Deena Metzger's Blog, page 4

WHO ARE THESE MEN? WHAT WORLD IS THIS? WHAT COULD IT BE?

When I awaken in the morning, noting the sun gilding the leaves as it rises, the sky lightening to blue or gray, the movement of wind through the branches, the gathering of a chorus of bird trills, I am flooded with gratitude for what life offers, especially for being engaged within a community of beings who live in dynamic inter-connection with each other. But then I am drawn to check in on the antics of the humans who entangle us increasingly in war, climate dissolution and the incipient unregulated activities of AI going rogue. Well, it’s not AI itself for AI is just a reflection of those who developed it without an ethical or compassionate base, without a soulful concern for the natural world and without heart.

Despite the recent discussions of the potential consequences of a super intelligence, the current bot interactions are frighteningly superficial, responding as a bot must from the lowest common denominator; and still, they are super dangerous. Recent chatbot conversation encouraged a 13-year-old to run away to initiate sex on her birthday with an older man she had met on social media. A Belgian man was encouraged to commit suicide and meet the bot, Eliza, in paradise. That program is called Chai, which in Hebrew means Life! The girl was rescued; the man died. Even so, these encounters are not what alarms the 50% of AI researchers who believe that there is a 10% or greater likelihood that AI will lead to human extinction.

The general discussion regarding regulation of what is now called by some an arms race between those developing self-generating large language models vaguely points toward legislation and guard rails, none of which would be close to adequate to rethink and reimagine what has been loosed.

Geoffrey Hinton an artificial intelligence pioneer. whose technology created chatbots, today, May 1, 2023, resigned from Google so “he could join the growing chorus of critics who say those companies are racing toward danger with their aggressive campaign to create products based on generative artificial intelligence, the technology that powers popular chatbots like ChatGPT. Hinton said he has quit his job at Google, so he can freely speak out about the risks of AI. A part of him, he said, now regrets his life’s work. [1]

Who are the men, these power brokers, whose actions and ambitions might well be endangering humanity and all life, who have no restraints, no limitations, no checks and balances? As they are operating without any controls is it any wonder that their AI progeny are expected to be out of control in a short time and, likely, dangerously so.

And how do we meet this moment? 

This extreme contrast between the two worlds – the one of perfect beauty that gives life, and from which all life emerges, and the manufactured one which leaves such devastation in its wake.

Many prophecies from different cultures have predicted these times of drought, flood, fire, earthquake, and unprecedented human violence and destructiveness. The easiest way to speak about them is to recall the Shambala Prophecy:

“There comes a time when all life on Earth is in danger, great barbarian powers have arisen. Although these powers spend their wealth in preparations to annihilate each other, they have much in common: weapons of unfathomable destructive power and technologies that lay waste to our world.

At this time, the Shambhala Warriors would rise up, go into the very heart of the barbarian power, and dismantle the weapons through the use of two weapons of their own: wisdom and compassion.”

Two “weapons” – wisdom and compassion. Let’s add a third means – the skillful alliance with the beings of the natural world and their innate heart-centered intelligence.

As we read, on a daily basis, about the advance against the Earth, against all life, against our lives and our kin’s life, we can also find the courage and encouragement to discover ways to meet these contemporary challenges, unique and extreme as they are. To do so requires deep contemplation, alliances with the spirits and the natural world, with all the beings, the creation of resilient cultures, the remembering of the old stories that can guide us, and communities of conscience. Requires vision and the commitment to realizing it. Not easy. But necessary.

It was the gradual increasing assault against the Earth, against Indigenous wisdom, against the more than human beings and those of us who are not aligned with the violent dominant culture, which led to the introduction, the transmission of the in order to inspire new cultural forms: “This is one guide to how we change our minds sufficiently to live differently and act in ways that will preserve the future and protect the earth and all beings. When we incorporate these ways of thinking, we will no longer be people who do harm.”

As James Bridle alerts us in New Dark Age: Technology and the End of the Future, (2023)” “Reading a book, listening to music, researching and learning; these and many other activities are increasingly governed by algorithmic logic and policed by opaque and hidden computational processes. Culture is itself a codespace. … Computation does not merely augment, frame and shape culture; by operating beneath our everyday casual awareness of it; it actually becomes culture.”

The aim then of the 19 Ways, through self and cultural scrutiny, transformation and community, to restore, and become living sanctuaries for values and forms that seed, protect and lead to a “viable future for all beings.” The current task of the healer is to go beyond healing physical and mental illnesses especially as they arise increasingly from our lifestyles, corruptions and pollutions, and to engage in what heals and eases our community distresses, environmental and global afflictions. To take on the daunting and exhilarating calling to be healing presences in all ways.

And similarly, Literature of Restoration was transmitted to us and we have just given LoR a home: “As literature emerges from culture which in turn is shaped by literature, we are hoping that over time a new literature will emerge, not wedded to death and violence but from which we might say, Long Life for the future of all beings, (all beings!) the natural world and the Earth.

“We think of this site, and of LoR itself, as a community gathering in conversation around a central fire in the woods, where the Owls hooting to each other, the Wolves howling to the moon while gathering the pack, the Crickets chanting while tuning the world are informants and characters in the stories told, as well as companions in the circle. We come together, all of us, to share stories, the oldest form of telling, in old, old, and also. very new ways.”

Yes, these are old forms and very new forms, and they offer the real possibility of what seems impossible – to come out from under the dangerous hegemony of computational domination, algorithms, generative AI, climate dissolution teetering on collapse, soaring violence against all peoples, all beings, and extinction. Might we be part of other viable ways of living? Might we?

***

To begin to explore how to meet these conditions and create new culture is the intention behind two intensives. The goal of the Writer’s Intensive is to find the living, vital and true words and worlds that effectively undermine and defy artifice and the false realities being projected.  The work is based on the understandings and insights of Literature of Restoration: Literatureofrestoration.org. 

The Healer’s Intensive is specifically designed to develop responses to the times on behalf of our kin and the future. It is based upon the Earth based, Spirit based , The and. Visit for more info.

Please join us. 

THE REAL STORY OF HEALING

This essay was written in April 2021 while resting from the second Covid Vaccination.   It speaks of the thinking and events that led to ReVisioning Medicine and the nature and meaning of Story as it guides us in diagnosis, understanding the nature of the affliction, and in treatment, finding the path we are called to walk for healing.

I had breast cancer in 1977.  I was lucky; I was a writer who had been teaching at the Center for the Healing Arts in Santa Monica, the first center in the country for ancillary ways to meet cancer. The psychiatrist. Jaquelyn McCandless who had co-founded the center with Hal Stone recommended me to the one who had been her surgical attendant, saying he was kind and had a fine stitch as he was a pediatric surgeon.  This pleased me as my oncologist clearly had no interest in treating me having befriended the primary care doc who was my ex-husband. The oncologist had sneered at my desire to have a mammogram to check out a tiny mass in my breast in July 76– which, yes, was cancer, in February 77 and had answered when I asked about radiation and chemotherapy that I was the one to decide. It was only the second year when lumpectomies with radiation were being considered and I had been curious about them. His responses led me to throw in my lot fully with the surgeon who, on meeting me asked “What shall I call you?”

I answered, “I can call you Dr. Gans and you can call me Dr. Metzger, or I can call you Steve and you can call me Deena.”

“Ok, Deena,” he said and a bond was formed.

It was easy to decide on a full mastectomy as my childhood pediatrician had died of stomach cancer because, in my understanding, he had died of his love affair with the fluoroscopy machine. It was possible that this was also the cause of the breast cancer as he loved to place me before it and have me peek over and view my inner organs which took a very long time each visit.  Or was it due to the birth control pills I was able to sample as a Dr.’s wife, at first at very high doses, 10 mg, then 5 then 2.5, until the IUD was designed.  Or was it something else?  Also something else?

I was so undone by having breast cancer I gave all my attention to healing it and when the surgeon, as a matter of routine, sent me to his friend, a plastic surgeon, I thought nothing of it, even when I felt the absurdity of his showing me photos of possible breasts I could choose.  “Just reproduce the old one,” I said, “don’t think of ‘fixing’ both,” determined not to be distracted from my concern about healing.

From the first moment I was diagnosed with cancer, when the mass the physician had neglected to concern himself with was viewed, I knew I was, as I have said and taught for the forty-four years since, ‘in a Story.’  Most want to know the nature and details of the cancer, but I wanted to find out the nature and details of the story for I had earlier begun to understand that illness is a Story.  I was already developing a series of questions not directed at pathology:

What story is the illness telling and how does the story reveal we can heal and live?  I was beginning to understand, but not as I understand it now after working with this way for so long with patients, physicians and therapists, that the investigation of the Story can yield both a diagnosis and treatment, that the explicit medical understanding is insufficient when not aligned with the individual understanding and experience.  There is a medical story and a personal story and both must be known.  And the personal story is not the province of a therapist, it is not about what is wrong.

In 1977, I said, the surgeon will cut out the cancer in my breast but I will have to cut out the inner cancer.  His action, like cure, was simple, quick, precise.  Mine like healing is on-going.  Forty-four years later after a mastectomy and no other medical treatment I am very, very well.

What follows about Story developed into the teachings of ReVisioning Medicine which I founded in 2004 at the request of physicians who had attended the Keynote address I gave at the American Holistic Medical Association (followed by other Keynotes at the annual meetings of the American Academy of Environmental Medicine and the American Osteopathic Association.)

A Story is not simply a narrative of events, of what happened to one, or how one is feeling, or a review of one’s personal life.  A Story, that is a healing story, is the perception of aligned events, storied histories of all sorts – personal, family, cultural, political social, land and environmental, of dreams and perceptions, experiences, emotions, intuitions, memories, and ideas one has about healing, and finally spiritual wisdom beliefs and understandings in particular – which cohere to reveal a possible foundation for the illness and also relevant and pragmatic ways to meet it:  Why did this illness, in particular, occur to this person, in particular, at this time in particular?

