Falling in Love with a Piece of the World

We picked up our older daughter from a week at camp this afternoon.

In the backseat she pummeled her younger sister for news of home. How are Tango and Ishult (horses)? How are Nikky and Ave (parakeets)? How's Dusky (hen) and Chickadee (rooster)?

And then one that surprised me - How's the maple?

How's the maple? Before asking about friends or community news?

But it shouldn't have surprised me that a tree - that particular tree – figured so prominently in her questions of home. Ever since their Dad helped them hang a rope swing in the maple at the bottom of the hill, our girls and most of their friends have been busy falling in love with that maple.

They've invented games with complicated rules played in its branches (going down has the right of way over going up). They've given it a nickname (Mape). Our younger daughter notices every maple of the same species on our drives around town and points each one out with the breathless excitement of one who has discovered treasure. They both notice how the tree changes from week to week (a rotten spot at the bottom; some bright pink leaves that don't seem 'quite right') and both speculate about its past (did the last children who played in it, when it was a much smaller tree, the ones who built a platform high in its branches, discover the same route to the top?)

The neighborhood kids who go to school have taken to swinging in it while they wait for the bus. The kids who do their learning at home have taken (when they can negotiate it) to carrying their books down to work underneath its shade.

Younger sister's report was highly detailed and focused mostly on the fact that a branch had broken (not anybody's fault) but that the rope swing and the games were mostly unaffected by the change in architecture. It makes me sad, though, she said.

There was silence in the back seat for a while, and then: Yeah, me too, it makes me sad too.

E. O. Wilson has said that we will only save what we love.

Luckily for all of us, this love lives close to surface. Twelve feet of rope and sufficient unscheduled time to touch, clamber, and explore is more than enough to call it forth.

In this time of ecological crisis, giving ourselves – child and adult alike – that time might be the most important action we can take.

We might not even need the rope.

Second Chances

There is one very good thing, I find, in this intention to pay attention to sky, to earth, to neighbors and partners and children and wind: you keep getting second (and third, fourth, and fifth) chances.

Last night I remembered to go outside at dusk to say hello to the new moon.

Remember, Part Two

Tucking my 10 year old daughter into bed, I realized (once again) that paying attention to the beauty of the world requires more than simply vowing to do so.

Daughter: Did you see the moon tonight, Mom?

Mother: Moon?

Daughter: Yeah, as you walked home from work. It was a little sliver, a sixth or maybe an eighth. It was sooo beautiful. You could see the dark part. That's the reflected light (said with authority.) That part was dull gray. And the bright part was glowing yellow! You didn't see it? It was right there.

There was nothing for it but to go outside (she, barefoot, wearing pajamas) into the freezing night to look for the moon.

But new moons set early, and this one was gone. My daughter was simultaneously disappointed at the absent moon and gleeful to be out past bed-time, barefoot on frosty grass.

As for me, the best that can be said is that I had enough sense to stand quietly for a moment in appreciation of the shinning stars above my head and the wide-awake child at my side.

Joanna Macy: Thoughts on Gratitude

A few posts back I wrote about some of the challenges I ran into in a recent climate change presentation/discussion as I invited a people to look for and share their sense of gratitude for the Earth and all it provides.

I also shared this experience with Joanna Macy, someone I consider a great teacher and guide in the work of creating a sustainable world. Her response was so helpful I wanted to share it so that it might benefit others as well.

Joanna wrote:

If we are serious in our desire to play a positive role in a dangerous and scary time, then gratitude provides us with firm grounding. It allies us with the larger forces of life itself, and its longer story. Gladness is a stronger place to come from than fear and guilt. In relationship to climate change, it helps us avoid the pitfall of demonizing nature.

On Earth Day, in a large gathering, we did Gratitude Open Sentences in pairs, right after all singing together "Gracia a la Vida." The particular, ordinary things celebrated in that song primed the pump, inspiring all to do the same--for it's particular things, not abstractions, that charge us with energy.

