The internal combustion engine and modern forms of energy production and consumption are largely centrifugal, dissipating huge amounts of energy in the creation of friction, heat and noise as energy is pushed outward - hence the need for metal bands around early wagon wheels to keep them from flying apart, and for radiators and fan belts and such. In contrast, Nature’s preferred means of locomotion is centripetal, moving from the outside toward the inside, in spirals, at increasing velocity, producing a consolidating, friction-reducing and therefore cooling effect. In Nature, extreme heat and violent force are used sparingly and for specific functions – to relieve pressure, to cleanse or decompose so that regeneration and rebalancing can occur. Everything to do with combustive engines is invasive, wasteful, complicated, noisy and expensive. Conversely, “Everything that is natural is silent, simple and cheap.”1 Planetary survival depends on our ability to rethink and restructure human activity in concert with natural systems.
Science is only now catching up to what indigenous peoples have always known: that the powerful elements locked beneath the Earth’s crust – oil, gold, uranium, and the rest – are crucial to maintaining the balance of the whole and therefore ought not be disturbed. Viktor Shauberger’s observations and experiments indicate that oil, in particular, is the source for healthy mineral content of spring water. The fact that the particulars of this underground balancing are still a mystery does not negate its inherent truth. Instead, it invites respect, even awe, and careful study to understand how the overall system and individual elements work. It reinforces our obligation to make radical course corrections.
We need to cast ourselves far beyond the fragmented battles, however urgent, to save this or that endangered species, habitat or corner of the world. The future depends on our willingness to step into the broadest imaginable vision of relationship, possibility and wholeness so that we have a sense of our earthsource at all times, one that informs our understanding of where we are going and how we will get there: What would a world look like that is fully restored and thriving?
Joseph Eagle Elk, a Lakota medicine man who lived 50 years ago, speaks of power and its use, and of the sacredness of fire. He explains how critical it was that people handled fire with gratitude, using it only when they really needed it, knowing that fire was both life giving and life destroying, and therefore requiring of us that we enter into sacred relationship with it. He said that there had come a time when people forgot that fire was a gift and stopped being thankful, and so ‘the heart got hard.’ Most indigenous cultures say the same thing. In Eagle Elk’s words, “Whenever we forget we are part of life and that at the heart of life is relationship, whenever we lose touch with our place in the scheme of things, then we start to take it all for granted. We put ourselves in the front… and then we forget what we have been given. We become hard. We begin to destroy ourselves.” 2
Kenyan peacebuilder and theater artist Babu Ayindo, speaks of the traditional understanding of conflict as being “a form of imbalance with fellow human beings, imbalance with nature, imbalance with the supernatural.” He says, “You know, right now I see the symbol of justice as being balancing scales. Even in most of Africa, we adopted the western justice system, with the emphasis on blame and punishment. But for my grandparents or any council of elders acting on the behalf of the community to resolve a conflict, the emphasis would be on the restoration of relationships, not just of relationships between human beings, but with nature and the supernatural.”
Babu says, “ For many Africans, once you apologize, you know, they’ll forgive you. In fact, it is viewed very negatively if people were to apologize and you refuse to forgive them because once they apologize, they are giving you the opportunity to redress
the imbalance (in all the worlds). Refusing that is viewed as a terrible thing to do, a greedy thing to do actually because you are now working against the communitarian purpose of our being here.” 3
Modern Western culture divides our world into either/or, us and them, all or nothing, boom or bust. Progress is primarily measured in terms of material gain. Modern narrative uses conflicts and crises to ‘drive’ the story. This way of seeing things, repeated over and over in the stories we tell ourselves, becomes the story we enact. We need stories of wholeness and possibility that will keep the world intact. It is time for humans to reclaim our place in global ecology. Like the tannins on the acacia, the earth is telling us, No More. Let us sit down together and listen.
1Alick Bartholomew, Hidden Nature: The Startling Insights of Viktor Shauberger, Floris Books, 2003, p. 90
2 Gerald Mohatt & Joseph Eagle Elk, The Price of a Gift, a Lakota Healer’s Story, University of Nebraska Press, 2000, p. 133-134
3 Joseph Babu Ayindo interview conducted at Eastern Mennonite University Summer Peacebuilding Institute, 1999, www.everydaygandhis.org
No comments:
Post a Comment