April 26th, 1997
Time to Pause
By Jackie Giuliano
Disconnection, separation, division, detachment, disassociation - these are all words that
describe the way we view our world and ourselves.
We are disconnected from the Earth herself, separated from the delicate web she has woven,
divided from each other by arbitrary encumbrances, detached from the very meaning of our
existence, and disassociated from the awe and mystery of the world and the universe.
Our daily lives are filled with more events than our elaborate datebooks can contain. We
live by the litany, "oh, that there were only more hours in the day," and we
bemoan our lot in life. We are scared to death of spiders and cockroaches, consider the
natural world as wild, untamed and therefore dangerous, and resist awareness of the
intricacies of our world for fear of having to take on one more responsibility. We in the
western world have tried so hard for so long to disconnect from the Web of Life.
I was discussing this in my Environment and Human Health class today, trying to get adult
university students to look beneath the surface and think really critically about what is
going on around them. One student expressed his feelings of hopelessness about being able
to do anything. He said that there were so many distractions that keep us from connecting
to the natural world. He is so right. There are many distractions that isolate us from the
natural world, separate us from each other, and keep us from seeing our responsibilities
and power. Let's look at a few of them.
Television is a powerful distraction. Ironically, the same tool we use to escape from
reality is also used as an information source. And television keeps us indoors at night.
More about this below.
Another great distracter is the street light. Yes, that's right. The street light, with
its power illumination breaking through the darkness in all directions, has kept us from
connecting with a powerful realization - that we are a planet in space.
You see, the majority of street lights illuminate not only the ground below, but shine up
as well, filling the night time sky with light. This light scatters around, increasing the
brightness of the sky. Rarely do city-dwellers get to experience dark skies. Most of us
live in regions where it rarely gets darker than a deep twilight. Just think about how our
lives might be different if every clear night we could see a rich, bright, canopy of stars
above our heads.
How would things be different if we noticed, every night, that the stars and planets
seemed to revolve around the Earth, rising in the east and setting in the west? What if we
noticed the cycles of the Moon throughout her journey each month? (See this column last
week, posted April, 18, 1997 for more about our lost connection to the Moon) I believe
that our sense of connection to the natural world would be dramatically enhanced by a
nightly awareness of the heavens.
I was listening to an interview with long time activist and poet Gary Snyder last week on
Pacifica Radio. He was speaking of another type of distraction - fossil fuel. But he
described it in a way I had never heard before. He called the use of fossil fuels a form
of slavery.
I found this difficult to comprehend and felt my mind searching for the connection. What
he said was fascinating. He said that that fossil fuels are energy slaves that allow us to
get more work done than we could ordinarily get done. Take a moment to let that sink in.
Fossil fuels allow us to get more done than we were meant to get done. Without them, we
would have to do a lot less, and make do with that level of accomplishment. Snyder said
that this prevents us from discovering what our own natural powers are - we lose our eyes,
we lose our ears, we lose touch with our hearts. Wow.
So all these distractions isolate us and increase our separation from the natural world
and from each other. So what can we do? One simple thing we can do is to label things
correctly. If you want to watch TV, by all means do so, but label it correctly as a
distraction. Say to yourself "I want to watch some TV now, but I know it is a
distraction from connecting with the natural world." When you get into your car to go
to the grocery store instead of walking or riding a bicycle, say to yourself "I know
I could walk or ride my bike, but I want to drive my car to the store. I know that this is
a distraction from connecting to the natural world." Seem nuts? Maybe, but I think it
is important.
Buddhist Vietnamese Monk Thich Nhat Hahn calls this being "mindful." Mindfulness
can be a powerful tool for recovery and healing. Be mindful of your actions. A student
told me he read that "the beginning of wisdom is calling things by their right
name." I don't know where this came from, but it carries a powerful message.
