Happy New Year! Luck and love to the world and all its Beings. May this year bring an end to the pain and suffering felt by all Beings and our beloved Earth. May our Mother Earth experience the cessation of human ignorance that continues to erode her ability to provide for Her children. May peace finally prevail and the ability to make war end in our time. I offer this as prayer to That Which Cannot Be Defined and yet is the source of all that is definable.
In this moment at the beginning of 2005 I despair over the pain and suffering I see in the world. It is so obvious to me and yet seemingly completely hidden to others. It is difficult to look at the New Year with gratitude and a light heart even though I am resting in a lovely and fecund rainforest. There is so much work to be done. There is so little time if we do nothing. It is difficult to bear the weight of the pain I have come to recognize that pervades my Being. There is no spot that hurts in particular; it is ubiquitous throughout what I am. It is immense and too much for any one human to bear. I remind myself that I just need to do my best, give it my all and let go of any attachment to the outcome. It is all I can do and that makes it bearable. If I do my part and take responsibility for “me”, do my inner work and connect with others who are doing the same I am doing what I can. What will be is yet to manifest and so I continue to limp along trying to be the best human can be. In this endeavor I pray for guidance from the sacred being that is our Mother Earth, I believe She knows what is needed.
After traveling and seeing the torment wrought by the industrial mega-complex I realize how unworthy of a worker I am. I lack discipline, knowledge, wisdom and strength and that is just the beginning. I have many weaknesses and succumb to anger, self-pity, fear, negative thinking and feeling the victim. I am afraid to speak my truth much of the time and fail to find the words to express what I am feeling when I do. Still, even realizing this, I wish to play a part in the healing of our people and our planet. It is impossible to be perfect and I gave up trying long ago and if only perfect people can do what is necessary for the wellbeing of our planet, well then, we are doomed. We are dreadfully short on perfect people these days. I just hope Mother Earth and the Great Spirit looks through my weakness into my heart. Unless I am fooling myself (and I don’t think I am) I have a good strong heart, courage, compassion, the willingness to be in service and capable of holding the love and pain it will take to make a difference, if only a small one. Imperfect people get good at keeping going in life, they have to, it is the only game in town.
The blessings I have in this life are many. I have my children Brandon and Trista; I have felt honest love and felt my heart break from its ending. I have my love for Mother Earth and Her love for me. I have wept at the sight of unspeakable beauty and been cradled in the sea, touched wild Nature, embraced by a tree and clothed in hatching butterflies. I have climbed skyscrapers and spirit journeyed with shamans in the rainforest. There are all good friends that support me and wise teachers to instruct, It is not important that I don’t know each of them personally I have access to their teaching through their writing and their examples. I have this life and I have my desire to be in service to all beings. I have my gratitude, forgiveness, love-kindness, compassion, the sense of connection with all things and the ability to see the wisdom of Nature. I am truly blessed and grateful to be alive during these years of transformation.
The New Year found me in my hostel room listening to the fireworks, music and revelry of the people of Puyo, Ecuador. Earlier in the evening I sat with a new acquaintance and shared conversation and watched the partiers as they brought in the New Year. In Ecuador the celebration to ring in the New Year is a blend of Halloween, Easter and the Fourth of July, there are many costumes and fireworks are everywhere. The noise is nearly unbearable and one of the reasons I came back to my room to wait for the passing of 2004. The streets of Puyo were packed with people walking, driving, or biking between the three main sections and town is one big fiesta. Young people in outlandish get-up set up temporary gates to stop motorists along the roads, charge a toll and dance in front of their cars. The people do not mind being stopped and extorted for pennies; it is all in good fun. Even though there was a lot of drinking and many people had too much, there was a very low police presence and the air was casual. It was something like I had never seen before and I did not take an active part, I could have, the choice not to was mine. I am not in a party mood.
There is something like sadness inside of me that has been getting stronger as the days pass. It also feels like loneliness and is sort of melancholy in nature. I can’t put me minds finger on it but I feel it tugging at my insides. I am prone to weep at beauty and other peoples suffering and it sits with heaviness in my heart. Maybe it is depression, maybe it is longing, maybe I’m more than half nuts, I don’t know. I have been deeply affected by the tsunami disaster in South East Asia and am very concerned for friends I have there; both are women. Connie, who lives in my hometown, is teaching in Thailand in or near Puket and Jeythane is a bodhisattva from Sri Lanka, who I met at the Land of Medicine Buddha at a workshop with Joanna Macy. Both areas were devastated by the tsunami that swept the Indian Ocean coastline just before Christmas. There are over 100,000 people dead and probably more to come due to disease and starvation. I am helpless to do anything or help in any way except to hold healing thoughts in my heart and hope for the best. So many lives lost and shattered it is difficult to comprehend. This event has helped bring into focus the heaviness of spirit I feel.
The problem is I know that humans, through their thoughtless and ignorant actions, increased the death toll of what would have still been a major catastrophe. People, in their rage to get rich and richer, dug away the coral reefs for their cruise ships, they cut down the mangrove trees to install shrimp and prawn farms and they built vacation hotels along the exposed coastline. People moved to work in the hotels, shrimp farms and tourist hangouts. In overpopulated Sri Lanka there was simply no place for the people to go. There was no warning system because this kind of event does not usually occur in the Indian Ocean, on this magnitude. Without foresight, wisdom or compassion the development kept growing. Man’s foolishness and greed may well be his undoing, as well as the undoing of countless other species.
Perhaps this is a part of my current emotional crises. I just don’t understand how humans can be so separated within themselves. We have such great ability to do good works. Our minds are so imaginative and creative and we have so much capacity for love and compassion. We have the ability to help create and live in such a beautiful world and yet we destroy our very ability to survive for a handful of dollars. We sell our children’s future for promises and wage war on each other on such massive scale it is unbelievable. We have convinced ourselves of original sin and are wonderful and evil in the same breath.
The entire world is responding to the disaster in S.E. Asia with compassion, energy, strength, money and hand-power, as they should. There are over 100,000 dead. However, it is as if the 200,000 plus dead Iraqis are nothing, insignificance. Government sanctioned death, even of our own children for their purposes, is acceptable and we go about our business. Armies can kill, rape and maim as many Iraqis as they want, but don’t let that bitch Mother Nature kill any. Millions of children and elderly have been killed by disease and starvation brought by economic sanctions, untold numbers of women have raped, been killed, or left to provide for their children after their husbands were killed by the war. How many soldiers have been killed? I have no way of knowing. I am not trying to diminish the loss of life from the tsunami, it is truly horrendous and the people are suffering greatly. I wish there were something I could do to help. I also wish I could stop the government insanity and end the war. I can do neither. It just seems so stupid for men to go around killing each other without discretion and still think nature is out to get them. When will we wake up and realize we are our own enemy and we are only killing ourselves.
These are the thoughts with which I begin the year of 2005. I am deeply troubled in mind and spirit and trying to keep the faith; to do the work I am called to do. It will take strength I don’t have, wisdom I have yet to acquire and the compassion of a heart broken wide open. I am so lacking and feel so incomplete to meet the challenge and yet feel as if I have no choice and will do the best I can. I am afraid of failure, I am afraid of not being good enough and fear for the future generations. If I act I may fail, if I don’t act I will fail; there is only forward to go and I don’t know the direction to take.
Mother Earth, please give me strength, wisdom and compassion and guide me to the work that needs to be done and please merciful God help us all.
