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.
I decided some years ago that in David’s Desk, I would not try to “chase the headlines,” as they say. I would not comment on current events in the world. This was not due to a lack of interest or concern but from feeling that there were already many skilled and knowledgeable people writing essays, blogs, reports, and commentaries calling our collective attention, almost daily, to the problems and challenges our world is facing. I felt that my best contribution would be to focus upon and write about the inner journey, as I say in my preamble above. That is where my strengths and my knowledge lie. Given that all things are interconnected, I felt that success in our spiritual lives could not help but reverberate outwards and benefit our positive efforts to meet these challenges.
However, our spiritual, our psychological, and our physical lives are intimately interconnected within us and to the environments in which we live and work. If we lack wholeness within ourselves, this will affect the wholeness of our environment, and vice versa. We cannot separate ourselves from the Earth. We are, in a way, one entangled, interdependent, interconnected organism, a planetary life within which every person, every plant, every animal, every stone and river, mountain and ocean, prairie and desert has value and meaning.
I talk about this all the time in my classes, but I have not done so here in this monthly essay. Now, I am. Every voice is needed to shout out, cry out, sing out, say out that it is time to change how we live upon this world and with the life that surrounds us. The world needs us, Life needs us, WE all need us to say “Stop!” to the habits of “business as usual” that are feeding the intensity of the climate crisis. The fate of our civilization—perhaps even the fate of our species—hangs in the balance.
One of my very good friends is Vance Martin, the President of WILD. He and his organization are doing important work on behalf of the Earth and the non-human species that share this planet with us; if you would like to know more, their website is www.wild.org. Vance and I met at Findhorn back in the Seventies, and I’ve watched his work with growing admiration as the years have passed.
Vance recently began a blog, to which you can subscribe by going to WILD’s website. I was moved by what he had to say about the climate crisis—he is definitely one of the experts in this field—and I received his permission to quote a relevant passage here:
“We will not escape the consequences of human actions…the natural world that supports us has laws not feelings…but there is much we can do to avoid catastrophe. Everything helps: nothing is too small. But some things matter more than others.
Be politically active at every level—demand and create enlightened leadership.
Be financially active at every level – demand and create responsible business and finances.
Be a personal demonstration – make the changes in your own consumerism, travel and food that makes a difference.
“All of the above are important. But even more important is how you/we respond with each other to this crisis. Danger, emergency, and threats can drive us inwards, defending and isolating ourselves from others as a matter of what we perceive as self-preservation. That is not the answer and, in fact, will only worsen the negative impacts of our situation. This is the time to reach out, not in; to integrate, not polarize; to be sharing, not selfish; and wisely loving, not negatively suspicious. More than anything be hopeful, not hopeless. And don’t forget that your sense of humor is a great ally! In short, be the best possible person you can be.”
To Vance’s list, I would add a fourth action that we can take: Be spiritually, psychologically, and physically active to foster and maintain inner wholeness—acting as a whole person helps create wholeness in our world.
Vance implies this, but I wish to make it explicit. The time is long passed when we can imagine a divide between being spiritually responsible for the state of one’s consciousness and being and being an activist taking responsibility for the state of one’s planet. The distinction and boundary between our inner and outer worlds simply is not there. We cannot foster a whole world if we are divided in ourselves. We cannot walk our spiritual journey divorced from the physical well-being and wholeness of each other and of our world. It is a shared path, a mutually dependent path.
From this perspective, the climate crisis can be seen as involving both the outer climate of the planet and the inner climate of our minds and hearts. As wildfires are raging in the world, so also anger and hatred are raging in our inner lives. As floods are swamping the land, so also fear swamps our inner stability. It’s not a matter of dealing with one or the other but rising to deal with both. The wholeness of the world is not divided between human and non-human, organic and inorganic, the spiritual and the material; it is one world sharing one future.
We may not know what to do to help with the outer manifestations of the climate crisis, though there are certainly many sources now available to give us that information, such as Vance has done in his blog and continues to do through WILD. One of the newest, and to my mind, one of the best, is Paul Hawken’s new book, Regeneration. It is a clear statement of practical actions anyone can take to, in the subtitle of the book, “end the climate crisis in one generation.”
But as Paul and many others, like Vance and like I am doing here, are pointing out, what we are facing is as much a crisis of consciousness as of climate. It is a crisis of who we believe we are, a crisis of changing to be the kind of humanity the planet needs us to become. In this area where we face the inner manifestations of the climate crisis, none of us is powerless. Here we can do something to learn, to grow, to change. In the process, we also discover how to act in ways that will build a new world with a new way of being human within it.
I want to close this essay with some thoughts shared with me by another friend, Patrick S. Wolfe, a writer living in Canada. Over the years, he has taken part in several of my online classes and forums, and he always has good, wise thoughts to contribute. After taking part in a recent online forum focusing on how we can meet the future, he sent me these comments in an email. I could not have said this better.
“May all who can, open to the qualities of fiery hope, peace, joy, and love, and to the potential and energy of the new civilization unfolding around us. May love, not fear, hope, not despair, joy, not distress, compassion, not anger or hate, enfold each of us in safety, protection, and courage. May we have the will to do what is available to us to bring the new civilization into being. May my strength, my calm, my courage, my joy, my love empower at least one other person to join in this enterprise and become a source of vision and new life.
Be peacefully urgent and aware, open to engage with love and power with what the world brings to your doorstep.”