There are other ways we can be mindful to break the chain of intensity that girdles our
lives. We go from one activity to the next, endlessly throughout the day, without taking a
PAUSE. I don't mean a break where you go outside or to the coffee room for 15 minutes. I
mean a pause, where you take a moment to reflect, to finish the present moment and move on
to the next.
For example, when you get into your car in the morning, instead of turning the key,
putting it into gear, and heading on your way, put your key in the ignition and then
pause. Take a long, deep breath. Break the chain of shallow breathing that begins with our
morning routine. Breath and think for a moment that you can only be in the here and now.
The present moment is all you can control, all you can live. Then put your car in gear and
begin your day. You will notice a powerful difference. And while you are driving, drive.
Don't plan your morning, your afternoon, your evening. Just drive. Attend to the present
moment. If we cultivate the present moment, live it fully, then the future moments will
unfold naturally. Bring yourself to an awareness of the present moment by simply noticing
your breath, breathing deeply and realizing that all things on this Earth are breathing as
well.
We try really hard, it seems, to break our tie to our planet, but try as we might, we have
not and cannot succeed. The embrace of Mother Earth is too strong. We cannot walk away
from the planet of our birth and even when we try to cut those bonds by traveling into
space, our bones and bodies wither. Those few human beings who have walked on another
world, who have come as close as anyone to breaking the bonds of our Mother (still
embraced, however, by the long arms of her gravity), came back so changed, so transformed,
that their lives were irrevocably altered. These astronaut/pilot/scientists who walked on
the Moon all became mystics, healers, farmers, artists, or theologians (except one who
became a beer distributor and another who became a defense consultant), but few may have
reasoned why they were so transformed.
We can learn so much from these men who tried to cut their bonds with Mother Earth and
failed, who experienced her awesome power from 250,000 miles away in space, who felt the
intense power of the place of our birth, who, while standing on an airless, lifeless Moon,
felt the great gift of our existence. Yet they were so unprepared for the experience, so
trained in the disconnected approach of western science, so confused about their place in
the universe, that the great gifts of awareness, awe, truth, and beauty that were revealed
to them as they stood on the surface of the Moon and looked back at their home often
turned to dysfunction, trauma, and fear.
What a challenge we Earth-bound people have to embrace awareness, experience the awe, see
the truth, and feel the beauty of our world if men trained and educated by our culture had
such difficulty from 250,000 miles away, seeing the interconnected ball that is the Earth
hanging in their sky. Yet in spite of the insensitivity of their training and the attempts
of their trainers to teach disassociation and denial, all of these men were transformed in
one way or another.
We can break the bonds of our cultural, intellectual, and emotional imprisonment. We can
open our eyes to see our connections and realize our true place in nature, a place that is
beside other species, not above them. We can do all these things, but we need help. The
disassociation of the last few thousand years will not erode overnight. But by carefully
teaching each other to re-member, re-integrate, and re-associate, the embrace of our
Mother Earth can be felt again. Maybe it can all begin with a pause.
REFERENCES AND RESOURCES
1. For an exciting web site devoted to eliminating our dependence on TV and consumerism,
check out Adbusters Magazine at http://www.adbusters.org/main.html
2. The rich teachings of Thich Nhat Hahn are published by Parallax Press. Visit them at http://www.tibet.com/
3. Trying to understand your relationship to time? Check out In Context magazine at http://www.context.org/
They have a special issue devoted to transforming our relationship with time at http://www.context.org/ICLIB/IC37/TOC37.htm
4. Learn about poet and thinker Gary Snyder at http://www.charm.net/~brooklyn/People/GarySnyder.html
{Jackie Giuliano can be found trying to pause in Venice, California. He is a Professor of
Environmental Studies for Antioch University, Los Angeles, the University of Phoenix, and
the Union Institute College of Undergraduate Studies. He is also the Educational Outreach
Manager for the Ice and Fire Preprojects, a NASA program at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory
to send space probes to Jupiter's moon Europa, the planet Pluto, and the Sun.} |