The four sentences were:

Some things I love about being alive in Earth are...

A place that was magical to me as a child...

An Earth-other (animal, plant, stream, etc.) that for me was a teacher of the heart is/was...

(Touching my face, I touch Gaia and I am grateful for this part of Gaia.) Some things I appreciate about myself as a living part of Gaia are...


If you want to learn more about Joanna Macy and her work visit her website or find one of her several excellent books, perhaps Coming Back To Life.

The Vulnerability Of Gratitude

In my last post, I wrote about how fun it was to participate in Step It Up gatherings last weekend. But I didn't say too much about how I actually used the opportunity to talk with a group of kids and parents about climate change.

I assumed that since all the gathered people were dedicating their Saturday morning to a rally, they were already convinced that climate change is real and serious and needs dramatic action; so I didn't say much at all about how the climate system works, the signs of climate change we are already seeing, or the technical solutions that we could draw upon to address it.

The organizers had also urged me to not thrust too much gloom and doom on all the children in the audience; a need I was feeling with enhanced sensitivity since my own two daughters were in the audience. I also knew that other speakers were going to talk about everything from the political moment to compact fluorescent light-bulbs.I knew that most of the crowd was going to walk to the nearby Dartmouth College Green to hear more speakers and visit informational tables and booths. In other words, they were going to have plenty to listen to and learn from.

With all this in mind, I arrived with the goal of giving them time to talk to each other rather than listen to me, and I focused on two themes that I felt pretty sure wouldn't be repeated by others in the day's program.

The first one was gratitude. I talked about how climate change is making us aware of services the Earth has always been providing us, but that we are becoming conscious of those services only as we so overtax them that they begin to falter. This was the first time I talked about gratitude in a climate talk so explicitly, and it was more than a little unnerving to start right out with it, while kids were fidgeting and people were coming in and out of the room. But driven by my sense that one of the most important things I have to learn from climate change is how to be a grateful recipient of the Earth's gifts and how to talk openly about those gifts with others, I launched in anyway, not all that gracefully or articulately, but with determination.

I was rewarded with one of those moments that graces groups from time to time. As I started to talk about gratitude all the fidgeting and whispering suddenly stopped. There was a stillness and collective intentness that I wish I had been better prepared to use. What seemed to bring this stillness forward were these words:

"I imagine that all of you have had something that was very precious to you that you lost, or that you almost lost, and the losing or the almost losing was what made you realize how much you loved and appreciated whatever it was. Climate change is something like this, an experience that can help us realize how much we love and care for our home the Earth."

The moment passed pretty quickly, and when I asked people to think about and then share what they were grateful for from the Earth there was another one of those moments that graces groups from time to time: a moment of awkward silence. I hadn't done what was needed to make the group safe enough for people to share what they were grateful for. We hadn't introduced ourselves (too many people, not enough time) and hadn't developed a feeling as a group. Five minutes into my presentation (the first of the morning) we were still a bunch of people coming to an event, not a group. In retrospect I think it would have been much better if I had asked people to turn to their neighbor and share their thoughts rather than asking for people to speak them to a group of close to one-hundred people.

I learned something important from this awkward silence: to share their gratefulness for life and the Earth is an act that makes people vulnerable.

This is something I've known for a long time about vision - that in this culture it is scary to speak up for what you really want for fear of being laughed at or called naive or unrealistic or a dreamer. But until this moment of awkward silence I hadn't thought about expressing gratitude as an act that could make people vulnerable. It makes sense to me though, in this culture where we are so conditioned to feel as though we don't have what we need (that sweater, that car, that pair of shoes) we don't have much practice at expressing gratitude for what we already have been given. We don't have much practice seeing our gifts, feeling our appreciation, and certainly not talking about those gifts and feelings publicly.