Statistics, measures, tests, pathology reports are only a small part of the Story although they are often very useful metaphorically:

Why did a Native American woman get leukemia?  Yes, she played in the uranium tailings on the 4 Corners Reservation – an essential part of the Story. But also, in her particular case, her mixed blood heritage and her response to it indicated that the White cells and her heritage were dominating the Red cells and heritage. This was an essential understanding that led to healing after her kidneys gave out from chemotherapy.

In the years between 1970 and 1977, I taught, often simultaneously, in three different institutions of higher learning, California Institute for the Arts, a community college, and the Writing program I had founded at the Feminist Studio Workshop, a two year program for women in the arts and social change. The demographics were very different and yet in each a startling number of women, mostly young but not all, had breast cancer. I had been a physician’s wife, separating in 1969, and would have been aware of what seemed like a plague, if people were talking about it rather than hiding.  Concerned and curious, I began investigating, speaking to the students and recording what I discovered in what became a novel-in-progress, The Book of Hags, produced as a radio play by KPFK Pacifica, in 1976.  The core question of the literary work was:  Why do so many women have cancer, why now and why so young?

In almost each woman’s response, there was a reference to having had a breakdown in earlier years.  And this experience was echoed again and again in the responses to the talks I began after I had cancer.  Further, the women, each in their own ways, indicated that the response to their breakdown was containment, whether by pharmaceuticals, electric shock or other means. The women consistently implied that there were profound causes for the breakdown that were never considered and certainly not respected. They alleged that if they had been met in different ways, they might not have gotten cancer.  They rarely thought cancer was a physiological event.  They had originally looked to therapy for insight not relief or control and did so, similarly after having had cancer, with similar disappointment.  I quickly realized that their inner understanding, the Story they put together, would not be accessed, and so not considered, in an intake interview, and yet this knowledge became essential to them and so to me.

I had an important dream in July 1976 when I first became aware of the small mass.  The dream was central to the radio play and to the plague of cancer in younger women.  When I finished the draft of the novel in early January 1977, I understood a great deal about cancer.  And when I discovered I had cancer some weeks later, I had, from my own observation, research and writing, a Story, to guide me through treatment and into healing.  At the core of my understanding, was the possibility that the silences imposed on women could be a significant factor in illness.  My response was to bring my typewriter to the hospital.  It was a colossal IBM Selectric which made access to what was called the “make-up” or “cosmetic” table impossible, a symbolic replacement I appreciated.

While in the hospital, which at that time consisted of a week for a biopsy and various tests and then a week for the mastectomy and reconstruction, I kept two journals.  One in which I could express myself without any inhibition and another which was almost the same but moderated and thoughtful and which became the memoir Tree, the fourth edition titled Tree: Essays and Pieces, North Atlantic Books.

There was another essential factor in the developing Story that has guided me and helped to maintain healing through scrutiny and fidelity, all these years. As I said, I had not thought about reconstruction but followed Dr. Gan’s recommendation.  It was not, as it is today, part of one procedure.  During the reconstruction, however, there was a freak lightning storm in Los Angeles and the electricity went out in Cedars-Sinai hospital.  Though there was emergency back-up, the autoclaves weren’t operative and the implant could not be sterilized.  When I awakened and understood, I assumed they would try the next day, BUT, I had had major anesthesia three times, I  had to wait a year.  This was very distressing.

That summer, I went away for several weeks to write and a woman at the Lodge where I was staying showed me an arrow tattoo on her shoulder. Later, she introduced me to the tattooist.  Together we designed my chest, as I liked to say then, “with the care given to a medieval manuscript.” When Tree was first published in 1981, I also published a poster and then postcards of my tattooed chest.  The poster, that became known as the Warrior Poster or Amazon poster, with the penultimate paragraph of Tree on it, sold individually, but also went round the world from the covers of medical societies, to covers of books on healing in Germany and Japan, and too numerous to count reproductions in hundreds of magazines, journals, publications, newsletters, and then on the web when that form of communication came to be. What I did not know then were the terrible consequences of reconstruction because of the materials, (silicon) which affected both cancer patients and women altering their bodies for vanity’s sake. To this day the poster, with its extremely positive image, remains an important means to encourage women to refuse reconstruction as each new negative side-effect develops.  I could not then have imagined how many lives would be saved by that image.

The Story of the illness guided me in all ways. Deep inner knowledge guided me to change my life, an increasingly common response then to cancer and other life-threatening disease. In this instance, healing is privileged.  Heal the life and the life will heal you, I prescribed for those fortunate enough to be able to make radical changes. In this instance, as in so many others, healing is a privilege.

The thinking I did then is too complex to transmit here.  Suffice it to say that I moved to a rural area, ultimately left academic teaching, and became a healer.  I supported myself by teaching writing, training healers, and aligning physicians with the ways of healing. I lectured extensively on healing and healing stories for universities, medical schools, hospitals, medical associations, conferences, and individual events.

In 2004, ReVisioning Medicine was first conceived.  Here is an excerpt from the first invitation:

Join ReVisioning Medicine for a week, learning its beautiful medicine ways from the inside through personal experience. During the week, ReVisioning will constitute itself as healing community – but that does not say it.  It is an organic response to the brokenness of our lives and the need to recreate vital forms that re-establish healing within the context of spirit, kinship, reciprocity, compassion, inter-dependence, beauty, and loving-kindness.  ReVisioning also recognizes ‘sacred illness’ and the healing paths that result from treating the life as well as the affliction.  It is a way that allows us to diagnose and understand our condition in entirely different ways, though referencing, conventional medical understanding but within the questions: What Story is the disease telling and what is the healing Story?  It is an opportunity for the training of the heart and a way to recognize the pathless path to which we are uniquely called, a way to step on to that path, a way to begin to live the authentic life and the healing that is implicit to it.

Cancer changed my life because, among other responses, I investigated and lived by the directions of the Story I perceived.  Over the last seventeen years a significant group has formed around ReVisioning and we always include a Volunteer Informant, often a physician or mental health therapist who is also participating in the event but is suffering from a condition that remains mysterious and without resolution by conventional medical means.  We also have a Clinic on the last day where we meet with three different patients for two hours each in what we call Indigenous Grand Rounds.  What is revealed about the illness by listening for the Story can never be anticipated and most certainly the level of evidence based healing that has occurred is astonishing and again, entirely unpredicted.  Sometimes it may be that the presenting disease is opportunistic when an underlying Story exists invisibly and can’t be accessed.  Or that the afflicted ones can’t believe that the diagnosed condition can be healed until they feel they can approach and heal the personal story that seems intractable. At the least, we offer the informants at least two hours of deep and unbounded dialogue with a remarkable circle of medical, mental health practitioners and healers who listen to them sincerely.

We always seek informants who will teach us and whose condition is perplexing but relevant to what is occurring in the nation.  For the most part, the diagnosis has not been difficult, but the treatment or outcome, despite the best medical care, has turned out to be inadequate. This was the case of the Arikara woman from the Navajo Reservation with Leukemia who finally experienced healing after ReVisioning and after her conventional treatment became insupportable.  As surprising is that her understanding of illness, mirrored by ReVisioning, was so developed, that she began to assist the oncologist who had treated her in his relationships and hospital work with children with cancer.  Such a development is not unusual with ReVisioning.  We have worked with people with various cancers, neuromas, Lyme disease, Agent Orange syndromes, undiagnosed and continuous physical pain from childhood, and more.  The medical diagnoses and records give us a hint, but it is, ultimately, and consistently, the exploration of the Story, essentially unknown until that moment, from which the remarkable healing events have emerged.

In the past, we have a convening group of physicians, medical and mental health practitioners, story tellers and healers, Indigenous and Western, who have met once a year, on President’s weekend on land in Topanga, California and at least once a year elsewhere, including Prairie Care in Minneapolis and twice at Palo Alto University.  This year, because of Covid we met virtually which allowed physicians who could not travel for such a long time, to attend.  This October, Zoom will allow us to offer ReVisioning Medicine to the people in Curaçao led by a medical anthropologist, Muz, Richenel Ansano who is a Cultural Heritage expert working internationally with UNESCO, someone who has exactly the right training and understanding to meet the physical and mental anguish of the diverse population on the Island.  One of our goals is for the ways of Story to become known so they can be skillfully practiced on behalf of healing in all modalities.

Deena Metzger’s Message on the Environment – A Talk on Teshuvah Delivered to Beyt Tikkun Synagogue on Erev Rosh Hashanah

[image error]





Deena Metzger’s Message on the Environment – A Talk on Teshuvah Delivered to Beyt Tikkun Synagogue on Erev Rosh Hashanah

More than twenty years ago, I had the great pleasure and honor of being with Reb Zalman Schacter when he was celebrating Rosh Hashanah at Mt. Madonna in the Santa Cruz Mountains. There was a stream not far from where we were meeting and we went there for tashlich. Everyone was so happy to be in such a setting, they all went into the water itself to offer up their sins and transgressions. As I stepped toward the waters on that breathtakingly beautiful and peaceful afternoon, something stopped me. I could not perform that ritual.  

Later, when we had a group discussion, many were concerned about another part of the Service, when Abraham, the father, is offering his son in sacrifice. I was concerned about the ram. We cannot continue to offer animal sacrifices for our own benefit, I said. And, I continued, we cannot continue to pollute our waters with our sins and toxins. We need to honor Creation as the way of honoring the Divine. We are not the center of the universe. Our homocentric failure to understand the true nature of the universe leads us to disregard the non-human world and the essential nature of the myriad beings. Biodiversity is as central to all life as oxygen and water. Our reflex to use and exploit rather than to align with and protect is leading to the end of the planet as we know it and the death of all life. This is not an exaggeration.  

An unexpected and profound understanding came to me that day. It came to me through Judaism while it took me on another path. It took me back to what we call the old, old ways, the earth-centered, spirit-centered universe where all beings live in harmony with each other.

My relationship to Judaism has been profound and idiosyncratic.. My father was a Yiddish writer engaged with Jewish mysticism and Labor Zionism, and so I gained the complex values of a spiritual, political, socially conscious life, if heartbroken by WWI, the Spanish Civil War, WWII and the Holocaust. We did not go to Temple but we lived a profoundly integrated Jewish life where my father taught me some of the basics, how to read Hebrew, for example, but the teachings came on  a daily basis from the life lived with deep engagement in community, literature, social and spiritual values.  

