Finding Spirit in The Sludge
It was with some trepidation that I tweeted an unconventional prayer for the Gulf of Mexico this morning. Bang goes my badass eco persona. And possibly my intellectual credibility.
It’s extraordinary that those of us who identify as ‘spiritual but not religious’ (SBNR – there’s even a facebook page) are so often afraid to admit to our esoteric sides for fear of being dismissed as incapable of rational thought or scientific understanding – or worse lumped in with the extreme end of the spectrum goofy narcissistic new-agers.
Nuts to that – I won’t be pigeon-holed.
My longheld belief is that we need to look at and understand the world, and each other, and current events from a lot of different perspectives in order to keep our thinking sharp and our souls courageous.
Besides, it wasn’t just that the poem that moved me. It was also my growing unease with the media scramble to be first with the biggest exclusives, the freshest perspectives and the hardest facts on the Gulf disaster. In newsrooms across the globe you can smell the testosterone, even amongst the women, as everyone elbows everyone else out of the way in the battle for a prominent byline and a place in the history of the event.
For politicians, likewise, the BP disaster is an opportunity to tough talk the spill in terms of national pride, economics, political gain and stock market prices. It’s a hot potato in the apparently ‘special’ relationship between the US and the UK. Same with social network sites like Twitter which, at their best, can be rich sources of different perspectives and original thought, but which have become awash with received opinions and endless retweets of the same old (BP) stories.
The melee has plunged us into information overload. We are drowning in a sludgy sea of everything from number crunching the gallons of oil lost, to the bookies’ odds on which endangered species will drift into extinction first. It’s an overwhelming tidal wave of ever longer strings of adjectives describing the horror of unfolding events.
I think I must be suffering from Gulf Fatigue, and I can’t help but wonder: if we continually respond from our heads, or worse from our competitive, cavemen (and cavewomen) selves aren’t we in danger of reinforcing the same kind of cultural shallowness and even arrogance, that led to the explosion in the first place? Doesn’t the overload follow the same dreary business-as-usual way of being and threaten to endanger certain things in us as human beings? Perspective for one. A thoughtful felt response for another. And I suppose a sense of spiritual wounding as well.
When I talk about a spiritual response to the Gulf, I am speaking less about lighting candles and burning incense and chanting and more about a well-rounded response that includes the raw facts, the number crunching, certainly, but also one that acknowledges the fear, the shock, the symbolic nature of the event and the grief. I am speaking of both head and heart.
Thus, in my state of spiritual and emotional Gulf exhaustion, those stories in the last week or so that have really grabbed me have been the ‘softer’ ones which are rich in the symbolism of the event and help connect, in a human way, with a disaster that would otherwise be abstract and incomprehensible.
For instance at Planet Waves, where civil action and political commentary meets thoughtful astrology (and a touch of liberated sexuality), the inimitable Eric Francis riffed on the totem meanings for Pelicans (help us float above the surface of the water when life’s trials and tribulations get intense), Turtles (guardians of time, and representative the Great Mother) and Dolphins (guardians of breath, which take us to another dimension of reality) and looked at the watery overtones of the current planetary setup and the watery emotional dimension of the spill:
“Now we have an uncontrolled toxic release from below the bottom of the sea, contaminating the realm of feelings, dreams and visions. More significantly, the sensitive, fertile meeting places where land meets water are taking the worst beating, and will take the longest to return to a position where they can sustain life. This region where land meets water is where we go for inspiration, rejuvenation and those rare moments of relaxation. And now that space, on the Earth and in our psyches, is being fouled.”
Allied to this are the increasingly watery dreams of some of my friends – massive tidal waves; carrying their children on their shoulders to safety in rough tides; boats or, in my case roofs and windows with uncontrollable leaks in them. These dreams are facts too and they speak to the deep grip this incident has on our psyches.
At Common Dreams Jill S. Schneiderman, Professor of Earth Science at Vassar College described the spill as “as a bellwether of slow violence” – a term coined by Rob Nixon to describe acts whose “lethal repercussions sprawl across space and time.”
She writes:
“Devastated communities and environmental refugees, dead or injured living beings, and absolutely altered land, water, and air…brutality in the guise of slow-moving and spatially extensive environmental transformations that are out of sync with the nano-second attention spans of the 21st century. But what will enable us unflaggingly to confront slow violence?
“In her memoir, Faith: Trusting Your Own Deepest Experience, Sharon Salzberg writes, ‘When we stand before a chasm of futility, it is first of all faith in this [the] larger perspective that enables us to go on.’ Some might scoff at the idea that faith has any place as a healing quality, a refuge, during this calamity and in the future it foreshadows. But human beings must begin to live and act in accordance with the reality of connectedness famously articulated by John Muir: ‘When we try to pick out anything by itself we find that it is bound fast by a thousand invisible cords that cannot be broken, to everything in the universe.'”
