Solstice charms
As autumn proceeds into winter, I too feel called to unveil the dark corners of my soul and get some very needed rest after the hard transformational work is done. It´s a tough challenge to focus inside amid all the business of the holiday season that is all around me.
My preparation for The Holiday is different. I´m looking inside, trying to see clearly what stays and what needs to be left behind. My experience is, that autumn has a great potential of making space for new ideas, projects, and feelings, if we just let it happen.
I, like the fallen leaves, rot and decompose and want to be mercifully covered by a soft snowy blanket: Incubating the new spring that will eventually come.
How´s the weather?
The weather has been crazy lately, where I live. We´ve had summer, autumn, winter, and spring within six weeks. It makes me think about the climate change. There even was a proper storm on 21. December! I think, I´ve never witnessed a storm later than in September when I was young. I do not understand how anyone can doubt that the weather is changing. It gets more and more erratic and restless with warm weather in winter, snow in spring and draughts in summer.
In my social bubble, especially young people get angry at governments for not doing enough. In Europe, there is going to be a ban on automobiles fuelled by gasoline in couple of years. But nobody says anything about huge ships crossing seas with international trade or factories operating heavy machinery or planes – all of which consume much more fuel then all the cars in Europe combined.
Cover it by Anger
In psychology, anger usually covers other emotions, especially fear and pain. When one learns how horribly are animals and the soil treated in conventional agriculture; how many animal and plant species are endangered or dying out, one cannot be surprised at our pain and fear. The future seems to be dark and humankind doomed.
As a psychologist, I know that fear and guilt are very powerful but ineffective motivators. Fear often leads to anger which can turn to violence and guilt often results in denial. What makes me sad is, that it seems calm proofs of our mistreatment of Earth that has been presented by scientists for decades, did not lead to any joint action. It took angry teenagers (Greta!) to move us to do something. Problem is that something is not very likely to help or to happen (Because what will power the batteries of all the electric cars? What about cobalt and lithium that is being mined in unstable countries like Russia, China or Zambia or Bolivia, causing local ecological catastrophes and promoting a variation of colonialism we are at the same time trying to get rid of. And USA or China not being part of the green deal in the first place.).
The magic of BOTH AT THE same time
What other way do we have besides worry, fear, anger, and despair? Respect, compassion, humility, and care. The point is NOT to replace one with another, but rather to hold BOTH at the same time. It´s only right to let ourselves grieve all that is wrong with our relationship towards the Earth and ourselves. At the same time, we can also stay humble – knowing that the Earth is much bigger than us and who knows: maybe she gave birth to us because she wanted some plastics, as one of my friends kindly joked.
Nothing lasts forever, maybe it´s our time to go. From what we know (and here we should also exercise much humility since our knowledge is still quite sparse) of the history of Earth, there were many periods of time, when massive extinction took place – and only one of them, the notorious dinosaur catastrophe, was caused by external event (asteroid). The very air we breathe with the life giving gas of oxygen, was once the cause of massive disappearance of most of life on Earth. Approximately three billion years ago a new organism – cyanobacteria – developed photosynthesis and started to produce oxygen, basically poisoning all other organisms that at the time were strictly anaerobic.
a positive disaster? saving by not saving
It was thanks to this disaster (any many other on the way – I am not sure, if we would stand a chance against all those tyrannosauruses) that humankind developed in the first place. And though we like to think about ourselves as the crown of all creation, we might not be. Who knows, there might be other life forms waiting for their chance to live in this world.
We should not, I think, try to save the Earth, our ourselves, because we fear extinction and death. I think we should do without the idea of saving anything really as it causes anxiety and worry – how can we save something we hardly understand (which is most of the world)? Such a goal inevitably sets us for failure.
What we could do instead is look at all the disrespect, lack of compassion and care we demonstrate towards ourselves, others, animals, plants, and the soil. Every day, we might ask ourselves: what would I do differently/ start doing/ stop doing, if I loved and respected myself, others and all living and inanimate “objects” on earth? If we all ask such a question on regular basis, I suspect we might turn our gardens and parks into food forests, eat meat only twice a week and from animals that were well loved and killed with compassion, walk a lot instead of driving, wear clothes sown locally by people we know, preserve the wild areas that are still left to us, share the surplus food with those who have less than us and much more!
To be able to ask such a question means we know how it feels to be respected and cared for – and THAT might be exactly the task for our times. With all the talk about trauma, we learn that horrifyingly high numbers of us have no idea what it means to be loved and safe with others. No wonder we create a society that is full of fear, anger, despair and treats everything as badly as ourselves. At the same time, I believe this to be a great opportunity for healing. Not curing. But healing. A cure means absence of symptoms. Healing means embracing and facing the hurt even when some things cannot be undone, and some damage is permanent. Healing means gaining compassion, humility and care for ourselves and everything that is.
By abandoning our mission to save the Earth and focusing on healing ourselves, we might save it after all.
Some of my sources (only in Czech):
https://vesmir.cz/cz/casopis/archiv-casopisu/2017/cislo-2/kyslikova-odysea.html
https://vesmir.cz/cz/casopis/archiv-casopisu/2011/cislo-10/masova-vymirani-historii-zeme.html