I find a few theories forming in my mind:

1. Connecting gratitude to climate change is important and has the potential to touch people.

2. Cultivating the practice of speaking one's gratitude publicly is an act of courage and an possibly an act of social change. Like speaking a vision, speaking gratefully is rare and is a gentle push against the assumption of the industrial growth society.

3. Building people's capacity to speak about gratitude takes more planning and intentionality than simply asking the question: what are you grateful for? And it requires the facilitator/leader to have done her own work at being uninhibitedly grateful.

I'm eager for the next chance to weave gratitude and climate change together, and also eager to learn from the experience of others with more experience at drawing out people's expressions of gratitude. What are the key pre-conditions that allow it?

I'll end these thoughts with those questions, and save my observations about the second theme of my presentation - vision – for another time.

Gratitude

One post back, I wrote about the work that keeps everything going, and about how - in this society at least - it is so easy to be blind to that work. But we don't have to be, of course. We can learn to see the cycles and the lives that make our own possible.

A lot of cultures are smarter than ours about ways to remember to see what it is that supports us. Ceremony, ritual, art, and prayer are all ways to do this. I've been thinking about this all week, but thinking about it is not the same as doing it; thinking about the importance of noticing and being grateful is not the same as noticing and being grateful.

So here: one tiny drop of gratitude in a day of meetings, emails, and deadlines.


Little Bird Business

Yesterday the high hill where I walk
belonged to the little birds
who were going about their little bird business
in the pine tops and on the fence posts.
I believe there is nothing more black than chickadee-black,
nothing more white than chickadee-white.
Half an ounce of feathers and flesh can move, can sing, can call the world to attention.
.
.
.
.

A Biosphere's Work Is Never Done

A friend with a PhD from Harvard and a toddler on her hip told me recently that she struggles, these days, to be 'productive.'

What she meant, I think, was that she struggles to make headway on the kinds of work that can be finished, the work that sits there on its own and needs no tending once it is complete, like the contract signed, the book published, the problem solved. The kind of work you don't have to do all over again the next day or the next season.

Anyone who has ever cared for another person, or for a farm, or a household knows that such tasks are clearly work. They take real time and burn real energy, but they are never really 'done.' The empty sink fills again with dirty dishes, the weeds invade the tended row. Even the milestones of this sort of work, the child's first word, or the first ripe tomato, aren't really end points, just places along the way, part of the beat, the rhythm of the work.

Real work it may be, but it is also, in this culture, often invisible work. The people who do it by choice or because they have no choice often earn less money, and have lower status.

Still for most of the Earth's history, all there has been is the kind of work that is never done, the work of keeping things going. That's the work of every organ and every cell of your body, after all. Your liver never finishes its work of detoxifying your blood; the work of your heart is undone eighty times each minute.

Whole assemblages of beings do this kind of work as well – flocks of tiny algae, floating in the sea absorbing carbon dioxide, hillsides of stately trees breathing out oxygen.

I think the blindness of our culture to this whole universe of maintenance work, the blindness that leads us to discount the work of cleaning ladies and bus drivers and and even our own care-giving, helps explain how we could have pushed the Earth's climate regulating systems so far past their limits.

It is as though we've been living in a house where for years and years our dirty dishes have always been whisked away to be washed by someone we've never really noticed. We never really had to notice, the system functioned so smoothly. But now we find dirty dishes are accumulating in the sink, and we realize it has something to do with our very fun and crowded party which is now generating more dishes than whoever it is who has been washing them can keep up with.

The hidden blessing in the sinkfull of dirty dishes is that they have the potential to get our attention, they might cause us to look up from the party and notice the tired looking woman with the apron on. They might make us gulp, amazed to discover that she's been here all along, working away. They might inspire us to try to help her; they might inspire us to get to know her.

If rising carbon dioxide levels really get our attention, that's what they have the potential to do, to connect us with the life pulse of the planet, the life pulse that has been cradling us all along. They give us a chance to offer our gratitude and begin to know the debt we owe.