divide the inside from the outside.” Maybe the pandemic, the climate emergency, regional wars, economic instability, and I’d add, this new administration, have made that illusory division uncomfortable and too painful to live with.

 

Weller thinks we’ve begun to feel there’s no “ordinary” anymore. He describes a felt sense that the continuity of history and our participation in it have altered. Increasingly, we “register in our souls” the sorrows of the world. The sorrow of others, of our planet, is our sorrow. As climate change stresses forests, oceans, the fabric of natural life, social bonds also fray, and clarity of thought diminishes. The world, or at least human civilization, seems to be teetering on an edge. Yet the fate of the world’s climate and history runs right through us. What an unbearable but necessary burden.

 

I hope he’s correct, but I don’t know. How many of “us” now fit Weller’s analysis? Polls show increasing concern about the environment and climate. They show disapproval of the DT administration’s wars, economic policies, and cuts to healthcare. Most of my community of friends, family, and neighbors fit his analysis, but certainly not others. Certainly not the sycophants or supporters of the administration. But will enough of us wake up in time?

 

Dividing up the world, analyzing and breaking down situations and problems, is often necessary and useful, but it yields only partial truths. It can create problems even as it solves others. But dividing ourselves emotionally from the world— never. We need to develop a better awareness of our entanglement with everything around us so we can better understand the echoes of what we do and say.

 

To counter the illusion of a divisive self, Weller recommends we increase our tolerance and ability to descend into the dark mythic underworld, the world of dreams, the unknown. We so often fear or resist the uncertain. We need to allow ourselves to do what we can in this unbearable situation; to let go of much of the life we’ve known so we can step into the unknown. So, we reach into the darkness to find the inspiration and resources to build something new, in harmony with the natural world, and I think just.

 

Weller recommends 5 disciplines to explore and strengthen in ourselves so we can better face the depths of what’s happening.

  1. Deep listening: to sit quietly and listen for the truth spoken and lived by others and the trees, hills, water, around us. Hear what needs to be heard.
  2. Restraint: take a moment before acting to pause, breathe, and reflect.
  3. Humility: look around and become sensitive to how we depend on one another, how enmeshed we all are in each other. And I’d add, realize that we’re all prone to think our view is right and true; so, in order not to be wrong, we must recognize the “right/s” of others.
  4. Embrace not-knowing. Acknowledge we never know what’s going to happen. We don’t even know all that’s really happening right here in front of us. But by acknowledging this, and living it, we can be more open, vulnerable, and humble. We can take in more than possible otherwise.
  5. Let go: Everything is impermanent, always changing. But we can better change in harmony with the world when we no longer try to control all that happens in it.

 

But descending into what Weller calls the dark is, I think, also entering what is always right here, now. It’s just that we don’t look at it or see it. In every perception, there’s not just us and what we look at; there’s the looking, or the awareness itself. When we are aware of awareness, we can be so present. It almost seems unnecessary or repetitive to say it, but when we see another human being, what we experience is not just the person but our awareness of them. That tree, that artwork, has ourselves in it. We are never not of this world. It’s our home. And when we feel this, it can be startling and beautiful. It can awaken the energy needed to dare, to care, to create, and to act.

 

Years ago, I hitch-hiked to the west coast and took a side trip to the Grand Canyon. I stood at the edge of the Canyon, staring into its depths; the strata of soil, stone, and colors seemed to extend forever. Deep at the bottom, a barely perceived blue river. Then a family of 5 parked and exited their car. The woman in the group was maybe 40 years old and totally wrapped up corralling her 3 kids. When she reached the edge near me, her attempt at controlling her children, her focus on anything other than the canyon, was totally forgotten. All she had, or all she was, was an awareness of what was seen and felt. She just looked out at the canyon and it seemed she felt the utter incomprehensibility of everything in front of her. And all she could say was, “Oh, my God. Oh my God.”

 

We need these “Oh, my God” moments, moments of awareness of a reality so startlingly real. And it might not be obvious, but demonstrating with thousands of others for a political cause while thinking with a perspective larger than ourselves alone— acting to save our democracy, healthcare, and planet— ”Oh, my God.”

 

When I was parking my car near a friend’s home several blocks from the location of the last No Kings demonstration, the size and atmosphere of the event became clear. There were so many cars, so many people. It was like a river of people flowing together, a powerful, even joyous river…

 

*To read the whole article, please go to The Good Men Project.

Reading, and Sensing an Immense World: It Takes a Universe

A wonderful friend and former colleague recommended a book to me that I found fascinating. It’s called An Immense World: How Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden Realms Around Us, by Ed Yong. It speaks to so many issues and concerns of our world today.

 

We both live the truth, and an illusion. The world we perceive can be so clear, immediate, and vital to us. Yet it sits imbedded in innumerable other worlds, universes, though we don’t and can’t perceive almost any of them. We mistake what we see for all that is there. What we perceive is not the world but one our human brain and body have evolved to perceive.

 

For example, Yong points out that we humans “cannot sense the faint electric fields that sharks and platypuses can…[nor] the magnetic fields that robins and sea turtles detect.” Our ears can’t hear the ultrasonic calls of hummingbirds or the infrasonic speech of elephants and whales. We can’t perceive the infrared radiation that is the heart of what snakes detect or the ultraviolet light birds and bees sense every moment.

 

Each species has what Yong, borrowing from Baltic-German zoologist Jakob von Uexkull, called an umwelt or perceptual world. A tick does not perceive a tree, green leaves, blue skies. It doesn’t ignore them. It simply is incapable of sensing or knowing them; they are outside its umwelt. Likewise, we can’t sense the tick’s world.

 

Too often we ignore, or are ignorant of these co-existing realties, and we harm other species by imposing our perceptual system bias on them. For example, our submarines use underwater noises that confuse whales and drown out their calls. The glass panes in our homes appear as bodies of water to a bat’s sonar. We hurt our cats and dogs by interfering in their use of their primary sense activity, sniffing, and unknowingly impose our human visual bias on them.

 

If we can’t understand what the other worlds are like to live in, Yong points out maybe we can use our reason and imagination to honor and recognize them. For example, we can imaginatively enter the world of a dog, or even more so, an elephant. Scents, unlike light, do not move in straight lines. They go around corners, up and down, swirl, and twist in all directions. Humans have fine noses. But a dog not only has more sense receptors, a larger olfactory bulb and scent-brain than we do, but a more complicated nasal structure.

 

When we humans exhale, we purge odors from our nose. But each nostril of a dog is divided in two so it can exhale carbon dioxide while inhaling more aromas. This is one reason they can detect low blood sugar levels or tumors in humans or discern a single fingerprint on a microscopic slide even after it was outdoors for a week. They can smell in the air an oncoming storm.

 

For dogs, everything around them includes the scent not only of what’s here, now, but the past and future. And smell has the most direct link to the brain of any sense. And since that link goes right to the brain’s emotional center, I imagine their world is dominated by emotions. Some might doubt the rich emotional lives of many animals but this science argues otherwise….

 

*To read the whole article, please click on this link to The Good Men Project.