We’re living in deracinating, doomscrolling times, rife with “polycrisis” and pessimism. The urgent humanitarian crisis in Gaza heads a long list of current reasons to be anxious about the future. Yet despite this, GDP growth is trending up in the US and China, and some are currently bullish on global economic growth. There’s an obvious disconnect between the state of the world and the dominant growth paradigm. There’s a whole discourse on rethinking it and finding new models that measure well-being and sustainability. But this discourse itself could use a new approach. 

Part of the problem is a blind spot in our linear conception of growth that limits our ability to imagine a qualitatively different future and take action to usher it in. We tend to forget that growth sometimes unfolds in surprising, non-linear ways that we don’t see coming, like a butterfly breaking out of a chrysalis. That’s often the way of epoch-making, transformative change. We rarely recognize it until it’s in the rear-view mirror.

While we’re living through it, it’s natural to imagine the future as an extension of present growth trends. Today’s trends are dark. Our economic system depends on endless GDP growth, fed by exponential population and consumption growth, driving conflict, ecological overshoot, and climate and extinction crises. 

Technological growth points to a similarly dystopian place. Global knowledge doubles every year (soon it will double every twelve hours). Each of us processes about five times more information (and counting) than a generation ago. This leads to overload, chronic stress, anxiety, and depression. Worldwide depression rates rose 50% from 1990 through 2017 (and roughly doubled during the pandemic). And then there’s rising AI anxiety.

These are all compelling arguments for stepping off the growth treadmill. Except for techno-optimists and a few fiscal policy experts, it’s clear to most of us that we can’t just do more of the same thing, in hopes of “growing our way out” of such problems. Yet it’s not as if we can solve them by magically shutting growth off, either. To step outside the dilemma, we need a different mental model.

Metamorphosis might be a less blinkered and more hopeful way to think about growth. Almost all animal species undergo it, transforming their morphology to adapt to ecological pressures. Although humans tend to see metamorphosis as the exception and non-transformative growth as the rule, in nature, it’s really the other way around. Most biological growth contains the seeds of sudden, dramatic transformation into something entirely new.

Humans don’t undergo biological metamorphosis, which may explain our limited notion of growth as becoming a larger or more developed version of the same thing, rather than transforming into something else. Yet human metamorphosis is a deep theme–perhaps the deepest–of mythology, psychology, and wisdom traditions.

In nature, metamorphosis isn’t just physiological, it’s also neurological. It literally rewires a metamorphic animal’s brain by respecifying old neurons and adding new ones. The human brain also has this latent capability, which contemplative practice can unlock. 

Neuroscientific research confirms that meditation and other forms of contemplation enhance human neuroplasticity, changing the way neural structures connect and synchronize. At virtually any time of life, contemplative practice can change the brain’s physical structure to enhance cognitive functions like memory and attention, as well as socially active functions like compassion, empathy, relatedness, and resilience.

Keeping this in mind might help us have more hope for the future, because if humans have an innate mental capacity for metamorphosis, human societies and economies, which are based on our mental constructs, could have it too. Positive, transformative changes could be underway right now, even if they aren’t easy to perceive or predict from where we sit.

Metamorphosis is an emergent process which doesn’t just suddenly come out of nowhere. It’s encoded and inchoate in genes and gene expression, part of an ancient and continuous evolutionary dance between changing conditions and strategies for adapting to them. In that sense, it is always preparing and unfolding, covertly, like a caterpillar in a cocoon. Whereas growth is an overt process we can witness and measure, metamorphosis is long in preparation and can be hard to recognize until it bursts forth.

The same could be true of social and environmental change. Indeed, this is how change leaders who are grounded in contemplative practice often talk about our crisis-ridden, panic-inducing times, and how to navigate them.

Joanna Macy wrote in 2009 of “the Great Turning” as “the essential adventure of our time,” where “the ecological and social crises we face…caused by an economic system dependent on accelerating growth” are undergoing a revolutionary transition “to a life-sustaining society.” 

While we can’t know how fast this metamorphosis will unfold, or what losses might accrue before it does, “we can know that it is under way and it is gaining momentum,” Macy writes. “To see this as the larger context of our lives clears our vision and summons our courage [and can] save us from succumbing to either panic or paralysis.”

