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Healing Our World: Weekly Comment
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By Jackie Alan Giuliano, Ph.D. Environmental News Service How Can We Possibly Change Things?
Please, dear mother Earth, 
The shortest day of the year – and the longest night - is upon us in the Northern Hemisphere, the Winter Solstice. To the ancients, it was initially a time of great stress as the people wondered if the days would keep getting shorter and shorter until the Sun went out for good. We can only imagine the great relief that spread over the land as the days became longer and longer again and the warmth of the Sun returned.
To us in our modern pollution filled, war ravaged world, we too are wondering if the skies will go dark, depriving us and our children of the air, water and earth humans have lived off of for millennia. As some nations stand on the brink of devastation and the United States braces for more senseless terrorist attacks, it is hard to keep hope alive. What can we possibly do to bring back sanity to the world? There is madness all around us and illogic abounds. How did we get to a place where it is considered good business for the United States to sell a squadron of fighter jets to China while at the same time issuing a travel advisory because China arrested American citizens for suspicion of espionage? The wars of the world are being threatened and waged with equipment bought from the United States. What is the logic in Washington State defying the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s demand that they regulate small emission sources? The Washington State Department of Ecology said that it would be a paperwork nightmare to regulate all the thousands of exhaust fans, for example, at one Boeing factory. I guess no one ever briefed them on the cumulative effect of those small emissions. So where does all this awareness and this year’s journey bring us? How do we learn from the past year’s mistakes, great achievements, and create a new way of living and being in the world? The answer will be different for everyone, but I think that solutions have common attributes regardless of their motivation. I have come to believe that so many of our dilemmas have very little to do with the need for new legislation or a new law. Rather, I keep coming back to the reexamination of fundamental values as a means to heal. It is not easy to discover what we feel and what we know. Our society expends a great deal of effort to teach us how to be dishonest. Huge industries exist for the sole purpose of maintaining an illusion that we are happy or on the verge of becoming happy if we buy this car or that product. But there are so many other horrors in our world. How can we invite this awareness into our lives and survive? How can we start the New Year on a path toward healing? Here are some ideas:
Then, feel your feet firmly on the ground and take a deep breath. Center yourself. You have work to do. Look at your own personal priorities. What does your day look like? Do you take the time to nurture yourself, take a bath, do something creative, take a nap, exercise? Do you take the time to spend meaningful moments with those in your life that you love? Or do you feel hopelessly driven from one activity to another, not really in control of your own time? Change your priorities. Make the time for nurturing activities and communication with loved ones. Don’t wait for someone or something to come into your life that will allow this to happen. Do it now. Decide what is important to you. What values do you want to have? What values do you want the world to have? What do you want to be remembered for when you are gone? What do you want children to think of you? Do you want to be remembered for all the stuff you were able to buy, or do you want your life to be a statement of compassion, love, and joy? Make mindfulness moments part of your every day, time when you will fully allow the awareness of horrors in the world to come in. Visualize the starving child, the suffering and frustrated person poisoned by nuclear waste, the homeless, the nuclear stockpiles, the submarines traveling at sea, waiting to strike, and whatever else you have chosen to care about. Take an action of some kind every day. Teach someone about what you know. Send e-mail messages to your elected representatives making your demands clear. Choose to not buy something from a socially irresponsible company and write them a note telling them about it. Pick up some trash. Use your power every day. Allow yourself an occasional day off. Bring your vision for change to mind in some quiet moments, pray for peace, and then go do something for yourself or your loved ones. After a while, you won’t need a day off. It is possible to integrate wide awake engagement with the pain and joy of the world without feeling drained and depleted. Look at each day as a precious, vital collection of moments that must be savored, for they will never occur again. Realize that every day, the Earth is traveling through a new region of space in the universe that it has never been in before and will never be in again. As the Earth goes around the Sun, the Sun goes around the center of the galaxy. Our galaxy then traverses through the universe in a cluster of galaxies and clusters of clusters of galaxies. You can truly start each day anew.
None of us are free of sorrow for our world. None of us can sustain the energy it takes to look away from the sights and sounds of our Earth and her people and her animals crying. Yet we all need help to recognize the anguish so we can find the path to an open heart, open arms, and the joy that is inherent in each and every one of us. Joanna Macy said, “Opening to what we know and feel takes courage.” It involves developing the ability to listen to ourselves. We are all experts in our own way on what needs to be done. We must listen to our bodies, the home of our hearts, for that least conditioned response. We must tune back in to our gut feelings. We must learn to live together, make a difference with every waking moment of our lives, and live as authentically as possible. We must notice the details of the natural world around us and revel in the awesome beauty and connections. We must feel - feel the pain, the sorrow, the responsibility, the joy and the need to act. If we do these things, we will eventually become immune to the greed and madness of our economically based political and industrial system. If we all did these things, we would deny our dollars and our energy to the corrupt, greedy widget makers of our world. The world would change and the new legal tender of business and industry could be compassion and concern for the future. It is all about what we consumers demand. If we stop demanding new gadgets to entertain and distract us from the harsh truths, they will stop making them. The process of healing is a journey of self and planetary discovery. It is an opportunity to challenge assumptions, learn how the world works, take control of our perceptions, and become more involved in the world. Our fast paced society rarely encourages taking time to pause and reflect, yet this is critical if we are to redefine our relationships with the world. Using art, meditation, writing, and other forms of expression, we each need time to let new realities sit and settle into our being. The universe around us has many doorways to wisdom and insight. Although each of our journeys follows different paths, maybe together we can heal our world. RESOURCES 1. Find out who your Congressional representatives are and e-mail them. Tell them you don’t want them to make decisions based on making a few people rich at the expense of millions. If you know your Zip code, you can find them at: http://www.visi.com/juan/congress/ziptoit.html 2. Read an excerpt from “World as Lover World as Self” by Joanna Macy and learn about personal authenticity at: http://dhushara.tripod.com/book/budd/mht/ecol.htm 3. See the travel advisory about going to China at: http://travel.state.gov/china_announce.html 4. Learn about the Winter Solstice and the other seasons at: http://www.equinox-and-solstice.com/html/winter_solstice.html 5. Visit Peace Brigades International and learn how some people are changing their lives and the world at: http://www.peacebrigades.org/index.html 6. Visit the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation at: http://www.napf.org/terrorism/index.htm 7. Shatter myths created by the corporate world about how humans interact with nature. Read “Nature by Design,” and learn some shocking truths about how Disney films staged events and even manufactured facts at: http://www.oneworld.org/ni/issue308/nature.html 8. Stay informed with the help of the Alternative Press Index at: http://www.altpress.org {Jackie Alan Giuliano, Ph.D. is a writer and teacher in Seattle. He can be found marveling in the wonder of his 7-month old son and visualizing a bright, peaceful future for him. Please send your thoughts, comments, and visions to him at jackie@healingourworld.com and visit his website at http://www.healingourworld.com} |
We must surround ourselves with this knowledge and awareness and get very, very angry. Feel the obscenity of the numbers of children dying and feel the horror of these events.
Awareness does not have to be feared. Your day can include walking around the block in the morning, loving your partner, going to work, taking time to see the trees at lunch (or wish there were some), writing an e-mail message to your senator, meditating on the suffering of children all over the world, and having dinner. We can make the desire for change a daily part of our lives rather than a feared, unfulfilled dream.
© 1997-2002 BEI