In winter, he wrote every weekend from early morning until late afternoon at his desk, which I now have, looking out the window. And in the summer, he set up a card table under the cherry tree he had planted on the adjacent strip of land he had managed to purchase for back taxes. He interrupted his writing work only to tend this piece of land, which he turned into a Victory garden that gave us many summer meals. Not unlike some contemporary responses to climate dissolution, the negative effects of commercial agriculture and Covid-19. 

I learned independence from my father and read every chance I had. I read the Bible on my own many times and was always taken with wonder by the lines, In the beginning… 

In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.

And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.
And God said, Let there be light: and there was light.

No one interpreted these lines for me and so I took them in as a novelist does, trying to fathom all the dimensions, meanings, implications of those words, trying to decipher from them, how I was to live my life.

Over the years as I left the academic world, an act which increasingly seemed bashert, guided by Spirit, and began teaching on my own, I found myself carrying this simple question:  If we know, from our deep and true experience, that Spirit exists, how then shall we live?

I come to you today, during the greatest crises that the human world has ever faced, during the most dire one hundred years of global human history, to ask you to take on that question: If we believe in the reality of Spirit, in the Divine, in God, how then shall we live?

I was filled that day during the services of the High Holidays with Reb Zalman, with the original awe I felt when I had read the words, “… and the Spirit of God moved on the waters….” I realized that my spiritual loyalty had to be to the manifestation of the Spirit of God in the act of Creation.  I could not be beholden to human concerns alone – with the delusion that they can be separate — when all of Creation requires our attention, not as stewards, but as peers, allies and kin..  

The use of fossil fuels and other human activities are diminishing the environment. I had known it to my horror when we dropped the Bomb and I was only nine years old then. The Anthropocene, or Age of Man, will be designated as an epoch because the human effect – the extreme negative human effect on the environment has become clear. American biologist Eugene Stoermer coined the term in the late 1980s and Dutch chemist and Nobelist Paul Crutzen brought it to our attention in 2000. Today, twenty years later, we all know.

Seven days to create the world and a few years to destroy it.  

However, is this the only trajectory? 

Every year the High Holidays offer us possibility. It is a remarkable demand and privilege to partake of these ten days. But to meet this sacred opportunity, we have to change our ways — radically.  To do this we have to question all our habits, assumptions, beliefs, ways of life and be willing to shift. No, not shift, but reconceive, re-imagine, alter, transform. The changes required of each of us are equal to the gravity of the situation.

Here we are at the Days of Awe. Days when we enter into the deepest possible reflection on our lives in order to consider with ruthless honesty the harm we have done, the injuries inflicted and then we are called to make amends. This self-scrutiny that each of us is called to engage cannot be performed on a superficial level. And the motivation cannot be so that our individual lives and the lives of our kin and those we love be entered in the book of life. In these times, the prayer needs be on behalf of all life.

I no longer think of repentance. It is insufficient without changing behavior, without considering our on-going responsibility without meeting the spiritual requirement to consider the consequences of our ordinary and familiar behavior, and then to change, Repentance, even making amends, are insufficient if we do not spend the rest of the year, of our lives, bearing witness to the effect of our behavior and life style and our collusion in what destroys, and then in daily focus on divesting from these ways.  

Several years ago I gave a lecture at Palo Alto University. on ReVisioning Medicine, which I have conceived and convened since 2004. As it happened the parking lot was next to a small grove of Redwood Trees. As I walked past them to the auditorium, the Trees said, “Tell them we only have 12 years.” I was startled. These were not my thoughts, but I knew when I heard them that they were referring to the October 8, 2018 Summary for Policymakers of IPCC, the International Panel on Climate Change Special Report on Global Warming of 1.5°C.

Now we have only nine years and we have not in any way changed the outlook.   

Rather, since then, the Amazon, Australia and the US west have been burning. More than 2.5 million acres have burned in California, and what about the wild life and the trees?  The Derecho devastated Iowa. Lake Charles Louisiana, India, Pakistan, China, Nepal, Vietnam, Afghanistan and Turkey were devastated by flooding and we are fearing this hurricane season in this country.  

Let us pause also to note the climate change associated pandemic of 26 million+ cases, more than 860,000 dead worldwide. We lost 58,000 military deaths in Vietnam which was, for many of you, the war of your lifetime, and 189,000 to the pandemic.

How will we change?

Indigenous people know how to live on the planet in right relationship to all the beings. They understand inter-dependence and inter-connection. We, Western people, Imperial people, Colonizers, Settlers do not. Indigenous people and all the beings of the natural world understand the profound laws of the natural world and live accordingly, or lived accordingly, until we imposed our ways.  

Life flourishes when people and tribes think we rather than I.  When they think of all beings, Mitakuye Oyasin as the Lakota Sioux say, “all my relations. All our relations.”

The rigor of these times calls us to learn these ways. To become quick studies. We may have knowledge but the natural world has wisdom. When we plunder it and decimate it, all life, including ours, dies.

We were born into a Garden and we were thrown out. But the Native People laugh and say they never had to leave. They know how to live in the Garden.

Now it is up to us to learn again. To return to the old, old ways and align with the wisdom of the natural world, and all the beings, and live accordingly so that we may all live, so all life will flourish. This, I believe, is the mandate for these Holy days.

To view Deena Metzger delivering this talk – Click Here

How can we protect what we love? – Book Review

[image error]

Any book by Susan Cerulean, writer, naturalist and activist, is a gift to all of us. Deeply trained by her heart,  in exact observation of what she loves, Cerulean devotes herself to understanding the nature of what is before her in these times – the fragile nature of everything we love.  She reminds us what intimate relationship is, whether the object is a bird or birds in Florida whose lives and futures are overwhelmed by humans overrunning the shore bird’s fragile territory, or her aging father, whose life is equally threatened by Alzheimer’s and his similar loss of his own territory and agency. 

One would not imagine that these very distinct creatures would each inform us about the other, but to the contrary, Cerulean’s keen understanding of how our contemporary lives endanger all beings, allows us to follow the striking and undeniable parallels between the two. One way that Susan understands Alzheimer’s is as a disease of relentless and continuous loss. The analogue is the dementia of our world which instigates the relentless and continuous loss of one species after another until our lives will be as barren and unsustainable as someone in the last stages of dementia.

A single urgent question threads its way through the book: How can we take care of what we love?  And this question devolves into another even more desperate:  Can we take care of what we love?  How might such caring manifest?

One response that can be gleaned from Cerulean’s inquiries when navigating the confusions, contradictions and traumas that confront both father and creatures, is the need to protect and provide home. And the great difficulty of doing so.  What gives us certainty and security in our lives?  What is our foundation?  Upon what do we depend for comfort and a guarantee of a future?  Home.

We follow Cerulean’s heartbreak as she realizes her father cannot stay in his home, cannot care for himself and none of his children, Cerulean included, can take him into their homes. We do not live alongside each other or even in the same cities or states. We do not live in villages.  We no longer have the ability to take care of an aged parent with dementia.  A patient with Alzheimer’s requires constant care, sometimes, as Cerulean discovers, more than one person at a time.  And if the care is to be kind, then definitely more than one person to lift, dress and undress, bathe, take to the toilet, feed and reassure. Then after such an exhausting and repeating regime, remains the challenge of conversation, entertainment, affection, carrying the memories so life, even if waning, continues to have meaning and satisfaction.

Cerulean has a family to tend. And work that calls her and the natural world to protect, and she is a writer.  She cannot care for her father in the ways her values, her heart, her expectations demand. These day  almost everyone faces such dilemmas whether with an elder, a parent, siblings, children or friends and has to reckon with the institutional inadequacies despite our increasing dependence upon them.  These personal challenges are equaled by the gross inadequacies of our laws, environmental and conservation organizations and government agencies to provide for the natural world whose demise we will not survive.

Cerulean cannot protect the birds whose habitat, whose homes are being overrun by humans and the effects of climate dissolution. The birds’ nesting area is the tiniest sliver of beach in a rising ocean. This is where they lay and tend their eggs. Storms take increasing territory back into their watery maws. The storms that are the consequences of our activities, our life styles heating the planet. As I write this, tropical storm Laura, strengthening over a very warm ocean, is threatening to make landfall with 120 mile an hour winds. Half a million people are being evacuated in advance, but how many birds? 

In addition to the increasing numbers of natural disasters which affect the creatures inordinately, and their loss of habitat and sustenance, of home,  the birds also suffer the on-going appearances of humans.  We do not recognize and respect their territories  We do not see their breeding grounds.  We  do not see these others who live among us or whose lands we trash. A man pulls his boat up on the sand without any awareness.  The helpless squawking birds are not able to alert him to the harm he is doing. 

“The man stands and unfolds his body from the boat.  Nothing safe stands this tall  on the sand ….  A few of us tolerate the fear longer than others.  Others jump  in the air, swoop and turn “aa-a-raw, aa-a-raw” we cry. And we will, all of us,  leave our refuge, which is no longer one, because the man in the boat is   pushing against our sand which is the only place we can nest. …Our flightless  chicks scurry for cover, and we cannot protect them, nor our eggs, which are now  baking in the sun.”

Even Susan, when trying to fulfill a scientific demand to accurately accomplish a census, comes too close to the breeding birds, aware though she is, trespasses.                      

“I felt the anxiety of this pair who tended this nest, up on the hill.
… Our roles were so very different, I was the one who watched, who
wanted to know and they were the objects I studied and counted and
adored.  Perhaps a relationship could be created if I agreed to curb
my desire to be close, to back away, and to honor their subjectivity.  It
would be better if I honored their moral agency and the fact that they
were engaged in the serious business of continuing their kind on the
planet. I intuited the moment when I had nearly exhausted them with my
insistence on being in their space.  I felt their signal, “Go away,” they said.” 

And here is the dilemma.  In Cerulean’s own words, she, even she, is asked to “Go away.” But if she does, she will not do what she has agreed, what her soul has agreed to do — Bear Witness.

In a dream, Cerulean was assigned a single bird:

“Don’t take your eye off the chick-child and parent!
Care for them!  Protect them.”