Systems thinking pioneer Peter Senge said in a recent interview, “Urgency by itself puts you in a mode where you just try harder to do what you have been doing all along. You get into a contracted state where you say, ‘my God, we’ve got to make this work.’ But that’s not very conducive to imagination, or building trust, relationships, or mutuality. It has taken humans a long time to dig ourselves into this hole; we aren’t going to dig [ourselves] out quickly. It’s way too urgent to act just out of urgency. We need to relax. That’s the paradoxical situation we’re in.”

Many on the front lines of social and environmental change concur. When things seem most desperate, we need hope the most, and can least afford panic or paralysis. When the stakes are highest and demand for solutions is most urgent, that’s precisely when we need to check in, slow down, and go deep.

Making the deep changes the world needs will require the grounding, relaxation, creativity, compassion, and resilience that contemplative practice cultivates. Contemplation unlocks the protean, metamorphic capacity of minds to change and become something new. Staying grounded in it in the face of conditions that demand new leaps of adaptation could be what triggers metamorphosis in our civilization.

Our current trajectory may seem headed for a dark end, but not everything points in that direction. Out of the ravages of extractive and exploitive linear systems are emerging circular, regenerative models for agriculture, finance, and civilization. Their uptake is growing. So is an emergent social field of changemakers and contemplative practitioners working to envision and help build a positive future. 

These seeds and seedlings of a better future are germinating and growing unpredictably in the present. They’re a wildcard that may yet hijack our dystopian growth narrative toward metamorphosis, from a self-destructive civilization into a life-sustaining one.

The post Metamorphosis appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

In Buddhist circles, hope often gets a bad rap. Especially in times of crisis and emergency, it can appear light, frivolous, or even delusional. But writer Rebecca Solnit is determined to change this narrative. For Solnit, hope is inextricable from action and allows us to imagine alternate modes of being in the world.

Over the course of her career, Solnit has published twenty-five books on feminism, popular power, social change and insurrection, and hope and catastrophe. Her most recent project, Not Too Late: Changing the Climate Story from Despair to Possibility, explores how we can harness the power of hope in the face of our current climate emergency. Featuring climate scientists and activists from around the world, the book addresses the social, political, and spiritual dimensions of the climate crisis—and envisions a path forward.

In a recent episode of Life As It Is, Solnit spoke with Tricycle’s editor-in-chief, James Shaheen, and meditation teacher Sharon Salzberg to discuss the difference between hope and optimism, the dangers of hyperindividualism, and why she believes beauty is an essential piece of activist work. Read an excerpt from their conversation below, and then listen to the full episode.

James Shaheen (JS): You write that our present moment is an exodus into the unknown, and our task is to make a home in this space of uncertainty and possibility. Can you say more about how we can take refuge in the unknown?

Rebecca Solnit (RS): A lot of people seem to really dislike uncertainty. One of the things I love about Buddhism is that it really encourages us to engage with codependent arising and to see that innumerable forces are at work, and exactly how they’ll dance together remains to be seen. I think of both optimism and pessimism as forms of certainty about the future. In both cases, we assume we know what’s going to happen. Pessimists assume it’s terrible and let themselves off the hook from doing anything because they speak as though the future has already been decided. Optimists take the opposite position but with the same kind of certainty that everything will be fine, so nothing is required.

Uncertainty is unnerving because it’s unpredictable but also because it demands a lot of us. If the future does not yet exist and we are creating the future in the present, then we have tremendous responsibility to actually engage. [We tend to have] anxiety and avoidance around recognizing the truth of uncertainty, which is also recognizing that change is constant. People often don’t have much memory of the historical past. They think of the present as a kind of eternity that’s somehow being shattered rather than seeing that the world was radically different twenty or fifty years ago, let alone a hundred, so of course it’s going to be different in the next twenty or fifty years. How it will be different is something we’re deciding now. This is the decade of decision.

Sharon Salzberg (SS): Throughout your career, you’ve written about the power of hope in times of emergency, and you say that hope is not a lottery ticket but an ax you break down doors with in an emergency. So how does hope function as an ax? And how can we harness hope as a powerful organizing tool?