Amen. This is writing for the soul – as necessary as writing for the mind and too often absent from the ‘news’ in times of crisis.
What is more, this isn’t the SBNR new-ageism of yesterday with its ‘me, me, me’ overtones. With its spiritual materialism and chanting for abundance, for that lottery win and for that shiny new Hummer in the garage. This is intelligent spiritualism focused more on ‘us, us, us’. On our interconnectedness, on our interdependence, on the solid understanding that our actions have consequences and on the bigger picture.
Oil spills are an ongoing and international problem. Last month when the 13 grandmothers – an international council of indigenous elders – called for a day of prayer to heal the waters of the earth, they meant all the waters of the earth, not just the American ones.
They were praying not just for the seas, but for all our waters that have been abused and polluted. They were praying not just for the wounded Gulf but for those affected by the spills in Port Arthur Texas in January of this year, in the Great Barrier Reef in Australia in April, in the Singapore Straight in May. they were praying for those in Nigeria where, also in May this year, a ruptured ExxonMobil pipeline flooded 1 million gallons of oil the once fertile Niger Delta destroying the habitat there and threatening the livelihoods of people who have fewer resources and much less resilience in the face of such overwhelming crisis than those living along the Gulf Coast. Indeed 40 years of oil company abuse in Nigeria has left the country in ruins.
Why should it matter to US citizens? Because the 606 oilfields in the Niger Delta supply 40% of all the crude the United States imports. Oil is a dirty business wherever it’s found and, as John Vidal of the Guardian reports, due to the oil pollution in the Niger Delta life expectancy in its rural communities, half of which have no access to clean water, has fallen to little more than 40 years over the past two generations. I’d be dead by now if I lived in Nigeria. So would many of my dearest friends and family. Maybe you would be too. Think about that the next time you jump in your car for a 2 minute trip to the mini mart.
Some observers have suggested that one way to turn things around is for business to begin to incorporate spiritualism as a fourth bottom line. Maybe it’s the fatigue talking, but I have some doubts. Most companies can’t keep up with the triple bottom line which aims to add environmental quality and social justice to the traditional single bottom-line of profit and loss to create ‘win-win-win’ business.
Although initially intended as a philosophical way for businesses to think about sustainability, TBL has largely failed to deliver any noticeable changes and has become just another form of accounting, a different way of cooking the books. And the people doing the accounting are largely ignorant of what ecology and justice entail. What on earth would they make of the intangibles of spirit?
Likely they would end up focusing on what can be most easily measured (the very tip of the spiritual iceberg) such as ethics and miss the 90% of what can’t be expressed through words, let alone measured in terms of annual economic performance. Witness how quickly ethics and CSR reports become just a gaudy sideshow, an efficiency drive aimed at increasing profits and a competition amongst some very dirty companies – BP included – to appear ‘clean’.
There are some groups and individuals who are focusing on a nexus of economics and spirituality and who believe that the economic life of a nation is reflective of its spiritual attitudes. This is what the European Spirituality in Economics and Society forum (as just one example) is grappling with, albeit in a rather high, intellectual way. Best of luck to them.
Bhutan’s Gross Happiness Index mixes the intangibles of spirit with the tangibles of daily economic life in a progressive way that reflects quality of life measures.
Sound far fetched? In 2003 the UK government took it seriously enough to publish a paper known as the Life Satisfaction Report recommending policies that might increase the nation’s wellbeing as well as “finding an alternative to gross domestic product as a measure of how well the country is doing – one that reflects happiness as well as welfare, education and human rights.” Sadly it sought to quantify happiness in salary rise equivalents (i.e. marriage boosts your happiness by as much as a £72,000 pay rise; losing your job decimates your happiness as much as a £276,000 salary cut). And lest the government be lumped in with all those goofy new-agers, losing its reputation for rationality and people-friendly policies that really work, the paper has emblazoned across the cover “This is not a statement of government policy”. We’ve got a long way to go, baby.
Although not directly connected with BP, green economist Molly Scott Cato’s recent treatise on the Rational Economic Man (REM) – the antithesis of the Earth Mother, who lives obsessively in his head and not in his body and nurtures a self-image of invulnerability and intellectual superiority – seemed a better place to start with the job of humanising economics. For me at least, the image of REM made the issue of economics personal again and reinforced my belief that we can’t get through all the tough times ahead by thought alone.
When we tackle the BP crisis with our heads only we are aping Rational Economic Man, or in the case of my profession Rational Journalist Man, winning at all costs but failing to get to the heart of things, failing to see where change needs to happen, and failing to feel our own sense of connectedness and responsibility. Without that spiritual and emotional IQ we’re only half as smart as we think we are.
It’s spiritual maturity or bust for our planet and its people. You choose. Which is it going to be?
This blog first appeared on the Plan C website.
© Pat Thomas 2010. No reproduction without author’s permission.