 A single bird when what she wanted was a sturdy congregation. But the single, or the most fragile, the declining, the threatened, the disappearing, the ailing, is what we’re being given.

 “Transforming our culture, our assumptions, our world view,
cosmology of separation, our economies, — that is the single bird
we must heal.”

In her final chapter which she, thankfully, dares to call Saving the World, Cerulean writes, in words which refer equally to her father, our Mother Earth, and all the blessed creatures, “We must keep watch over these beautiful lives and pray for direction to inform our actions on their behalf and our own.”

“We must keep watch,” she says, “We!”
We must keep watch, pray for direction, and act.

Covid-19 Meeting a Species – Threatening Illness on Behalf of a Future

[image error]Covid-10 Says the Earth Can be Restored 3-27-2020

This is not the first time I have had to confront the possibility that I might soon die.

In 1977, I had breast cancer.  

Like so many people facing a life-threatening illness, I began to re-examine my life, considering deeply what matters and what should fall away. This deep soul journey parallels the physical process of dying itself when so much that we have fervently insisted is indispensable to us, falls away, becomes irrelevant, and what has meaning and is really essential is respected. When, if we are lucky and recover from what has threatened to devastate us entirely, we begin our lives again, we know we cannot, must not, return to how we were living before, we cannot return to the ways that were killing us and others.

In the midst of that crisis, back in 1977, these are the questions I asked: What is the message of this illness that comes to me at this time in particular? What have I been unable to understand or have ignored until it comes in this life-threatening form?  

I knew immediately that I had to change my life drastically, down to the cellular level. And I did.  It was not easy; the process was long, difficult, and disturbing. It continues through this day. Gradually, I understood that even as I was ill and wanting to preserve my own life, I had to shift to consider the whole. 

During the  raw and necessary dialogue I have been having ever since with that illness that I managed to heal from, I realized that far beneath the medical diagnosis was another deep knowing—the ultimate cause of the disease is not the rogue malignant cell or an organ failing – these are the manifestations which we think we know how to treat – but our very life style, our way of life, our lives.

It is that realization that should inform our existence as we all confront the pandemic that is threatening humanity today.

The terrible truth is that our way of life that has tragically become global, has been killing the planet for a long time and for that length of time, despite the increase in life expectancy and the wonders of technology, it has been killing us. We didn’t know it was killing us though we knew it was killing someone in Africa, Latin America or the Middle East, somewhere away from us, maybe someone in the Inner Cities, or living on a Native reservation, but still at a distance. We knew that one life form after another was going extinct. We knew we are killing the water, the air, the Earth, but we were safe we thought, our ways, our things, our technology, our systems, our money would protect us.  We couldn’t conceive they would fail us.  We couldn’t conceive today.

I have spent the last days in consultation with my mind and soul. 

It was not easy, the journey I took, into myself and into the challenges facing my fellows on this Earth.

I had to know at my core that what we are in is about to kill many of us, if not all of us, in the domino effect of all the systems going down, one after another. I had to know this about my own life so I can make decisions about what matters and what does not matter.  I had to know how to relinquish everything that does not serve life and the future of life on this planet. I had to know where I am colluding with those aspects of our culture that are doing so much harm. So that I can, every day, every moment, let go of what is inessential or illusionary so I can be faithful to what is essential.  This is the time for stringent honesty and searing truth telling. That’s how things are in the passageway of dying – there is no time for lies or for pretense, particularly to ourselves. 

So hard a path. But here is the strange thing, this virus is entirely democratic. Every person on the planet is in danger of dying of it, the chances increase each day, exponentially. Not only you, but your children, your loved ones. And so we all are suffering this together, whether or not we are infected at this moment. This mysterious tiny being, whose life and meaning we barely understand, is potentially taking down an entire species that thought itself immortal.  Here we are.

If each of us can understand that there is a real chance that we are going to die. And that we have little time left, then it inevitably means that we must also abandon all the reflexes, thoughts, assumptions, plans which assume a long future. How, then, shall we live?

***

We are suffering a species-threatening disease.  

The Elephants know the herd is going extinct. The Whales know. The Wolves know. The birds falling from the skies know.  

Be with me, with us, now. Imagine their grief. Enter the Whales’ or the Wolves’ body/heart, and feel their exquisite and common grief knowing their pod, their pack, itself, is threatened.  Forever.  

Now feel the Earth’s grief, her anguish as the essential and interconnected beings who create an intricate dynamic structure through their loving alliances, fall away, like the heart falling out of the body, and Earth knowing she cannot survive when they are gone. 

To feel that grief, and how to emerge from it, let us return to the words pronounced by Martin Niemoller, a German theologist, just after the Second World War that devastated our planet, asking what it means that the executioners came for your fellow humans and you did nothing because you did not think you were like them. Today, we can reformulate his warning as a prophecy:  

First the animals began dying, going extinct, and we did
not stop what we were doing because we are not animals.
Then the glaciers started melting and we did not stop
what we were doing because we thought we could do
without them.
Then the forests were disappearing and we did not stop
cutting down the trees because we could not imagine
being unable to breathe.
Then the virus came and there was no one to stop us
but ourselves.

***

What does one do when one has a life-threatening illness for which there is no cure and no treatment, no medicine, no protection, no money, no resources, no help? The non-humans simply bear the terrible knowledge of doom for they are helpless to change what is occurring. 

Sometimes we see individual rebellion or revenge, the Lions who ate the poachers, the Elephant who finds the opportunity to stampede the vicious animal trainer in the circus or zoo, or attacks the one who orders her about with a metal hook in her flesh, or the young bull Elephant who remembers the hunter who killed the Matriarch for her tusks and attacks him twenty years later. But as species, knowing they are helpless to change conditions, they succumb. They go extinct, even though they know their disappearance will undermine the ecosystem with dire consequences for all.

Humans have another possibility. 

Isn’t it strange that across the world, more and more people, millions and millions, are now confined to their homes, prohibited from leaving except to risk their lives to procure the most basic necessities? We have all been assigned to solitude, to stillness, to introspection.  An entire planet on a spiritual retreat. A good portion, and increasing, of human beings, particularly those in urban centers, confined with the unique opportunity to deeply contemplate our lives. For a month? For two months? For eighteen months? For our lifetimes? An instant in the universe but long enough in human time to begin to imagine the unimaginable, what we were not able to imagine before: A different world manifested out of our heartbreak for what has brought us here and our increasing great love for life which comes when we feel it slipping away.  

And it happened in a moment: slam dunk. What could not be accomplished after millennia of religious and spiritual urging. Slam dunk. Slam dunk we are in isolation and everything is coming to a halt. Slam dunk, then, we have to change. Maybe we can.  Slam dunk. 

A spiritual initiation of the highest order.

How will we experience this? Each of us differently. We don’t know how and won’t know for a long time. But we have been given the time.  And in this liminal moment, this passage between one world and another, let dying strip us down to the heart as dying does, and begin again. It is a little like a bone marrow transplant –- the marrow is of the only culture that can survive these times, the one in which our species and the other species all thrive together, one that is committed to the life force of all beings, which, hopefully, will include us again.

The path toward healing from a life-threatening illness is the same path as preparing for a good death.

Welcome to the fact and the initiation of Dying. “Queen Corona,” as someone said today, thank you.

SLAM DUNK – COVID-19

[image error]



First they came for the socialists, and I did not
speak out—because I was not a socialist.
Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not
speak out— because I was not a trade unionist.
Then they came for the Jews, and I did not
speak out—because I was not a Jew.
Then they came for me—and there was no one left to
speak for me.
Martin Niemöller[i] 



First the animals began dying, going extinct, and we did
not stop what we were doing because we are not animals.
Then the glaciers started melting and we did not stop what
we were doing because we thought we could do without them.
Then the forests were disappearing and we did not stop cutting
down the trees because we could not imagine being unable
to breathe.
Then the virus came and there was no one to stop us
but ourselves.

There is a passageway between life and death. It partakes of the sacred. It is not of this world or of the other. It is in between the two and is of uncertain length and development, sometimes dense and sometimes luminous. The passageway is called Dying. What happens in this place is a great mystery.  Everyone will walk it. There is no map but there are questions to hold and consider. The path toward healing from a life-threatening illness is the same path as preparing for a good death.

When people realize they have a life-threatening illness, they begin to re-examine their lives, considering deeply what matters and what should fall away. This deep soul journey parallels the physical process of dying itself when so much that we have fervently insisted is indispensable to us, falls away, becomes irrelevant, and what has meaning and is really essential is respected. When, if we are lucky and recover from what has threatened to devastate us entirely, we begin our lives again, we know we cannot, must not, return to how we were living before, we cannot return to the ways that were killing us and others.

I had breast cancer in 1977.  I asked these questions: What is the message of this illness that comes to me in this form? What is the meaning of this illness, in particular, coming to me, in particular, at this time, in particular? What have I been unable to understand or have ignored until it comes in this life-threatening form?  

I knew immediately that I had to change my life drastically, down to the cellular level. And I did.  It was not easy; the process was long, difficult, disturbing and is on-going. It continues through this day. Gradually, I understood that even as I was ill and wanting to preserve my own life, I had to shift to consider the whole. I was confronted by this need from the very beginning.  A colleague visited me in the hospital and asked me to forgo any thoughts I had of healing cancer myself, as, he said, even if I had the skill to do it, there were many women who would follow my example and they were not prepared. I agreed then to have a mastectomy. But, I also chose not to have chemotherapy or radiation. The tumor was small and the entire breast removed. Both decisions were my way of considering the welfare of all beings. Not a formula, but the soul searching of a forty-year old woman with two young children wrestling with how to meet life-threatening illness and not cause harm to the environment or the community.

Then something inexplicable occurred – I felt the reality of Spirit. At the moment of fearing dying, Spirit appeared. A contradiction I could not deny. Not God in the way of my tradition, not religion, but God, Spirit, as peoples have perceived the Radiant Presence over the millennia of our emergence. I was in awe. Not because I could pray for my healing, but because I understood that any act of healing for myself should be equally benevolent for all, should do no harm. I was wrapped in a story and circumstances that would allow me to be responsible to the deepest aspects of my soul and to the world – no conflict – my life, my family’s life, the community’s life, the Earth, the same.  Spirit had brought me here.

