David's Desk is my opportunity to share thoughts and tools for the spiritual journey. These letters are my personal insights and opinions and do not necessarily reflect the sentiments or thoughts of any other person in Lorian or of Lorian as a whole. If you wish to share this blog post with others, please feel free to do so; however, the material is ©2021 by David Spangler.
My eye surgery this past month ran into some hiccups as the retina of the eye which was operated on has swelled. This is more bothersome than alarming as it’s a known complication of cataract surgery, and it will heal itself over time. However, while it is doing so, my vision is blurry and writing is a chore. So, I’m once again dipping back into my David Desk archives. This particular essay was written twelve years ago this week (David’s Desk 26, July 2009). I’ve edited it a bit to bring it up to date. I hope you enjoy it.
Consider a small town in which everyone has a house and a garden and all the houses are clustered into small neighborhoods separated by hedges. People are aware that they are in a town but it serves more as a backdrop to their everyday lives than as a true community. Everyone is busy attending to their own affairs, their own gardens, and their own homes, with some attention left over for their immediate neighbors.
But then one day a discovery is made. There are underground wires running between all the houses and not just the ones in a particular neighborhood cluster either. The whole town seems to be interconnected in ways no one had suspected. Furthermore, these wires are attached to a peculiar instrument that had always been in the house but which had not seemed to do anything, so folks had just been ignoring it. Searching about, they found old dusty manuals that suggested that these devices, called “telephones,” could be used to talk over a distance across the hedges to people in other houses, even people in neighborhoods on the far side of town. Suddenly the sense of being part of a whole town became that much more real.
Unfortunately, they also discovered that many of the wires had been broken by the digging and plowing that people had been doing in their own fields and around their homes. If we really want to have a whole town, the people said to each other, we need to fix these connections so we can talk to each other. And this is what they did.
However, they discovered even this was not enough. Interconnected though they might be and although they were now communicating and aware of each other in new ways, they began to realize that to truly be a town they had to build it together. Communication by itself was not sufficient for community. A level of mutual participation, caring, and co-creativity was also required. For the town was more than just a collection of houses and neighborhoods; it was a collaborative creation, a shared consciousness and identity.
Over the past few decades, particularly as the impact of climate change has become more and more felt and acknowledged, the penny is dropping that we live in an interconnected, holistic world in which all of life is interdependent and interconnected in profound and complex ways. To continue my metaphor, we are citizens of a township called Gaia or Earth, a “township” made up of many diverse neighborhoods. The next great task is to learn how to be participants, collaborators and co-creators with the other neighborhoods that make up this world and in the process fixing the connections that our human activities, particularly in recent years, have allowed to become broken.
For make no bones about it, we live in a broken world, though one that I feel can be repaired. The connections between parts of ourselves, between ourselves and others (particularly those different racially, ethnically, politically, economically, or culturally from ourselves), between ourselves and the kingdoms of nature, and between ourselves as physical beings and the subtle or non-physical realms of life and intelligence are nowhere near as healthy, whole, or vital as they could be. Much of this “wiring” has been buried and forgotten or outright broken, leaving us struggling within a fragmented—and fragmenting—consciousness of the world.
This issue is not solved simply by accepting and believing in a holistic paradigm. It is solved by collaborative mind and action, a reaching out across our boundaries to create wholeness through, at the very least, the use of love, caring, and appreciation. It is also helped by developing an appreciation for the many ways in which we are connected and the nature of some of the invisible “subtle” wiring that we’ve overlooked for decades in our technological and materialistic culture.
I suppose my summer thought then is that as challenging as the work has been and continues to be for many people to articulate and foster a holistic, ecological worldview, the real work, the “town-building” work, is yet ahead of us. If the holistic paradigm has asked us to revision and redefine the nature of the world around us, the next step asks us to revision and redefine ourselves in co-creative and participatory relationship to that world. It means accepting levels of both surrender and openness on the one hand and power and capacity on the other with which we may feel uncomfortable and unfamiliar. It asks us to step up as partners to the world, learning to “think like a planet.”
Thank you, everyone! May you have a wonderful, blessed, joyful, fun, and safe summer.