Sad and Beautiful

 There is something beautiful about a group of people sitting quietly together for an hour on Sunday mornings, not hustling around, not competing for air time, just sitting still and letting mind, body and spirit come together. It is different than sitting quietly by yourself. There is a togetherness, a commonality that stretches in the air between us. And when someone is moved to break that silence with a message, you listen.

There is an atmosphere of humbleness. An assumption that none of us knows everything. And some things are not known by facts and figures. Instead, we need to look inside for deep truths. Today I was remembering how we humans live in a world full of non-human life. We’re surrounded by plants, other animals, birds, insects, tiny microscopic life above and below ground. And if we’re smart, we respect all of this other life and do our best to fit in, to not upset the balance of living things in our world.

And then I thought of my favorite earth-dwellers: plants. They are so miraculous! They are our neighbors, our teachers, our helpers. And scientists are finding that plants are much more cognizant and interactive than we ever used to think. Of course, indigenous peoples probably always knew this. They live in a world filled with their relatives (animals, plants, all the living world). And they grow up respecting the whole. Their understandings and spirituality are just what most of us need in our present reality.

I gave a workshop yesterday on Healing Plants. I was afraid no one would come. After all, everyone is so busy. And you can go to the corner drug store to get all the medicine that you need. Why would anyone want to look at the plants from which our modern doctor prescriptions came? Just buy a bottle of little white pills. So much easier!

But for me, keeping our relationship with plants is so important. All those bottles of white pills originally came from people taking healing plants from all parts of the world, plants that helped with the problems our human bodies encountered. And they took each plant to the laboratory, and broke them apart to find out what chemicals were inside them. And then they made artificial healing stuff with their chemicals. It made a lot of money. And it pushed the real plant medicine into the corner. In fact, doctors nowadays warn their patients about ever using plants for medicine. They’re dangerous, they say!

The truth is that those little white pills are much more dangerous than plants! Oh my, don’t get me started! That’s a topic for a whole article. Yet, learning about these natural healers feels more and more important to me, for it is clear that our culture as well as the whole world is on treacherous ground these days. We try to imagine that everything is just fine, that life will go on just like it is. But it is hard to push out all the clammer about climate change, about how in a few years more and more things will go extinct, more and more uncertain weather will happen, the ice is melting, the seasons are changing…..   And when we can no longer easily buy those bottles of little white pills, we may really NEED to know about healing plants!

I discovered a new bad thing last week. I am taking a course about what’s happening on earth and what we can do about it. The first week we studied the twin forces of climate change and “peak oil”. Hmmm, I thought. What is peak oil? Well, this is what peak oil is: for decades, we have known that at some point, our accessibility to oil will soon go downhill. And if you can imagine, declining oil products in our modern world will have a huge impact. The big oil companies evidently don’t want us to know this, but it looks like we’ve already hit “peak oil”, which means that from now on, oil reserves will have less and less to offer humanity. And almost everything in our country and many countries rests on oil and its products. Burning fossil fuels powers most everything. Even things like solar panels (wonderful as they are) still depend upon oil products for construction and use. And it looks like quite soon we will be having to recognize that our lives need simplification in order to survive.  In our class, we brainstormed about things we could do to deal with this outcome (not prevent it, for it’s already happened!). 

So as climate change is threatening us on many fronts and we’ve ignored it for so long that there’s not a whole lot we can do to stop it, there’s peak oil right now: a decline in the accessibility of oil and its products. Not a happy recipe!

It doesn’t work to focus on all this too much, and then  throw in the crazy political situation here in this country. Help!! So I try to make myself notice the good things every day. There ARE still good things. It’s just that our fright or flight tendency tends to focus on danger. And that made sense when we lived in caves, and a lion came along. It was a good thing we had the insight to fly! But these days all these frightening things are too big for easy fixes. And we can’t get away from our earthly home, nowhere to fly. 

The thing that helps me most when all these bad things threaten to bring my mood down is pulling myself way back in the historical time of our planet. The truth is that our human presence here on the earth is like an eyeblink in length. We’ve been here a tiny, tiny amount of time in the history of the Earth. And like other species and other ages in the past, we may not last a lot longer. A sixth extinction is probably on its way. But this is the way I can look at it: We’ve been so lucky to have had a chance to live here when the earth was healthy and perfect for us, surrounded with beauty and inspiration, air to breathe, food to eat, weather that was supportive. It has been a wonderful haven for our species for thousands of years. Yes, we are probably bringing on the collapse of this age, but there are lots of great things we have done too. We are such smart creatures, just not quite smart enough to find the humility to find our place in the interconnections of the rest of the living world. But oh well, I tell myself. We did our best. And it has been a wonderful ride. We can still do things to delay the worst things happening. Maybe, if our species survives the next 50 or 100 years, there will be stories about this age, stories that warn the children to treasure the earth from which they come.