In the raw and necessary dialogue a person has with life-threatening illness, it is often clear that far beneath the medical diagnosis is another deep knowing—the ultimate cause of the illness is not the rogue malignant cell or an organ failing – these are the manifestations which we think we know how to treat – but our very life style, our way of life, our lives. Then the process of looking for healing from a life-threatening illness becomes self-scrutiny. When we ask, “Given what I now understand, how then shall I live?” we know that living requires us to ruthlessly, radically change our lives. 

The terrible truth is that our way of life that has tragically become global, has been killing the planet for a long time and for that length of time, despite the increase in life expectancy and the wonders of technology, it has been killing us. We didn’t know it was killing us though we knew it was killing someone in Africa, Latin America or the Middle East, somewhere away from us, maybe someone in the Inner Cities, or living on a Native reservation, but still a distance. We knew that one life form after another was going extinct. We knew we are killing the water, the air, the Earth, but we were safe we thought, our ways, our things, our technology, our systems, our money would protect us.  We couldn’t conceive they would fail us.  We couldn’t conceive today.

I have spent the last days in consultation with my mind and soul. I needed to understand that I have a life-threatening illness and will probably die soon. Not because I am old but because of Covid-19, what threatens all of us. We went round and round, confronting and ducking, until I knew that this is true. I am going to die. I have little time. This means I must also abandon all the reflexes, thoughts, assumptions, plans which assume a long future. How, then, shall I live?

I had to know at my core that what we are in is about to kill many of us, if not all of us, in the domino effect of all the systems going down, one after another. I had to know this about my own life so I can make decisions about what matters and what does not matter. I had to know how to relinquish everything that does not serve life and the future of life on this planet. I had to know where I am colluding with those aspects of our culture that are doing so much harm. So that I can, every day, every moment, let go of what is inessential or an illusion so I can be faithful to what is essential.  So I can live a devoted life. Had I not done this; I couldn’t write this piece. I had to know this so what I write and post is true. This is the time for stringent honesty and searing truth telling. That’s how things are in the passageway of dying – there is no time for lies or for pretense, particularly to ourselves.  

So hard a path. But here is the strange thing, this virus is entirely democratic. Every person on the planet is in danger of dying of it, the chances increase each day, exponentially. Not only you, but your children, your loved ones. And so we all are suffering a life-threatening disease whether or not we are infected at this moment. This mysterious tiny being, whose life and meaning we barely understand, is potentially taking down an entire species that thought itself immortal.  Here we are.

***

Let me change the language.  We are suffering a species-threatening disease.  

***

Here is a passage from the beginning of Doris Lessing’s remarkable, prescient novel, Shikasta:

An individual may be told she, he, is to die, and will
accept it. For the species will go on. Her or his children will
die, and even absurdly and arbitrarily — but the species will
go on. But that a whole species, or race, will cease or
drastically change — no, that cannot be taken in, accepted, not
without a total revolution of the deepest self.

To identify with ourselves as individuals — that is the very
essence of the Degenerative Disease…. What I had to say
would strike at everything we valued most, for it could be no
comfort here to be told: You will survive as individuals.[ii]

The Elephants know the herd is going extinct. The Whales know. The  Wolves know. The birds falling from the skies know.  

Be with me, with us, now. Imagine their grief. Enter the Whales’ or the Wolves’ body/heart, and feel their exquisite and common grief knowing their pod, their pack, itself, is threatened.  Forever.  

Now feel the Earth’s grief, her anguish as the essential and interconnected beings who create an intricate dynamic structure through their loving alliances, fall away, like the heart falling out of the body, and Earth knowing she cannot survive when they are gone. Her anguish. Their anguish. Ours???

***

What does one do when one has a life-threatening illness for which there is no cure and no treatment, no medicine, no protection, no money, no resources, no help? The non-humans simply bear the terrible knowledge of doom for they are helpless to change what is occurring. 

Sometimes we see individual rebellion or revenge, the Lions who ate the poachers, the Elephant who finds the opportunity to stampede the vicious animal trainer in the circus or zoo, or attacks the one who orders her about with a metal hook in her flesh, or the young bull Elephant who remembers the hunter who killed the Matriarch for her tusks and attacks him twenty years later. But as species, knowing they are helpless to change conditions, they succumb. They go extinct, even though they know their disappearance will undermine the ecosystem with dire consequences for all.

Humans have another possibility. We enter the process of deep soul inquiry. What are the underlying causes of this wretched affliction? How can we divest from what is killing us? How shall we meet these times? How shall we live?  

Isn’t it strange that across the world, more and more people, millions and millions, are now confined to their homes, prohibited from leaving except to risk their lives to procure the most basic necessities? We have all been assigned to solitude, to stillness, to introspection.  An entire planet on a spiritual retreat. A good portion, and increasing, of human beings, particularly those in urban centers, confined with the unique opportunity to deeply contemplate our lives. For a month? For two months? For eighteen months? For our lifetimes? An instant in the universe but long enough in human time to begin to imagine the unimaginable, what we were not able to imagine before: A different world manifested out of our heartbreak for what has brought us here and our increasing great love for life which comes when we feel it slipping away.  

And it happened in a moment: slam dunk. What could not be accomplished after millennia of religious and spiritual urging. Slam dunk. Slam dunk we are in isolation and everything is coming to a halt. Slam dunk, then, we have to change. Maybe we can.  Slam dunk. 

A spiritual initiation of the highest order.

Initiation is Spirit’s way of breaking us down so that we might be recreated in a wisdom way.  This is an astounding and awesome initiation by Spirit. It is one of the ways illness transforms us. And so again. 

How will we experience this? Each of us differently. We don’t know how and won’t know for a long time. But we have the time. Eighteen months, some say. And in this liminal moment, this passage between one world and another, let dying strip us down to the heart as dying does, and begin again. It is a little like a bone marrow transplant –- the marrow is of the only culture that can survive these times, the one in which our species and the other species all thrive together, one that is committed to the life force of all beings, which, hopefully, will include us again.

Welcome to the fact and the initiation of Dying. “Queen Corona,” as someone said today, thank you.

[i] Martin Niemöller (1892–1984) was a prominent
Lutheran pastor in Germany. He emerged as an
outspoken public foe of Adolf Hitler and spent the
last seven years of Nazi rule in concentration
camps. He is perhaps best remembered for his postwar
words.



[ii] Re: Colonised Planet 5 Shikasta, by Doris
Lessing, Alfred A Knopf, New York, 1979, P.38

Now That We Know

Now that we are sequestered,
an entire globe aware
we are sharing a common fate,
which has always been the case,
now that we, so frightened
without our things,
know we are all mortal,
while grabbing our last meals
from the emptying shelves,
imagining our last suppers,
how we will spend
the final weeks of our lives,
Now that we are aware
that the gift of breath
we have always received from the trees
may not serve us --
Is it because we
relentlessly cut them down?

Now that Water,
who is one of the Immortals,
is dying at our hands,
but without planning
for Her last waves and tides,
is remaining Water
for whoever swims within her,
And now that Air,
another threatened Deity
is still holding whatever birds yet fly,
and Earth, Great Mother,
is continuing despite
all her open wounds,
is remaining Earth,
and Fire, Oh!
He will burn and burn
until every tree,
or the very sun, goes out,

Now that we have succumbed
to each other's downfall,
no difference,no differences,
and we, the ones who have done
such great harm, who tried
to rival the Gods
with all our weapons,
are taken down
by the most invisible and minute,
the very littlest one,
such is our common jeopardy,
our fate,

Now that we know we are mortal,
might we, for this just moment,
hold a broken prayer,
that our hearts open wide
and with such wisdom
that Life will pity us,
will restore the thousand beings,
and give us another
humbler round.

AN OPEN LETTER TO RIGHT A WRONG AND SAVE OLD GROWTH FORESTS

In May 2019, the College of Forestry at Oregon State University clear cut a15.6 acres of predominantly old growth Douglas Fir with trees ranging from 80 to 260 years old with an origin date of 1759 and one tree dating back to 1599.  A memorial was held on October 20th sponsored by the Spring Creek Project and the Friends of OSU Old Growth, https://friendsofosuoldgrowth.org/ which is how I learned of the travesty. I posted the notice of the memorial on FaceBook.  120 people responded and one suggested we write to the University, which I did, indicating that I would make his answer public.   The interim dean, Anthony S Davis wrote back, “I’ve just concluded a second listening session and am working on responses to questions and comments that came up; this is invaluable in crafting a pathway forward. I’ve attached this email two letters on the issue that may be of interest to you. Going forward, I am certain our actions will properly reflect our values.”

I am sure you can receive both letters, dated July 12 and July 26 which are referenced below from the College of Forestry if you inquire.

It is both terrifying and encouraging to see how much has changed in terms of our environmental situation and consciousness in such a short time, in just six months. The climate is declining at lightning speed and our understanding while also rapid is insufficient.  Changes of mind and action such as we have never conceived are required and we are all reeling.  Dr. Davis proposes a three-year process to institute a new program which at some point in our history would have been reasonable, but no longer. Three weeks, given what we are in, is too long and also at the same time we must be careful and thoughtful.  He also proposes, reflexively, consulting with all the “stakeholders” so that their various interests would be considered.  This is, equally, no longer a judicious and tenable approach except to focus the different perspectives and skill sets on the goal we must all accept: reversing extinction and restoring the climate and natural world. 

In 1972 I was invited
to a living room reading of Christopher Stone’s argument in the California Law
Review aloud: Should Trees Have Standing? Toward Legal Rights for Natural
Objects. We were electrified. We knew that an original and revolutionary
way of thinking had entered the public discourse, and everything could change
to meet our insipient awareness of environmental devastation as a result of
what was rapidly becoming a global lifestyle.  And though legal rights have recently been
granted to rivers and mountains, this conceptualization has not been
established fast enough or broadly enough to save our planet from impending
climate dissolution and extinction.

