Seeds, Soil, Shelter, Water, Air, Community, Care, Health, and Spirit. These are our needs.
Our seeds need to be open-pollinated, so that they can continue without proprietary hybrids.
Our soil needs to be ours to learn from and restore, so that we can build soil organic matter and grow healthy food.
Our shelter needs the ability to keep us reasonably warm, reasonably cool, reasonably safe, and reasonably dry.
Our water needs to be clean and available, held in the soil, and free of chemicals that harm animal and soil life.
Our air needs to be safe to breathe, clear enough to let the night sky through and free of advertisements and manufactured desire.
Our community needs to be rooted, mutually supportive, healing, non-violent, and diverse.
Our care needs to be mutual, courageous, and given and valued as a gift.
Our health needs be approached holistically, free of drugs and procedures that treat symptoms without treating causes.
Our spirit comes from our ability to meet all of these other needs for others and ourselves and from existing in communion with the earth and each other.
This is the good news. Our real needs are old and simple.
We can meet them if the power goes out. We can meet them without a commute. We can meet them without invading other countries. We can meet them without spending a life saving for retirement. We can meet them without developing new condos. We can meet them without fracking. We can meet them without smartphone reminders. We can meet them without college debt. We can meet them without pharmaceuticals. We can meet them without militarized police. We can meet them without corporations. We can meet them without violence.
We can start to meet them today. We can start caring for each other today. We can plant something, wherever we are, whoever we are, today.
My hope comes from knowing that all we have to do to be OK is to let go of things that make us suffer. We just have to open our hand, and let all the work that we all contribute to maintain this alienated system fall out of our grasping. We don’t have to hurt anyone or convince anyone or endure deep austerity.
It takes so much energy, resources, and work to fight wars, to maintain a consumer economy, to manufacture plastic objects, to mine the earth, to program an app, to get ourselves to keep looking at that computer screen, to deal with hierarchies and bureaucracies, to leave our home and family and community each day, to keep up with the competition, to stay relevant, to pay interest, to treat the depression that originates from a life without purpose or the anxiety from knowing just about everything we do to make money is hurting the earth and each other.
We use so much energy and give so much of our lives to do things that do no good for anyone. Even the wealthy who reap the profits of our chronic busy-ness are trapped in a life of disconnection, stuck in the manufactured gravity of the grey and lifeless structure of industrial civilization.
What would happen if, instead of grasping this failing civilization with a tighter and tighter hand, we opened our palms to the sky and let it fall?
What would happen if we all refused to feed our lives to the machines of this mass-unhappiness anymore? What would we be able to do with all that energy reclaimed from the service of something so noisy and ultimately unnecessary? What does it look like when our talents are suddenly withdrawn from the systems of harm and our power is poured into creating and recreating the humble life-giving ways that leave this planet shining with beauty?
Billions of people are employed in work with no real end but making a few unhappy people wealthier. Endless work goes into controlling land to produce unhealthy food, creating plastic junk that ends up in the oceans, maintaining poorly designed buildings, and making weapons and armies to fight over the resources we make scarce by wasting them; and each of those people doing that work are powerful. Each of them have a leader inside, or a teacher, or a gardener, builder, healer, caretaker, land tender inside of them. To the problems we are facing, we have 7 billion solutions waiting to be asked to help.
To leave the systems of harm, we need each other. It may be very hard at first; but once enough of us become good at feeding a purposeful life for each other and the earth, it will be easier. Each time one of us chooses to stop feeding our lives and our children’s lives to the terrible-nothing-much, it gets easier for the next person to do the same.
Each day, find a way or make a plan to stop feeding some part of the broken systems. Each day, find someone else who is doing the same. If it doesn’t do any real good for anyone, you aren’t hurting anyone by letting it fall apart. Let’s open our hands together and grow miracles in the time of the rising waters.
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