This Labor Day weekend brings 2022's migrating extreme heat to southern California--another direct reminder of our collective dependency on the natural environment. As varying areas of the country wrestle with natural disasters and "un-natural" (unfamiliar) weather patterns, the consequences of a changing climate become more real. This is not a swift process, regardless of the urgency of immediate needs and genuine emergencies that erupt in extreme weather. Specific situations demand we act in the moment, but digesting and coming into alignment with global changes--a change of collect consciousness-- takes time. The collective change is an inner movement that impacts each of us, initially unconsciously, even as we attend to our private lives, personal concerns, and familiar routines. Extreme weather disrupts routines, disrupts expectations. At best we are unsettled, more aware of the hardships others face, and begin to prepare for a changing future. The more flexible we are, the more we can adapt and the more we can offer support for others.
But how do we adapt? What do we need to do? Those who have been immersed in ecological study for decades have one form of knowledge that offers road maps for reconstructing society's relationship with nature through regulation, technology and global cooperation. Cooperation may be the most difficult to achieve.
As individuals, living spiritually, consider this teaching from Anthony de Mello's, The Song of the Bird (1984). He retells the classic metaphor of the ocean fish who searched for the thing called the ocean, missing the reality of ocean all around him. De Mello writes of a seeker who complains of looking for God on mountain peaks, in the desert, in monasteries, and among the poor but never finding God. There was nothing the teacher could say, because the all-ness of God was alive in the sunset, the hundreds of gathering birds, the sounds of human traffic and the buzz of a mosquito near his ear.... He concludes with, "Stop searching, little fish. There isn't anything to look FOR. All you have to do is look."
Today is a day to look, hear, smell, touch, or taste life. We will grow into new social action. Spiritually, we don't have to look FOR nature's signs and directions; even as the collective consciousness is reckoning with the new, we are that new, that evolving shift. We are embedded in this living Earth.
Follow the link for Amanda Gorman's inspiring poem Earthrise https://www.sierraclub.org/.../earthrise-poem-amanda-gorman