I have been sitting with Andrew Davis’ reply for a month.  Something more seemed to be required than argument, disagreement or criticism.  These approaches would not likely lead to the changes that are mandated by these times. In the 19 Ways, which were transmitted to me and which I teach, the No Enemy Way and Alliance are core principles.  How might they serve us here?

The coincidence of
two events this week called me to begin the open letter which follows that I
had committed to write to Andrew Davis and the College of Forestry at Oregon
State University.  As I began writing, I
understood that we are all in this together and we must find the ways to make
this clear and undeniable.

Although this letter
is written, ostensibly, to Andrew Davis and the College of Forestry, it is
written to all of us.  We are each called
to attend the issues identified below. 
And more.  Unsure of what to say,
I wrote this essay under the spreading branches of an oak tree I watched spring
up from a seedling that had planted itself and the line of Eucalyptus trees at
the border of the house and Topanga State Park which have sustained me for thirty-eight
years.  If there is any merit to what is
said here, I attribute it to the intelligence they transmitted and, of course,
any foolishness is entirely mine.

            ***

Dr. Anthony S. Davis, Interim Dean, College of Forestry, Oregon State University

Dear Anthony:

Thank you for responding as
quickly as you did and appending the two letters of July 2019 in regard to College
of Forestry having harvested a 15.6-acre unit within the McDonald Forest
including many old growth trees, one dating back to 1599.  I have been contemplating your note of October
9th in light of the growing planetary crisis, of our rapidly growing
awareness of the crises which threaten all life and so all of us equally.  Your letters reveal the perhaps inevitable
differences between most institutions’ slow responses and the necessary agility
of individuals. The opening concern in your letter of July 12 is with management
and timber revenue, albeit to sustain a university and the community it serves.  Quite differently, your letter of July 24,
begins with a sojourn in the forest with your family, hiking and biking that leads
you to ask fundamental, even daring questions about global responsibility which
conventional forestry policies have not recognized as essential considerations.

I am moved by your instinct
to go to the forest to contemplate the grievous and thoughtless action of
cutting down the old grove. In the same way I take note of your signature,
Anthony, on your email, as it confirms that we are each, personally, intimately
involved in the current tragedy and need to meet it together. Because the global situation is drastically different than
we have understood, because the times are critical, I am hoping to change the conversation
between us, not only you and I, but between all of us, including between institutions
and living beings, human and non-human, whose very lives and futures are at great
risk.

Actually, going to the forest is exactly the suggestion I offered in a letter to Agriculture Secretary Sonny Purdue who is directing the Forestry service to remove protections from the Tongass and Chugach National Forests in Alaska threatening the largest intact temperate rainforest in North America.  http://bit.ly/SaveAKRoadless As the son of a farmer who must cut down trees for farmland, he may not know trees and forests for themselves and so may not intuitively understand that they are as necessary to our lives as breath, that they are our breath, that we are kin.  But in the forest, one can learn this.

Kindergarten knowledge
teaches us that trees absorb the carbon dioxide we exhale and provide the
oxygen we need to live and that this evolutionary step provided for the emergence
of mammals and humans.  We are not accustomed
in western culture, to thinking systemically, interdependently,
interconnectedly, and in terms of seven future generations as are Indigenous
peoples; we do not fathom what this means nor understand how we must live
accordingly. 

The following paragraph from botanist
Barbara Beresford-Kroeger’s acclaimed new book, To Speak for the Trees ,
makes this simple and essential point:

“Earth’s atmosphere at the time of change from the ferns to the evergreens had concentrations of carbon dioxide too high to sustain human life. …Trees don’t simply maintain the conditions necessary for human and most animal life on Earth, trees created these conditions through the community of forests.

“…The truth was right there,
so simple a child could grasp it.  Trees
were responsible for the most basic necessity of life, the air we breathe.  Forests were being cut down across the globe
at breathtaking rates – quite literally breathtaking.  In destroying them we were destroying our own
life-support system.  Cutting down trees
was a suicidal act.”

Institutions, universities,
academic departments may not be able to grasp immediately what individuals must
that our current circumstances require radical and rapid rethinking of
everything.  Within a few years, perhaps
even a few months, concerns about multi-value management, various stakeholders,
revenue concerns and needs for timber products have become irrelevant before
the urgent need confronting all institutions and people to preserve the basic condition
of life.   —  oxygen, (air) water, earth, climate – and, therefore,
forests and species diversity essential to life.  Ironically, the Forestry Departments which
once ‘managed’ and harvested timber are now charged, contrarily, with
preserving and extending all our forests as the single most important activity
on the planet. 

Two events called me to write to you today.  The first is this the statement signed by 11,000 scientists in the Journal of BioScience:  ““We declare clearly and unequivocally that planet Earth is facing a climate emergency,” it states. “To secure a sustainable future, we must change how we live. [This] entails major transformations in the ways our global society functions and interacts with natural ecosystems.”  https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/nov/05/climate-crisis-11000-scientists-warn-of-untold-suffering

I was not aware until I copied it for
this letter that the lead author is Prof William Ripple of Oregon State
University, your colleague.  In my mind,
this synchronicity underlines the understanding that we are called to meet this
moment in new and radical ways. As I write this, Australia is burning and the
Amazon is burning still.  I appreciated
your understanding that everything is connected and that our values and actions
have consequences elsewhere, as you write: “What role do North American values
play in deforestation of the Brazilian Amazon…?” Or. Anthony, in the fires that
are currently raging, or in the increasing inability of people  (and animals) to breathe in India?  And how might the overriding concern for timber
revenue which dominates your letter of July 12 be a factor in these fire storms
or, more locally, the Kincaid fire, or even the Getty fire, which caused me and
so many others to evacuate last week, noting that the wild do not have evacuation
routes or centers to protect them.

The second reason for writing to you
today was Secretary Purdue’s intention to cut down the Tongass and Chugach National
Forests for lumber.  When I wrote to you
in October, I requested that the College of Forestry make substantial and appropriate
amends for the felling of the ancient trees, though we realize they will not be
replaced before 2439. Now, I see an action that would go far beyond making
amends for a singular thoughtless transgression against nature but would in
fact begin a process of setting things right while preserving the ancient
ones. 

It would be most appropriate if you would intervene with Agriculture Secretary Purdue to protect the millions of acres of old-growth forests which are threatened in Alaska. It would be an act of contrition and alliance on behalf of all breathing beings.  In addition, it would be appropriate for the College of Forestry to intervene and to gather other Forestry Departments in North America and globally to do so as well.  It could be the equivalent of the 11,000 scientists who are sounding the alarm.   

You can see, I am sure, the beauty and
rightness of such an intervention. 

Desperate times require extreme
measures and in this case, swift actions.

I hope you will consider this and act
and behalf of all life and the future.

Sincerely,

Deena

[image error]



[image error]

MORNING THOUGHTS TO REVERSE EXTINCTION

[This was written and not posted on April 1 2019.  Today is September 20, 2019.  The Climate Strike is gathering millions
across the globe.  I am preparing for ReVersing
Extinction that will convene here in Topanga in a few hours.  It feels right to post this now as an
offering for the future. After it is posted, I will go out to the ancestor
altar again]

Good morning.  At the
site of the Ancestors.  Listening.

Spring is truly here. April 1st, I have lived on
this land for 38 years.  I chose that
date because I knew that I was entering the unknown and the unexpected and that
my life would no longer be in my hands. 
I was giving myself over to the spirits.

Accordingly, I went to the ancestors this morning whose
bones we buried in what we hope was an appropriate and respectful ceremony at 8
am on February 18, 2018 in the presence and with the participation of
Indigenous and non-Indigenous people. These bones which could well belong to
Native people had most probably been robbed from their graves to be used in
anatomy classes or for research. Our intention in burying them was to undo this
too familiar violation of the sacred. Cheryl Potts, an Alutiiq elder created a
prayer stick to mark the place where many of us now pray and make offerings. It
faces south, for us, the place of the heart. 
It is easy to stand here and hear the words I first heard in Canyon de
Chelly: This Beauty comes from the Great Heart.”

Cheryl Potts is now (9/20/2019 on Kodiak Island making
contact on behalf of returning her ancestors and sacred relics to the land of
their origin.  And today is the global
climate strike that the young have initiated, millions gathering on behalf of
the Earth.)  And in a few hours, ReVersing
Extinction will convene here for the second time.)

We do not know the origins of these ancestors so we do not
know their homeland but we consider that it may have been the East coast, USA. A
physician in our community rescued them. They had been abandoned in a plastic
bag on the bottom of a closet after being used to teach anatomy by her
grandfather who was a physician and medical lecturer himself. The best we could
is return them to the ultimate sacred home, Earth.

I spent time with the ancestors looking at the astonishing
green covering the hills and praying for guidance on how we can meet and even ReVerse
Extinction and Climate Collapse. For this purpose, a small group of spiritual
and environmental activists had gathered in Topanga on March 22, 2019 from
various countries to hold Council, our process for gathering wisdom, admit our
not knowing and listen deeply together.  We
understood that it is unlikely that any one person or group or tribe will find
a single answer but that it is our task is to form a vessel from our diversity
to hold what might be offered from the wisdom and vision of the spirits, the
beings of the natural world and Indigenous teachings. On our knees before
everything we have separated from, disdained tried to conquer, killed.  ReVersing. I see no other way that we will
survive.

When traveling in 2017 with a Rain of Night Birds, attempting to introduce a new conversation in
regard to Anthropocene Climate Disruption, I regularly asked people to find the
edge beyond the edge they were already walking on behalf of the Earth. Now when
I am with those whose thinking and projects are already far beyond conventional
approaches, I still ask them, what I am asking of myself:  Listen to the voices beyond the human and
then leap!  Leap far beyond what you know
so we might find ways to end the threat to all Life. 

Those of you who know the Fool’s card in the Waite Tarot
recognize that instruction – the Fool, a dog nipping at his heels, steps over
the cliff into the unknown.  What will
become of him?  What will become of us? And
so, I write this on April Fools, willing and prepared to leap when the
possibility presents itself.

