The Wonderment

Gratitude, Love, and Climate Strike 2019

I still plant trees. I plant trees whose beauty and full growth I will probably never see (remember, that’s usually hundreds of years — the trees I plant will mostly be tree-teens or early adults by the time I die even if I live to be a hundred). I plant trees and care for stone walls and nurture soils not because of what benefits I reap now. I do these things from a love of the land, for a care for this earth, from a heart space of gratitude, wonder, and love. In the same way, I work on living with the smallest carbon footprint I can manage, and each year pick away at what I can do to improve. And, from gratitude, wonder, and love for this earth and the beings that live upon it, I do what I can to advocate for climate equity, justice, and well-being. While each day calls me to reflection, thanksgiving, wonder, love, and action, the legislative changes, business changes, and community changes are often medium-to-long term for the human lifespan. All to affect the climate changing so much faster than it has ever changed before, and yet will require so much effort to slowly heal.

The Hebrew Scriptures tell us of a people driven by famine into another country, displaced by weather and pest pressures, undermining their ability to grow crops or herd animals and stay in what was home. There was a refuge that could be sought, a place that could make way and welcome, although, as the stories go, it ended with fear and slavery and eventually exodus, seeking a new home. In other words: human beings have always been susceptible to drought, crop failures, and water pollution. Today, with record numbers of people displaced by violence and the effects of our changing climate, there are a limited number of places to go, and even where folks end up, they still meet the effects of changing climate right there. There is no refuge from a global phenomenon. In our changing climate, the world is changing. We must change with it to survive, and to allow the world to thrive again, change our behaviors now. As we adapt to those changes, and as pressures increase, we will have more change opportunities ahead. Adaption is life, just as assuredly as life can have suffering and joy.

Whether we choose compassion, equity, justice, love, or gratitude as keys to our lives of making meaning, global climate change invites us to action here and now. We will need to act later, too, undoubtedly our whole lives and probably into several generations, for what has been wrought over multiple generations usually takes multiple generations to undo. One of humanity’s great capacities is that with sustained ecological change, wisdom changes. The long Ice Ages nurtured one set of wisdom cultures. The development of agriculture in an environment where much of the world that is now dry was wet with fresh water opened space for another set of wisdom cultures to accrete, emerge, and grow. And as those areas dried and changed yet again, so did the awakening of another age of wisdom. Right now, we have the opportunity to grow again as a species, drawing on the strengths of existing wisdom traditions and adapting them with us as our planet changes dramatically. The difference from the past changes is speed and intensity. Today the world is changing faster than it did for most of the past in which humanity existed. We need to change faster too.

No matter how much we live in digital spheres and urban environments, we still depend upon planetary well-being. We need to eat nutritious food and breathe clean air and drink pure water to have a basic quality of life. We need places for our families and friends to live and make lives of meaning and thrive. And yet, climate change threatens this fundamental well-being. We are in the early years of effects noticeable to those without fine instruments, with significantly rising seas and flooding, increased ocean temperatures and dramatically intenser storms, salt-water intrusion into fresh water sources, cold and heat extremes worse than we have on record, widespread droughts and related fires and widespread floods. Pressures on crops from weather, temperature ranges, rainfall or its lack, and increased pests threaten the food supply. This bountiful, amazing planet is in trouble because of actions human beings have taken over the Industrial and post-Industrial development of economies around the world. And we haven’t turned the corner yet. Intensive effort and concentrated action are required to create some kind of planetary well-being for our future and to keep addressing the disruptions of the present.

Can we approach climate change from a place of love and thanksgiving? Love for this planet, thanksgiving for the life we have been able to have and know? Can we extend that love and thanksgiving to one another, as we call each other to action, as we expect governments, businesses and other organizations to move forward in slowing, stopping, and reversing climate change? By tending love and thanksgiving every day can we keep our sense of urgency awake alongside our sense of why we’re taking the actions we’re taking, sacrificing what we need to sacrifice, changing how we live to provide for a future we will never see?