RS: One of the quotes that I love is that you can’t have hope without action, but you can’t have action without hope. I think there are a lot of misconceptions about hope. One misconception is that it’s the same as optimism. But optimism is certainty about the future, whereas hope is just about possibility. Another misconception is that hope is a feeling and that if you don’t feel good, you can’t be hopeful. But we know that people in the worst situations in the world dared to hope, not because they felt good but because there was something worth doing.

Hope is active, not passive. Hope is where you begin, but you don’t just sit there on the couch feeling hopeful. You actually need to take that hope and act on it. I love the anti-prison activist Mariame Kaba’s definition that hope is a discipline, meaning that it’s a real commitment to how you want to be in the world, and you’re going to try without being confident or certain about outcome.

“You can’t have hope without action, but you can’t have action without hope.”

I often go back to Václav Havel, the Czechoslovakian activist who helped topple the [Communist] regime in ways that were so unforeseeable until it happened. He’s a great beacon of hope, and he said, “Hope is not the conviction that something will turn out well but the certainty that something makes sense, regardless of how it turns out.” Sometimes people think that if you don’t always win, then your hope was ill-founded, but it’s always a gamble. You’re breaking down the door with an ax, but whether you’re going to get everyone out of the theater on fire or the flooding basement remains to be seen. Still, you might as well try.

SS: You liken hope to love in the sense of taking risks and being vulnerable to the possibility of grief and loss. Can you say more about the relationship between hope and love?

RS: I think hope is a kind of vulnerability and a form of care. You don’t hope if you don’t care. Cynicism is a way of saying it’s not worth caring because it’s all going to hell anyway and there’s nothing we can do—it’s a form of giving up beforehand. When I wrote Hope in the Dark, I was really struck by who was hopeful, which was often people on the frontlines, and who was cynical and despairing, which was often really comfortable people who saw it as a form of solidarity with the people they imagined as being desperate and therefore hopeless. I think they were wrong about the hope, if not the desperation. But I also think that ultimately, they were taking care of themselves rather than the world.

Cynicism doesn’t require anything of you. It’s a posture. Hope does put you on the spot. If you hope we can win, then why the hell aren’t you doing anything to win? If you hope that this life can be saved, you better get out there and save it. Hope is inextricable from action, whereas cynicism is almost inextricable from passivity and making decisions that may benefit yourself but not the greater whole. I think cynicism comes partly out of a sense of powerlessness and partly out of a sense of separateness.

“Cynicism doesn’t require anything of you. It’s a posture. Hope does put you on the spot.”

So much encourages people to believe that we can’t win, so all you can win is a really good posture for yourself. But I think that’s wrong. There’s so much more that we can win, and the historical record demonstrates this. This is why I view hope, which is about the future, as very connected to memory and to the past. If you remember how different the world was and how many times dedicated small groups changed the world through nonviolent direct action and concerted campaigns, you know that the world can be changed by these means—it has been changed, and it is changing all the time. The fossil fuel companies, Wall Street, and capitalist forces are all very willing to change it for the worse, so we should be at least as willing to change it for the better.

The post Taking Refuge in the Unknown appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

This conversation is an excerpt from Tricycle’s second annual Buddhism and Ecology Summit, a weeklong event series focused on transforming anxiety into awakened action.

Sam Mowe: Rebecca, in Not Too Late: Changing the Climate Story from Despair to Possibility you describe the climate crisis as being, in part, also a storytelling crisis. What do you mean by that? And would you also describe the climate crisis as a spiritual crisis?

Rebecca Solnit: I think the spiritual crisis and the storytelling crisis are the same crisis. Capitalism would like us to believe that we’re basically selfish individuals. Private individuals. And that what we most want and need are things money can buy—lots of stuff, plus maybe some sex and some family and lovers in our immediate vicinity. What other views of human nature tell us is, in fact, the things we most yearn for are broader connection, community, meaning, purpose, hope, and awe—these other things that capitalism is very bad at, which is why it would prefer we forget them. 

Then there are stories about how change works, which suggest that change is something that the powerful hand down to us. That’s a problem. Another problem with the story of change we often get is also a kind of capitalist story I call “instant results guaranteed or your money back.” We have a demonstration on Monday and if the powers that be don’t fall to their knees on Tuesday, people too often go away expecting that if nothing happened, then it didn’t work. Whereas change is actually often very indirect. There are ripple effects. The story we’re told about the nature of power is that it exists among the officially powerful politicians and the wealthy. But ordinary people, massed together, can be more powerful than anything else. 

