It’s 2020 and Covid-19 has sucked the life out of so much.
We can’t go out and play together.
Everything has become a challenge worthy of a strategic planning meeting: work, school, shopping, home.
But let’s not forget that this is just the start, as far as climate science has been telling us for decades.
This is the carbon we released in the 90s. Spiking towards the sky, swirling up the stormclouds, breeding new diseases, creating the conditions for the worst bushfires in Australian history. Even the original peoples, here for tens of thousands of years, don’t have a story for that kind of damage. And if they don’t have a story for it – the people that were here when you could walk across Bass Strait from the mainland to what we now call Tasmania, who hunted across the plains of what is now Port Phillip Bay in Melbourne before the last great deluge – then it is truly unprecedented.
Now that we’re beginning to see what anthropogenic climate change looks like, we might as well get used to it, as we have to prepare to be lashed by the 30 years’ worth of carbon that has been discharged since this greenhouse began getting pumped full of hot gas.
The storms that lashed the Buddha, as he faced his final spiritual battle before the complete and irreversible awakening that would be the apotheosis of a lifetime of meditative practice, can be seen as metaphorical. Whether they were psychic entities tormenting him towards his great overcoming, or real elements of malevolence, the earth continued to live and breathe beyond the scene. Our reality is the ecological version – real storms and the breakdown of the physical world – but maybe it’s time to treat them as a spiritual challenge too.
To prepare best for the worst, stop thinking things are going to get better. That optimism will leave you victim to reality, shocked with every new assault upon your vision of the good life, unprepared for the horrors to come. 2019 was the best year you are ever going to remember – at least on a planetary scale. You may have better ones personally, but we’re on the downward slide now kids. Get used to it. Breathe deeply and find calm in the midst of the storm. Lean into it. Awaken the Warrior of Peace and Spirit.
While it’s also not enough to find solace in being protected by a great serpent, like the Buddha was, when the storms become truly threatening, it’s certainly one of the things we could be doing with our time, while we still have it. Keep agitating for change but balance that out with some concentration on spiritual liberation. This is your one wild life.
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Greta Thunberg rules! Listen to her speak truth to the world direct.
I’m going to the strike. I’m taking my kids out of primary school. I don’t care if they get it yet or not. They need to know that i care and that they are going to. Why? Because climate scientists have been pointing this out for over 25 years, since they said (at the Rio Earth Summit in 1992) that overwhelming indications pointed towards massive damage being done to the earth’s biosphere by modern industrial society. Since then, unfortunately, it’s been mostly business as usual: mass media has supported politics aligned with global corporations, to continue supporting the damage done, in the name of profit. It’s frustrating to know this and to watch people – even intelligent, open-minded adults – clutch at straws and try to believe that we can continue to destroy the earth and not pay the ultimate price.
Sometimes, it takes an innocent or an outsider to destroy our illusions and smash the bubble of lies we have woven for ourselves. The Emperor has no clothes! Now, again, a child has come to wake us up. This is kinda embarrassing. How is it that a strike has to be called by children, who want to leave school to try and make political leaders realise that they have to act now if we are to save the environment from irreversible damage? It’s not like we have lacked credible science or anything … no less than the IPCC – that’s the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the leading international body for the assessment of climate change, and a source of scientific information and technical guidance for Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change – has been trying to wake us up for years.
But we all love a good story, especially when it means we can enjoy creature comforts and believe we are chosen to live in the lap of luxury, not merely by the good fortune of technological development and historical serendipity, but because … we are special. That is the power of myth. A powerful myth convinces you that you can have it all; you can enjoy life here and now and in the body, as well as knowing that you are destined by the forces of the universe to carry on in splendour and majesty beyond this mortal coil. Doesn’t that sound great?! Yeah!
And to think, without destroying our planetary home, we could have all of this, with a sophisticated understanding of how myth works within and without. In the world and in our hearts and body/minds, we are star dust, evolving to be at one with eternal consciousness, unlimited … unless we choose not to. And then we become forgetful, worldlings, limited, socialised, attached, adult. And then, we need the children, the fools, the artists, the whimsical, the poets, to remind us. That we are more. As Marianne Williamson put it, “Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, and fabulous? Actually, who are you not to be?”
So don’t just let the kids lead the way! Strike! Join them (and us). Why can’t we organise and resist the devastation of the world as adults? Because we are so caught up in the myth of technological progress and plenty that we are drunk on it. We can’t always see the truth so obviously dangling before our eyes. But Greta can. The kids can. And we can wake up to it too. It’s about time. Let’s speak out and make our kids proud. They’ll remember this, when the damage really starts to hit in the near future. They’ll know that we cared enough to strike out, against the mainstream, for change. And that we never gave up.