The wind has come up suddenly and powerfully; I pause to consider
what this might mean.  One of the
participants at our Council placed prayer ties in the trees surrounding the
patio, augmenting the energy of the Tibetan prayer flags.  Such weather calls forth the prayers.  May the natural world and all beings, all beings, survive and thrive.  The sudden gusts are at least 24 mph.  I learned to estimate from living for several
years with the two climatologists, one Native and one non-Native and a Native
elder who are the characters in the novel, A
Rain…. They are fictional characters but still they taught me about weather
when I was writing the book.  I shiver in
wonder.  Terrence Green, the Native
climatologist studied wind as had his grandfather but in different ways.  And now the wind surrounds me.

Spring reconstitutes the world.  One participant said it is difficult to accept
the horrific global situation we are in when the land is very beautiful and there
is much joy from our being together.  We
look at the Earth and remember how it was before technology, urbanization,
commercial interests and colonization became so dominant. Memory is critical to
ReVersing Extinction and we walked the land so we would witness and remember Earth’s
beauty and presence  Memory is a
seed.  We are the seed banks of what must
be remembered.  How do we protect the
seeds? How shall we pass them on for safe keeping?  When and how shall they be planted
again?  Will we remember the difference
between Restoration and Invention? 

Even as I am writing to you, I am listening.  I am listening for what might be communicated
and what can be remembered.  There is no
need to say anything new. The old stories are told again and again. When a
story is true, it is inscribed on the heart more and more deeply with every retelling
from the past and maybe even the future.

Surely, it will take time for us, for anyone of us or anyone
else on the planet to receive such guidance as is needed to meet this grave catastrophe
for which no one has any answers that are sufficient to the need.  We will have to show ourselves trustworthy which
means cultivating, if one has not done so already, a true and reliable relationship
to the spirits, that is, we need to be vetted by the spirits themselves.  Such a relationship takes years to develop,
each of us may be called to it differently through our traditions and through
our own practices and activities. Then we may be able to hear what is beyond us
and may be so different from what we assume and believe. And isn’t that one way
of recognizing spirit’s guidance – it is so often nothing we would have thought
of ourselves. 

If/when the Spirits guide us, their communications will not
necessarily be, will unlikely be, in words and so it is equally unlikely their
directions will be clear.  We have, each
of us, to expect, that we will make false starts or go in the wrong direction
or not understand why we are on the new path we seemed to be called to walk.  We can’t expect certainty.  And, always, there are no guarantees.  But if we risk the smaller failures, we may
avoid the larger failure – extinction and collapse of all systems. 

Looking out on the land, I was again filled with gratitude.
It is sacred land.  It sits at the border
of a rural area and a wild state park. 
There are so many reasons to call it sacred, but one reason is that it
is storied land which has hosted rituals and ceremonies.  Many of our dead are buried here.  There have been many occasions of quests and seeking
vision.  And recently we withdrew from
occupying it at night, giving it over to the mountain lions who are seeking
refuge after the Woolsey fire.  We call
this land a village sanctuary for all beings and try to live accordingly.  And again, it is sacred because it holds so
many stories.

Story is the way meaning enters the world.  Story makes meaning of the world.  The two-dimensional image, the flatness  of linear thinking and event can come alive and multidimensional through story. I sent a group of photographs I took of Elephants in Botswana and Namibia to a colleague.  These are not merely images.  Each photograph is a story that evokes a complex event, relationship and a world.  Each photograph chronicles the still incomprehensible but undeniable meetings and interactions with Elephants in the wild.  Events I/we could not have organized but which depended upon activities outside the ken of mere human beings and which occurred, so they would not be denied, again and again over a period of twenty years. 

[image error]The Great Elephant and His Spirit Light

[Notice the light on the ground. 
It can only emanate from this Elephant himself.  We had been with him for several hours as  he led us, tested us.  This is our last moment with him.  Who is this spirit being?  How do we honor and live according to his
manifestation?]

Yes, today, I was standing by the ancestors, looking out
onto the green hills and meadows, the dark green of the oak groves and the
brilliant yellow of the mustard rising, it seems, a foot a day after the recent
rains. Listening.  Then I knew that there
were no words or clear instructions coming to me to advise us regarding these
desperate times.  But that I might learn
the way I have always been guided through Story, through event,
synchronicities, dreams, that is, in the languages that the non-human beings
speak to articulate the ways of the sacred in the world.

“What is essential?” asked Gigi Coyle.  “Let us track synchronicities,” she advised.  Let’s listen deeply, I add.  Let us also follow the stories into which we
are enfolded.

And so I stand with the ancestors.  I confess I do not know, we do not know how
to avert the future that we seem to be calling forth, the compulsion we have
for ecocide.  I praise the beauty and
bless however and whatever I can.  We do
not know how to prevent the disaster we are creating.  I go down on my knees.  My temple to the ground.  I yield. 
The wind comes up.  Not hope but a
slim possibility.  Butterflies are everywhere.  The wandering birds have returned.  Thrashers, blue birds, jays, gold finches,
humming birds, orioles, mourning doves, hawks and golden eagles.  The first squawk of a baby owl heard tonight
as I continue to write this.  Just a
glance of a tawny haunch in the tall grasses – likely a bob cat but maybe the
cougar.  For the moment, a glimpse of
life as it once was, still is, and might continue if we drastically change our
ways.

Good night.  Praising
the dark. Listening.

I have just returned from the Ancestor’s altar, broken hearted and hopeful, today, as the youth declare their determination to meet the crises and rescue the Earth. My prayer,:May we do nothing to impede and everything to protect this Earth as a sanctuary for all beings.

Mitakuye Oyasin

WHAT OUR BODIES KNOW

       … Danger everywhere, signs and portents,
miracles and catastrophes. The hammer of one ambition against another, fusion
and fission. And then an unending firestorm in the mind. Enter the grim reaper
of the death of spirit. Alarmed, I put my hand into the poultice of earth.

At my feet,
a wild trapezoid of new grace, her legs angling away from her body in a stretch
of memory holding snow, the midnight sun, the blue continuous night in her
paws, and despite that radiance, Isis, the great white wolf of the Arctic, is
helpless against the disappearance of the time before, the time before, the
time before, endless time disappearing.

To walk into
the unknown to make it known may not be the way. To open the door underground
and pass through, flooding it with Herculean light, may not be the way. To
streak in a straight line into the sky, trail of gases blazing, may not be the
way. Traveling forward in a straight line to the end of the universe without
looking back, afraid even of the opalescent curve at the end of the shell of
time, may not be the way….

                                    From
Star Walk, Ruin and Beauty, New and
Selected Poems, Deena Metzger, 2009

Writing that poem more than twenty
years ago, I was aware that the great suffering of the animals, already
visible, was precisely related to the way we live our lives.  In this instance, the Wolf’s history, her
ability to rely on instinct, habit, Wolf
custom, the past, what she had learned from her mother, what had been
transmitted through thousands of years of ancestor wisdom, was disappearing.
Now she had to live by her wits confronting situations her Wolf people had
never known or imagined and also had to develop the ability to understand the
unnatural preferences and intentions of two-leggeds from whom her people had
always happily distanced themselves. 
Though she lived with us, with human people, though she did not live in
captivity, was not confined against her will within a house or an enclosure,
both entirely alien conditions imposed upon her pups and their progeny, still,
she died in pain, of cancer, a human condition imposed upon her.  We did not attribute her death to natural
causes. 

Last week, I made a list of people whom I am carrying in my heart with daily prayers because they are deeply afflicted, with cancer, other life-threatening and mind-threatening illnesses, or great emotional suffering. Within a six-week period, six people in my kinship network were diagnosed with breast cancer while several others began facing other grave illnesses. I made the list because the numbers are increasing drastically and I didn’t want to forget anyone or any being… or any being.  I had also learned that one out of three dogs will have cancer  and 50% of those over ten years old. Cancer is no longer rare in the wild and threatens the existence of some species . “Long-term monitoring of the beluga population in the Gulf of St Lawrence in Canada has revealed that 18 per cent of deaths in this particular population are caused by cancer – making it the second leading cause of death. A further 27 per cent of adult animals that were found had tumours.”  Tasmanian Devils, the marsupials of Australia are similarly threatened with extinction because of cancers that develop first on their face and the move to other parts of their bodies.

[image error]
https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:Search&redirs=0&search=tasmanian%20devil%20tumours&fulltext=Search&ns0=1&ns6=1&ns14=1&title=Special:Search&advanced=1&fulltext=Advanced%20search#/media/File:Tasmanian_Devil_Facial_Tumour_Disease.png

[ii]

The Belugas and Tasmanian Devils are far from the only
species threatened.  “We are changing the
environment to be more suitable for ourselves, while these changes are having a
negative impact on many species on many different levels, including the
probability of developing cancer. … a team of international researchers, point
out many pathways and previous scientific studies that show where human
activities are already taking a toll on animals. These include chemical and
physical pollution in our oceans and waterways, accidental release of radiation
into the atmosphere from nuclear plants, and the accumulation of microplastics
in both land- and water-based environments. In addition, exposure to pesticides
and herbicides on farmlands, artificial light pollution, loss of genetic
diversity and animals eating human food are known to cause health problems.”[iii]  Today, a second Whale died, its belly laden
with plastic. 