The Equinox approaches, the autumnal equinox for the northern hemisphere and the vernal equinox for the southern hemisphere. It is a time of equalizing light, a time for planetary unity in noticing the inequities we have created as a species that intensify the effects of global climate change, and calling us to act together for improving the well-being of all. The Equinox is a time for heart-opening, gratitude, and recognizing our deep interdependence with one another and this planet’s well-being.

Friday, September 20th many people will be joining the Global Climate Strike (https://globalclimatestrike.net) , which extends through next week. Whether you can strike for a day, a few days, a few hours at an event, or join faith or communities in prayerful care, protest and encouragement to governments and businesses to address climate change, consider how you might add your heart, voice, and being to nurturing now and the future.

Building Sanctuaries for Climate Justice

Climate change has already displaced and will increasingly displace so many people, across and within national borders. One of the persistent fears during evacuations is that folks will not be permitted to return and will lose everything they value, from community to the structures that nurture their communities. This is not an irrational fear, because repeatedly, that’s what happens. What climate change intensified storms don’t strip away, local, state, and federal policies might and have. To attend to a particular story about that, check out Living on Earth January 25, 2019 episode, where Lewis Raven Wallace describes how a predominantly working-class and low income African American community in New Bern, North Carolina has been and continues to be displaced following a hurricane. 

 

Rebuilding is expensive. Rebuilding to climate adaptive standards is even more expensive in the short term, though when building for resiliency, gives you better chances in the longer run. Many of the folks displaced by rising seas, intensified storms, and intensified droughts cannot rebuild, and there is no effort governmentally to try and keep communities together. Nor is there a spate of affordable climate adaptive housing being planned by the U.S. Housing and Urban Development Department. Where rebuilding needs to be set further away, so we can have better coastal buffers recognizing the rising seas and intensified storms, we need affordable resilient housing, not just housing for wealthy people. 

 

This week in Parashat Terumah (Exodus 25:1-27:19) we read about the details required to create a space of awe and reverence, a sanctuary for the Holy. Before there is to be permanent housing and settlement for the people, they learn how to make a home for the Holy. In this home for the Holy, we welcome beauty, attention to detail, and the offerings each person and family can bring, the gifts we share as communities to create and care for such sacred spaces.

 

Following the flight into freedom, the people had to relearn how to be free, how to be a people, a community together. And that includes how to be a people of reverence and to create lives of dignity. Part of reorienting ourselves after displacement is to establish again those elements that craft us as a people, unite us, transform us, challenge us, welcome us, and give us dignity, meaning, and purpose. This is a need for displaced communities wherever we are in time. Today, we need to think about displaced communities, not only displaced individuals, and have policies and supportive programs and neighborly aid to hold communities together. Losing our community, we can lose very important parts of ourselves, our supportive networks, the people who know our stories and whose stories we know, to whom we belong and with whom we having dignity, purpose, and meaning. Displaced peoples also lose their sacred spaces, and part of keeping communities together and helping them resettle is to create again those sacred spaces, in different places and with inevitable differences, but still the community’s heart.

 

Individualism as an ideology ties into this ideology of meritocracy and both erase and ignore the truth of displacement. Can you imagine how different Exodus would read and we would be if the story wasn’t communal, but individual and everyone had to do for themselves rather than a community developing together? What we lose in displacement is more than individual loss; it is a loss of vital and vibrant community, history, and future together. When whole communities are displaced, whole communities need spaces to stay together. As the people in Exodus need to create such space, we all benefit from this part of home: a communal place of dignity and reverence, beauty, awe, and wonder. The community from New Bern, North Carolina, the communities displaced by five-year-drought in western Honduras, the communities displaced from Puerto Rico or the Florida Panhandle or Houston or New Orleans need communal reassembly spaces, places to become communities again and not be dispersed and assimilated and disappeared into losing so much of who they were before displacement.

 

Consider in your life where the places and spaces are that welcome you and yours to restful quiet, to joyful thanksgiving, to awe and wonder, and to needing and receiving your gifts gratefully? How do you feel without access to such spaces? Without a place where you and yours are met and loved and accepted as you are? Without a place where what you bring is needed and celebrated? 

