To heal this world we must begin with our own hearts. And healing our hearts is all about loving. And loving begins in quiet reflection. So how do we find quiet?
In 2011 my sister Julie handed me a children's picture book she found one day. It was called Me All Alone at the End of the World by author MT Anderson. A wildly imaginative book about a young boy naturally, happily being a child until the spectacle of modern life (as fueled by the endless pursuit of development and ever- increasing, heightened, sensory overload) comes to his quiet place promising him fun everlasting. Like many of us, he engages at first but then begins to question whether the spectacle is all its cracked up to be.
The book became the cornerstone of the original incarnation of the Creativity Project under Art in the Open 2011--the first year of Charlottetown's open air public art festival. I sought and received the generous permission from MT Anderson himself to do a voice recording of our oldest daughter Maria reading the book aloud to be shared with public participants during the eight hour run of the show. My brother in law Norman Love (Julie's husband) generously recorded then eleven year old Maria's sweet voice telling this awesome tale. It was shared in our quiet whimsy tent set up on the Victoria Row where my three sisters and I invited the public to enter, consider and share.
The reception was overwhelming. Perfect strangers writing of their need to reconnect with self and nature. Passionate notes written about wanting to make change happen but feeling unsure how. Responses spoke clearly of people tired of a world filled to overflowing with stuff and distraction. How to find silence again? How to be more natural and wild when naturalness and wildness have been systematically bred out of us through generations of institutionalization of learning, of loving and dis-connecting with the natural world?
Just this morning I read an inspiring piece reminding me of the very real need to heal our connection to self and nature. Written by Ed Gillespie, author of Only Planet and published in the always thought provoking The Ecologist, Gillespie calls us back to a sense of connection between self and nature. He invites us to consider "the end of saving the world". That perhaps (and I have read this many times before) saving the world is not what we are called to do. His radical challenge is for us to fall in love once again with the world; to envision, as Charles Eisenstien calls it in his same titled book, The More Beautiful World our Hearts Know Is Possible.
Gillespie doesn't sugar coat or gloss over the urgent and confounding realities we are currently facing in this mad era of runaway climate crisis, rather he questions our human ability to actually know and respond to the magnitude of the situation.
"We are not saving the world. What terrible arrogance makes us think we are? Are we saving ourselves? Is such ‘enlightened self-interest’ really a moral motivator? Are we saving our system? Is the maintenance of the business as usual, status quo inherent in ‘sustainability’, developing self-perpetuating practices, actually killing the evolution of what Charles Eisenstein calls ‘the better world we know in our hearts is possible’?"
His refreshing analysis lands the thoughtful reader in the same position I imagine the little protagonist of Me All Alone at the End of the World ending up in; sitting questioning what the heck we have done to this beautiful world and to ourselves in the process.
Is it not okay, even beneficial, to sit quietly, all alone, experiencing personal happiness in a natural, non-harming way? Do we all really need the glitz and sparkle of what eminent sociologist George Ritzer sees as the ever increasing degree of spectacle creation; larger and larger malls, theme parks etc? Ritzer's book entitled The Enchantment of Disenchantment warns of this never- ending, capitalism driven, ideological pursuit of more, more and more as resulting in a deadening of something critical within our cultures.
Where is our sense of what the Swedish conceptualize as lagom?
The little boy in MT Anderson's lovely picture book seemed to figure this out for himself. People who took in the Creativity Project over its five year run wrote to us of their significant need for quiet reflection in nature away from the distractions of the modern world. Ed Gillespie writes of this in his Ecologist essay of late Feb 2020 which I read early this am.
And at risk of revealing his whole essay I copy this anyhow:
"Every time we treat our home in a utilitarian fashion, as complex resources to be exploited for our benefit - if we could just strike the right ‘carbon neutrality’ or ‘balance’ of natural capital, craft a zero waste or circular economy, and protect a bit of nature here and there for our titillation and natural history pornography - we demean both this wild and wondrous world and ourselves.
The planet does not want to be saved. Or rescued. Or even changed. Our planet wants to be loved. Love is not a game of numbers and spreadsheets, checks and balances, debts and contracts. It is an exalted dance of joy, respect and gleeful, mutual appreciation and true partnership.
We should all be dancing. But right now the music’s stopped. And I sense it won’t authentically restart until we properly reconnect with what really matters: our deeper selves, each other and our home."
It is high time to find the quiet and space we need to fall in love with Earth again. And from that love the healing can begin and as we heal our Earth, inevitably the destructiveness will lessen. The starting place for loving is always our own heart.
In love and possibility,
Jill MacCormack
Thanks for reading!
ps--if you read the Ecologist essay see if you note parallels between food insecurity in the UK and closer to home here on PEI. Food insecurity is food insecurity regardless of its location. A loving response to food insecurity on PEI would be lessening our dependence on imports through regeneration of viable, small scale organic agriculture. Jill
You are so right, Jill- keep writing...