Winding through 'God's Country' the last few days has been a heart-filling experience. I sometimes forget that the prolonged effect of solitary time in nature is often the lovely, sobering reminder of how small we are and how great our capacity for love and awe are.
I spent a couple of nights under the overwhelmingly hospitable roof of one of my best friend's parents, in Sioux Falls, SD this week, and was also reminded how difficult it it can be to accept full-on generosity from people. I have always found it challenging to accept gifts from people - compliments, presents, acts of service - and it is humbling to realize that about oneself. I am in a moment of my life where accepting people's hospitality is an integral component of the journey that I am on, and showing gratitude for that hospitality is best received without a simultaneous, self-conscious attempt to refuse the gift. Reluctance to accept other people's kindness is sometimes taught to us as an act of modesty: "Oh, you shouldn't have!", or "I simply cannot accept", or "Thank you for the compliment, but now I am going to say some self-deprecating comment to negate whatever you just said". These are all ways that we both accidentally offend people, as well as being ways in which we deprive ourselves of the depths of closeness and synchronicity that we can experience with, particularly new, people in our lives. It is a powerful lesson that is coming up for me on this trip.
As if these lessons weren't enough of a blessing, I had an interview with a woman in Sioux Falls this week that has left a deep and staying impression on me. It is certainly one of those moments that I look forward to sharing as a video on this site at the end of this trip.
She and I were speaking about our cultural perspectives on death, and how they relate to our perspectives and behaviors towards societal and environment health. I mentioned how I have the feeling that our cultural denial of death lends itself to ignoring our own personal health in favor of addictive foods, laziness, etc., as well as ignoring the health of the planet and the destruction that we are causing it. Without blinking, she described how she feels that the end of the planet as we know it is inevitable, perhaps not in our lifetime, but eventually. She went on to say - and here's where I got blown away - that she feels this, like any other death, is meant to happen...that the beauty, life, and landscape of our Earth is meant to be destroyed - by our human hands or not - and that it's just something to accept and move on from gracefully like any other kind of death.
Now…as somewhat of an environmentalist, and someone who has been going through a very personal process of mourning for what I see as a very active campaign against our living world, this felt like a big paradigm shift to consider. Of course, as a science-y and reasonably learned person, I know that nothing is permanent, all things must come to an end, blah blah blah… But my staunch belief that the accelerated and wasteful abuse of our natural 'resources' and aesthetic landscape is due to human intervention and therefore, is something that we have a modicum of control over, has truly maintained my notion that there are interventions that can be put in place to, at the very least slow down our consumption, and that, as moral individuals we have a responsibility to act in accordance.
The perspective that: not only is our Earth on a one-way course to death, but all of this rampant destruction of the planet as just the natural course of things and, of course we will use up everything on this planet - it's meant to be, it's the natural course towards our planet's death - well, that really shook me to my core.
I don't entirely agree that humans using up every last drop of goodness on this planet until it's good and dead is the way it's 'meant' to be, but I do understand the concept that our world, just like anything else, is impermanent, and if it doesn't go by our hand, it's going to go some way, someday, and it probably won't be pretty.
It made me, again, think about my own impetus for the questions that I'm asking and where my own issues around death stem from. As environmentally aware as I like to see myself as being, perhaps my refusal to accept that this world is on a one-way course towards, if not 'death' per se, than at least a monumental shift of ecosystems and environments, is actually another form of denial that hinders me from really seeing the world for what it is while it's here. I can see how this would be a handicap to realizing, not only my personal potential, but also embracing the full spectrum and depth of, as Martin Prechtel puts it, the 'grief and praise' that would allow me to truly honor the planet that I love on a spiritual and physical level.