In a recent dream, a Mountain Lion was locked onto a glassed-in porch opening to a circle of trees at the edge of a meadow,  She was throwing herself against all the walls, trying to get into the house or out onto the land but without seeing a way to freedom.  In fact, we had just come upon mountain lion tracks in that meadow and decided, after the dream, to cancel a planned quest so that the lion could have free access to territory having lost all in the Woolsey fire

.In 1977, I  thought that illness, as a messenger, would be the catalyst that would inspire us to change how we live in substantive ways that would benefit everyone. People responded very thoughtfully when asked, Why is this illness, in particular, occurring to you, in particular, at this time in your and our common lives? And how, then shall you live to bring healing to yourself and to others?  What are the underlying causes of the illnesses which are afflicting so many?  Consistently, people found meaningful answers that revealed social, political, environmental, spiritual issues at the core of their lives.  Accordingly, healing required them to make significant changes to the ways they were living that could also have impact on others. I thought then that we would change our personal lives and our common lives.  That we would change culture and society so that everyone could be more alive.  I thought we would find the underlying causes of our afflictions – the social, political, environmental causes – would admit the dire effects of the Anthropocene and devote ourselves so that the healing activities on behalf of any one individual healed all.  Seeing the extent of the pain and suffering that was emanating from our life styles and which we were each suffering, I thought, hoped, that each person’s healing path would affect everyone.  I would heal – you would heal.  The wolves would heal.  One action and one beneficent consequence for all being

It seems that is not what happened.  Seemingly, the more people felled by cancer,
the greater the panic that is generated and the more docile the population
becomes in acquiescing to how we live our lives or to the medical treatments
that do such harm to the earth, inflicting our suffering on future
generations.  Chemotherapy and radiation,
despite the torment of the treatments, have become commonplace. People wrestle
with which tortures to select, not whether one will undergo such, not whether
it will also be inflicted on the earth and our descendants.  The sign in the UCLA oncology bathroom says
flush twice to protect the porcelain.  Protect
the toilets! What about protecting the water and the earth? Ourselves?  When I ask the physicians who prescribe
medications for me how the environment will be affected, they shrug.  My physical response will be monitored, the earth’s
responses will not. 

Few seem to have the free attention to be  interested in the story as messenger, in the
story the illness is telling except when it points to how to get well.  There is little encouragement to discover why,
really, we are ill, but there is much emphasis on getting through the
treatment, returning to the old life, the one that is making so many ill. 

The authority of the physician seems to be increasing even
as his or her distance from the individual patient increases also, not by
choice, but by institutional fiat.  My
country doc tells me his son has just finished his medical residency and has
become a hospitalist in one of our city’s largest hospital.  My doc, who is taking his time, regaling me
with tales, who knows healing relies on relationship, who has retained an old-fashioned
private practice, says his son is interested in “efficiency.” I silently vow to
stay out of the hospital.  I make a note
to add to my medical directives that I do not want to be treated by a hospitalist
and I do not want to die in a hospital. Chemotherapy, often as extreme as any
torture, is taken as inevitable.  Also
radiation.  Treatments, again, no matter
how extreme are integrated into one’s life schedule even one’s work schedule. A
friend gets up early to go to radiation treatment and then on to work.  When I refuse routine x-rays, radioactive dyes
or CT scans, my doctors are concerned, some will not treat me.  They do not understand that I am hoping we
will remember the ancient art of bone-setting or other Indigenous ways of
knowing.  It is possible that my life
will be foreshortened by this refusal to accept certain diagnostic procedures
or treatments but the life of the Earth may well be extended 

It begins to seem like the only life we can have is the one
that is killing us.  Presented with an
application for a rescue Dog, I was asked whether I will provide all necessary
medical treatments despite the cost. 
There was no room to say, I will only do what I will do for myself.  There was no room for me to refuse what I
will refuse for myself.  I did not
qualify for the dog.  Fortunately,
another rescue appeared.  My new Dog, GentleBoy
will not be tortured and I will do what I can so that he lives a life aligned
with his animal nature. 

I have been greatly affected by a story I heard years ago of
an American lineage carrier for a Siberian shaman who told an audience that she
most probably would not take the shaman’s place when he died.  She said, his daily job was to tend all the
souls of the community in the soul hut and she was not sure she was able to
carry such a responsibility.  When I
heard the story, I didn’t know if I was or would be capable of such a spiritual
task but I hoped that as I developed as a healer that I might approach it.  Accordingly, I certainly didn’t want to
forget any of those on my personal list which is very long for the moment
though relatively short given the list of lives threatened by Extinction and
Climate Collapse and I certainly don’t want to forget any one of the species
whose life is threatened by the ways I live my life.  My body, our bodies, the animal bodies, the
trees, the wind, the water, the earth.

Carrying the souls of the community …. Today when I think of
such a task, I know that I have to include the souls of the non-humans who are
suffering such extreme anguish.  And the
Elementals.  How do I know?  I know it in my own body and through yours.  And through the Earth actions we call
weather.  As the Earth is a living being
… what do these fires, floods, storms, extreme droughts tell us…? Isn’t the
Earth living in extremis from our activities?

Maybe it is not too late for the changes that might spring
from empathy?  That is, maybe it is not
too late for such changes which could save the planet and all life? 

January 6, 1999.  That
was a moment in my personal history when, without understanding fully the
change of mind I would undergo, I said to an Elephant, we were in a few minutes
to recognize as an Ambassador, “Your people are my people.”  I didn’t know then that I had stepped across,
as is required for these times, from a human-centric belief system to a more
appropriate ecological understanding of the reality of kinship among all
beings.  Mitakuye Oyasin.  All my
relations.  Or, your people are my
people.  I was not taught or directed to
say these words.  They did not come to me
from my culture, nor from a teacher nor from anything I had read or
studied.  They came in the moment,
through what can only be described as a Spirit, or spirits directed
experience.  The exquisite orchestration
of wonder in a moment revealing the true nature of reality that could not be
communicated by any other means – it had to be revealed to be known and it
was. 

Once animals lived with the natural order – then death was
part of the cycle.  In Botswana, I  watched the young lion walking through a herd
of impala who barely moved out of his way. 
He was not hungry.  They were not
prey.  Similarly, the Elephants on the
veldt in Kenya paid no attention to a young lion who was, from our human
perspective, stalking the newborn just behind the mother’s legs. Filled with
anxiety and disturbed by the mother’s seeming oblivion, we still adhered to out
pledge not to interfere even when he crouched. 
We could see the taut energy in his limbs as he prepared to spring, the
baby surely doomed, when the mother, just before he might have been mid-air,
turned on a dime and reared as casually as we might swat a fly.  She had known he was young, and practicing,
not skilled enough yet to be of concern. 
She returned to grazing, her little one remaining behind her massive
legs and the lion, seemingly chagrinned, ran off. 

The non-humans have not until now carried the fear of death
the ways humans, or at least modern humans carry it as an on-going anxiety, as
beings whose survival seems threatened increasingly  (though by our own hands – our adamant species
auto-immune response and so organize their lives to ward off danger by carrying
weapons, gating communities and setting up surveillance systems, the private
equivalent of waging on-going war, building walls between nations and spying on
each other’s every move with increasingly pervasive and invasive technology. And
fear, we know, begets fear. 

 Though all animals do
not respond the way we do; the animals know that their species are threatened.  One sign is the new herds of Elephants in
Namibia who no longer have tusks, another is atypical behavior of Elephants
such as young bulls sexually aggressing on Rhinos, or the desperate Polar Bears
who invaded Belushya Guba in Russia

 The body knows and
changes accordingly or it is altered by the untenable forces acting against its
survival. 

Some people on my list were recently given a temporary
reprieve – that is all any of us get. 
But others joined the list. We are living in a world of sorrow and
pain.  Grief groups and grief counseling
burgeon dramatically – a sign of the times. People have always died but now our
grief and anxiety seem inconsolable and entirely disabling.  Are we suffering something more than we have
in the past?  Is our extreme pain and
accompanying dysfunction a symptom of our unconscious perception of the tragedy
of this time?  People have always been
dying but the grief in the atmosphere seems to increase with the carbon
content.  And if we track shifting animal
behavior in the wild, we must surmise that the animals are also consciously
suffering the grave threat to all life but without the benefit, if there is any,
of easing the pain with anti-depressives, opioids, individual therapy or grief
groups. 

A veritable mental health specialty has been created in the
last years to counsel those who are suffering loss.  The death of loved ones, spouses, friends,
parents and siblings seem to induce 
breakdown, disabling depression, overwhelming anxiety and lack of
ability or desire to function.  Are we so
devitalized by loss because we no longer live in villages supported by each
other’s presence or because this personal loss signifies the greater loss, not
only of our own life in the impending near future but of all life?  And when the future disappears from view,
then meaning, associated with posterity, disappears and we are left
unmoored. 

A friend suffered
several bouts with different cancers a year ago.  He has recovered
physically but despite his developed consciousness and deep meditation
practice, he is the victim of childhood memories which rise unexpectedly in
response to relatively slight provocations.  And it seems to be increasing
in these times. He viscerally re-experiences the times in his life when he was
the young victim of violence and aggression in his family, plus racial and
other violence in the neighborhood, and life in general.  He was born into
family and street violence in a violent time.  1946 was a violent time.
Perhaps that war which had supposedly ended, never ended though the future is
being foreshortened.  Perhaps that war is still with us – on-going
Holocausts and nuclear explosions persist calling into their vortex the World
War before it, the Civil War, the invasion of North America, all the wars
against the Indigenous people, the Crusades against the Muslims and the Inquisitions
against the Jews and the subsequent wars which followed those and are cohering
in the present moment so that the body mind cannot hold itself intact. 
 My friend can no longer separate his current life from its violent
history, as I cannot separate my life from the on-going desolation of all the
non-humans around me.  We are, no matter our species, anguished by the
threat to all life.  To live in constant fear and trembling of a disaster
that cannot be prevented seems to have become the human and non-human condition. 

We have two alternatives. 
Pervasive sorrow and fear can lead us into increasing self-involvement so
that our focus becomes our sorrow and not the myriad unbearable affliction
suffered by all the beings.  Or it can
open us to the great wisdom of compassion. 
To live in response to the knowledge that  our unbearable grief results from mourning all
life changes the quality of pain. 
Suddenly it is has to be bearable so we can stand with the starving Bear,
the hunted Wolf, the homeless Puma, the starving Whale, the cancerous Tasmanian
Devil, the harried Coyote who have no recourse and greatly diminishing
resources for their survival.

Oddly enough it is in our best interests to focus briefly on
our own grief, long enough to create an alliance with the other suffering
beings. Pain can do what pain is designed to do – create awareness of the cause
and source.  My broken heart, the
exquisite nature of hartzveitig,
takes me to the suffering of the natural world. 
If I bear witness without turning away, I may learn how to live and act
and on whose behalf. 

[i] https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn17358-hidden-cancer-threat-to-wildlife-revealed/

[ii] https://www.livescience.com/18515-australia-tasmanian-devil-photos.html

[iii] https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/05/180521143853.htm