Storytellers have the ability to change the story. With climate itself, there are just so many ways the story can be told differently. We see a lot of defeatist stories: that it’s too late, we have no power, there’s nothing we can do, nobody cares. I saw somebody on social media saying the climate denialists and the defeatists are telling us the same thing: don’t do anything, there’s nothing we can do. But of course, there’s not only so much we can do, but there’s so much already happening right now. The more closely you look, the more exciting it is—the energy transition, the research on new, better materials and energy sources, the growth of the climate movement, and the success of its ideas, which have become part of what the majority of people around the world, believe, support, care about, and think is urgent. 

There are so many ways in which how we tell the story conceals or reveals what’s possible, who we are, what we desire, what constitutes a good and meaningful life, or what the future can hold.

Roshi Joan Halifax: Our stories represent our views. And our views are deeply embedded within our society and also how the economic structures, as Rebecca has pointed out, shape our experience. We’ve been, in a certain way, colonized by late-stage capitalism. And we are in a process of decolonization, if you will, from the stories that have contributed not only to toxifying and mortifying the earth, but also the psyches of people all over the world. From my point of view, the value of practice to look deeply into reality, to see the truth of impermanence, to understand the power of the realization of pratityasamutpada, of co-arising or co-dependent arising, interconnectedness, interdependence, interpenetration. To understand there is no inherent self in the absolute sense, but that we are composed of all of the elements, and in a way, we are inhabiting each other there. Our subjectivity is coextensive with all of life. So being able to have the quality of mind to perceive reality deeply will make it possible for us to actually shift our view of reality—not the distorted view of reality that is promulgated by the economic systems that are in control of so much of our world today. It takes determination. The Buddha said, “my dharma is swimming upstream.” And this is kind of an upstream swim, quite frankly. But you know what swimming upstream does for us? It makes us a heck of a lot stronger if we manage to navigate against the current of the times toward a reality that is sane and compassionate. 

“What are the stories that are constructive and liberating?”

Talking about stories, I think it is important to understand the role of myths in society. We know that myths have had a tremendously important presence in culture for thousands of years. And in a way, we’ve jettisoned the typical myths that would guide our culture toward greater integrity. Myths come out of both the social structure and the psyche. The social structures that we live in are reflected in the psyche and the psyche influence our social structures. And those structures are reflected inside of the stories that are told through time, but also point toward timeless truths. Much of my work is, how do we actually come back to narratives that are generative? What are the stories that are constructive and liberating? 

Rebecca Solnit: One familiar story is that we’re constantly told we live in an age of abundance. And some of us do live in material affluence and comfort. But part of that story is the idea that what the climate crisis requires of us is renunciation. I learned once from a Buddhist leader, or maybe a Catholic person, that renunciation can be great when you’re giving up something terrible. But the idea that we’re now living in abundance and must go to austerity, I think can be turned on its head. Look at the ways that we are austere in meaning, purpose, hope, social connection, justice. We’re impoverished in clean air, clean water, healthy topsoil, in the survival of so many species, and the health of the ocean. We either feel it as a kind of moral injury, or we experience a kind of moral numbing. 

We can look forward to an age of abundance in these qualities we’re currently austere in, but first we have to find the language, imagination, stories, and cultural structures to recognize, name, value, and make them central to who we are. Right now, I feel like we don’t see nearly enough how poor we are in so many ways. We find it so normal to live in a world so poisoned by fossil fuels. Two-hundred-thousand people in Thailand were just hospitalized for particulate matter, air pollution inhalation, and more than eight million people a year die of air particulate matter from fossil fuels primarily, which is more than in any recent war. And yet we normalize this and think everything is fine. And that we have to give stuff up. What if we’re giving up poison? What if we’re giving up loneliness? What if we’re giving up hopelessness? Those are the stories I’m trying to tell and the stories that I think will make us brave enough to make the transitions we need to make.

The post What If We’re Telling the Wrong Stories About the Climate Crisis? appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

In his 2007 book The World Without Us, the environmental journalist Alan Weisman quoted a New England farmer: “If you want to destroy a barn, cut an eighteen-inch-square hole in the roof. Then stand back.” What follows is a chapter-length meditation on impermanence where Weisman examines the ways that water can get into manmade structures, despite our best efforts to keep it out. In the same vein, each of the winning and honorable mention poems for last month’s challenge used the season word “roof leak” as a metaphor for environmental collapse.

