Deep Work and Courage

David Loy, in his fine book Ecodharma: Buddhist Teachings for the Ecological Crisis, makes many important observations and recommendations. The two that have lingered with me in the wake of reading his book are: 1) meeting the ecological challenges of our time will require a deep shift in view and 2) in order to meet these challenges, we need to connect to some deeper source of inspiration than fear.

He points out, as others have before him, that the challenge of global climate change is systemic. What is required is not a small shift in behavior, but a rethinking of our systems of social organization. And though he wrote this book several years before the current exploding awareness of systemic racism, Loy mentions racism and economic oppression as intertwined element of the systems that have led to our current and ongoing destruction of the natural world around us.

The shift in view that is needed is from what Loy refers to as cosmological dualism to a view of the interconnected realities of all life. The dualistic view sees the world we live in, ultimately including other people, as merely a background for our individual drama to play out. From this perspective we ‘take care of number one’ and get what we can when we can. More is always better. Trees and animals and the earth itself are simply resources to be consumed to enhance the bottom line of profit.

Science itself is often spoken of as arising from this western dualistic view. In the 17^th century science began separating belief in God from the realities we can observe and began looking closely at the stuff around us. But this so-called dualism of science has led us to see that no individual thing is separate from the world around it. We all live in circles of mutuality that are both minutely functioning in every cell of our body and vastly connecting our individual well-being with the health of the ecosystems of our planet from the rain forests of Brazil to the polar ice cap.

One of Jason Blake’s sisters spoke at a rally a few days after his shooting in Kenosha, Wisconsin. She said that Jason’s shooting didn’t surprise her because her other brothers and sisters had been shot by police too. She said their names: George Floyd, Ahmaud Arbery, Michael Brown, Breonna Taylor and the tragic list goes on and on. We are interconnected. Our fate is radically intertwined with the fate of all life. Jesus put it this way: ‘As you do it to the least of these people, you do it to me.’ And given what we know now about our interconnected and fragile biosphere, he should also have included all life and the water and soil and air as well.

But facing the seemingly overwhelming challenges of deeply imbedded systems of destruction of our natural world and of black and brown human bodies, how do we find the capacity to move forward? In exploring this crucial question, Loy refers at length to the work of Buddhist teacher and activist Johanna Macy.

Macy has laid out a framework that developed from her work in the 1970’s that she called despair and empowerment. Originally developed to help people deal with the dangers of nuclear power and nuclear weapons, she continued in the 1980’s with opening to all of nature in what was then called deep ecology. She has most recently proposed a spiral journey for the work the world work that needs to be done.

The journey begins with gratitude for being alive, then moves to opening to the pain that we all feel. This allows us to begin to see with new eyes and from this, we . She and her co-author Molly Brown put it this way: There is so much to be done, and the time is so short. We can proceed, of course, out of grim and angry desperation. But the tasks proceed more easily and productively with a measure of thankfulness for life; it links us to our deeper powers and lets us rest in them.

So let us, each in our own way, commit to the journey of awakening and healing—not just for ourselves, but for all life, human and inhuman and especially for this fragile and wondrous planet on which we depend. Let us be thankful and rest in the deeper power of life itself.