Exactly one month prior to this Earth Day 2007, I was standing in
the coral sand of a tiny atoll in the middle of the Caribbean Ocean at
night amid several other vanishing species. Less than a hundred feet at
its longest point, its sands were scattered here and there with the
bleached skeletons of ancient lobster traps and sea turtle shells, and
etched by the tracks and tailings of turtles, small birds, and all
sorts of strange crawlies from the tide pool. Swarms of translucent
little crabs with huge black and white target-like eyes on stems coming
out of their heads scurried furtively, avoiding the cormorants and
other kinds of birds hugging the atoll against the same sturdy winds
that once carried disease and guns into the new world and Spanish gold
away from it. During the day the sun on that sand was blinding. But at
night there was just that wind and absolute blackness with millions of
stars and the cries of birds.
Seldom have I ever felt the presence of the earth's spirit and the
terrible beauty of creation so strongly, where the world flourishes and
struggles and dies right before your eyes. Thousands of colorful worms
go by in the shallow water, winking on and off and schools of tropical
fish are plainly visible right at the water's edge, their fate hanging
with the frigate birds suspended overhead.
And while standing there -- frankly, taking a nocturnal piss -- the
wind rose and grew stronger. And as I closed my eyes against the
billowing coral sand, that wind blew away all the flesh from my bones.
Then blew away the very bones themselves. And what I was left with the
core of selfness, just the awareness of awareness -- that center of
humanness that exists in pure duration before any thought or word is
even formed, the unarticulated stuff that exists in the womb of woman
and in that great frothing amniotic soup of the mother of us all -- the
sea. It was just me and the overarching black canopy of the world, as
if god's own infinite bowl of stars itself had been overturned, dumping
them upon my fallible and pitifully meaningless outer self -- the one
presently engaged in pompous scribbling about the liberation of man,
yet unable to save a single one of those tiny crabs or glowing sea
worms in the tide pools from their own destinies, from their return to
the sea via the gullet of a vanishing petrel.
Western civilization began by smashing the faces of beasts with
stones, determined to "conquer the wilderness," hammering at both
matter and mind on the anvil of the millenniums until finally, we
pulled down mountains and made atoms scream in tortured orbits. Now the
day of deliverance comes, casting our shadows in merciless hydrogen
light, illuminating not only our latest war crimes, but also crimes of
trade and finance and greed during what has come to pass for peace,
when our darkest commercial cannibalism feasts upon the naked wondrous
bodies of the innocents. And now destruction dances in infinite rooms,
singing in dark chords for the brute who smashed open the celestial
clock, hungry to eat the ticking heart of god.
For all that the study of history could have taught an amnesiac
America about the fall of empires and civilizations, it is doubtful it
can prepare anyone for what is fast coming upon us, because it has
never happened before and by definition can only happen once. Though
the Wiccan priestess, the fundamentalist preacher, the rabbi, and
environmental biologist call it by different names -- as if renaming an
apocalypse made much difference -- we need a liberated theology,
epistemology, or ontology (again, that obsession with naming rather
things than doing things). Something to liberate "the within" of we who
find ourselves traveling together amid gathering darkness toward the
long promised kingdom of sanity and justice. That kingdom which rests
at the end of no mortal road, but was always within us. Just like Jesus
and Buddha and the Pentecostal preachers of my childhood said it was.
The gist of the article is that what he calls personal liberation
(essentially what I've called Let-Self-Change) is a necessary but not
sufficient condition for saving the world. And that personal liberation
is as open to disillusioned neocons and the uneducated and uninformed
(but instinctively sensitive or just pissed off with how the outrages
of this world affect them personally) as it is to those of us who've
studied and learned how the world really works. And that the most
important part of Let-Self-Change is changing one's actions, one's
life, not just one's ideas and beliefs. What to do? Trust your
instincts and just start.
The obvious question, which Joe wisely refuses to answer is, If
Let-Self-Change is a necessary but not sufficient condition, what are
the other necessary conditions that together will be sufficient to save
the world? I get the sense that he agrees with me that they don't exist
-- that it is impossible that enough of us will Let-Self-Change to be
able to alter the momentum of our civilization over the cliff to
collapse. That's why he's already done what I mused about last week in
my post
Walking Away to the Next Human Culture
-- he's walked away, made the migration to a warm Central American
climate where there is room (physically and politically) for him to
live as close as one can anywhere anymore with all-life-on-Earth. He says it's a safer and more
comfortable viewpoint from which to observe civilization's inevitable
collapse. Every migration needs a scout, and I suspect he's ours.
Joe's already said everything else I had to say on the subject.
MADE IN CANADA
trust your
instincts 