 

As people of heart how may we respond to the increasing numbers of internally and internationally displaced people, people displaced in large part due to climate change?

 

• We make way and welcome, which allows communities to stay together, to reassemble, to create communal spaces that can house history, connection, heart, home, and spirit
• We change policies to build and adapt affordable housing for or changing world, and not cruelly disperse folks or expect them individually to relocate and find what’s already non-existent or in short supply in many places
• We tell, collect, and cultivate the stories of displacement and the diasporas that are part of our history and that are happening now and will be or future history
• We work to slow and adapt to climate change, to intensified storms and droughts and to rising seas, community by community, at the larger level because our ability to survive is not about individual choice but communal ones.
• We grant one another the spaces and places to create together sacred spaces of reverence, welcome, and celebration of our gifts.

 

May we steadfastly carry on to address climate change, to make welcome and space for one another, and to have a heart to create more justice in responding to displaced communities and peoples. May we unite to build sanctuaries for climate justice with our displaced communities.

Beginning Here: Love The Earth

Home: it can mean so many different things to each of us. Home is a place we live much of the time, or a family that raised us, or an escape from work, or a nest of love and care, or a dream and a hope, or right here in this breath, or under that tree, or with this particular night sky. We make homes, places we feel rooted, connected, and loved and places we cherish, nurture, and love boldly in. But all of our homes are on this single planet, which is another way of thinking about our home, a place we belong just by being here, a place that is ours to care for and a place that nurtures and sustains us.

 

One way we can nurture loving this planet that is our home is to be attentive to reasons for awe, laughter, joy, contentment, and thanksgiving wherever we are. I find this easiest to nurture outside. Rolling down the path, up the hills, over past the neighbors, under the trees, alongside the waters is one of my joys. Moving through this place that I make home reconnects me with each breath and push of my wheels to this web of being. Every day that I go out, I seek out one more reason to give thanks for this place and to cherish and nurture it. One day that might be the resilient weeds in the sidewalk cracks, persisting and making a place to be. Another day that might be the cardinals tapping outside my door to see what treats are going out to the feeder station today. On yet another day it may the be the sound of rain or the feel of warmth from the sun or a breeze that wakes me up and focuses my attention. Inside, I might spend some moments in awe as the thunderstorm passes or feel the minute changes in daylight as the earth spins on its axis around our sun even though there is a heavy snowstorm.

 

I belong to these places I learn moment by moment; they are part of me. No matter where I go, they remain part of me. And each one who makes their home here is part of this place, too, belonging here. Sadly, we are living in a time of great climactic change, where the world that has been so favorable for human development is changing and will continue to change dramatically. How dramatically depends in great part of on our daily choices, through laws we pass and policies we pursue, in consumer choices, and in whether we can work together globally to address these changes. But it is hard to stay motivated to act when that action is based in fear. Fear felt day after day becomes, eventually, background noise; we adapt to these new normals of anxiety. But when we love and cherish something or someone, these ecosystems and place in which we live, then our hearts are renewed to keep acting. The fear stays is fresher because we have respite from it, in being nurtured by and in delighting in this planet, and we also know very much what we’re struggling and risking for. Tending our communities of people and of place, of trees and waterways, of birds and of fungi, of flowers and of fantastic landscapes, we can nurture a beloved future for this earth, our home. Each day how we live answers the question: how do we nurture life? How are we acting from loving and open hearts to care for this planet, our home? 

 

In this new year, as at any moment, may we start where we are, whether at home or away, breathing in and breathing out. May we touch the earth, or the snow, or the bark of a tree, or the salt water. May we feel both the soft darkness of night and the warm light of day. And in this breathing and being right here and right now, may we find our hearts opening with gladness for here, for this earth, this air, this night, this day, this place where we belong just by being. This is our earth, our home, something to cherish, protect, nurture, give thanks for, dream for, and tend with all the other hopes and dreams we embody.

 

From dust to dust, we belong to this earth and in that belonging have cares, responsibilities, delights, awe, and thanksgiving. Loving this Earth, loving this place begins first with attention to and awareness of the here and a heart open to care, wonder, and nurture.