• Kelly Shaw turns a “trickling roof leak” into a meditation on indecision and delay in the face of climate change. 
• Elizabeth Nolcox compares a glacier to a roof “laid atop Greenland”—a roof that leaks, raising sea levels everywhere.
• Freda Herrington sees “an unknown coastline” emerging from the leak stain on her ceiling, redrawing the map of the world.

Congratulations to all! To read additional poems of merit from recent months, visit our Tricycle Haiku Challenge group on Facebook.

You can submit a haiku for the April challenge here.

***

Spring Season Word: Roof Leak

WINNER:

trickling roof leak
if ever there was a time
I was of two minds

— Kelly Shaw

Two studies released in the last month (in Nature Communications and The Journal of Climate) indicate that sea levels are rising faster than projected along the coasts of the southeastern United States. These were followed by an article about Charleston, South Carolina, that raised a question no one seems to have an answer for: what do we do about an environmental apocalypse that, while it is clearly already happening, “is taking place relatively slowly compared with the human attention span”?

Charleston has grown in size from 9 to 140 square miles since 1960, expanding through low-lying areas that are vulnerable to storms and tidal flooding. Because of its topography, and the fact that so much of it was constructed atop fill, in all likelihood it will be among the first US cities to succumb to rising oceans. Property development continues unabated in the meantime, as Charleston continues to grow. The city is projected to reach a population of one million by 2040. The same thing is happening along other coastlines throughout the world.

The issue is complex, but the problem is simple: we are of two minds when it comes to climate change. One mind knows the long-term consequences of ignoring the rise in average global temperature. The other knows that whatever “storm” we are presently experiencing will surely pass, after which life will go back to normal—at least for a while.

In this case, the poet has been honest about his lack of resolve. He knows he should fix the roof. But to do so will disrupt his routine, as he contracts roofers, supervises their work, and endures the sound of nail guns and heavy footsteps plodding back and forth above his head. Not to mention the expense of the repair. So he remains “of two minds”—which means that nothing happens either way.

The season words of haiku are repositories of past meaning where our experience of nature is concerned. But they are not sealed in amber. The fact that so many of our poets saw a connection between a leaking roof and climate disruption reflects the rise of extreme weather events around the globe.

This month’s winning haiku couldn’t be simpler. The poet tells us that his roof is leaking… but that he can’t decide whether to fix it now or wait. That such a plain statement could tap so deeply into our core predicament as a species says much about the crisis we are living through now.

We know that we should act. Some of us know that we must act. But at the collective level of nations, and even at local municipal levels where it should matter even more, nothing happens. We are of two minds, or perhaps many minds, when we ought to be of one.

HONORABLE MENTIONS:

laid atop Greenland
the roof of our home has been
leaking and leaking

— Elizabeth Nolcox

the roof leak sketches
yellow lines on the ceiling,
an unknown coastline

— Freda Herrington

♦

You can find more on March’s season word, as well as relevant haiku tips, in last month’s challenge below:

Spring season word: “roof leak”

the roof is leaking
the sun is shining    this house
is a box a rain

Submit as many haiku as you wish that include the spring season word “roof leak.” Your poems must be written in three lines of 5, 7, and 5 syllables, respectively, and should focus on a single moment of time happening now.

Be straightforward in your description and try to limit your subject matter. Haiku are nearly always better when they don’t have too many ideas or images. So make your focus the season word* and try to stay close to that.

* REMEMBER: To qualify for the challenge, your haiku must be written in 5-7-5 syllables and include the words “roof leak.”

Haiku Tip: The Anatomy of an Allusion

One of the most underutilized techniques in English language haiku is allusion: the use of an indirect reference to history, music, art, or another work of literature to give additional depth to a poem. Allusion is especially important in haiku, where our words often have to do double duty to achieve a satisfying turn of thought.

I tried for decades to write a haiku about my favorite Grateful Dead song, but I could never figure out what to do with the words “Box of Rain.” Then, one March a few years ago, right at the tail end of a torrential rainstorm in the Catskills, our roof began to leak badly from several places at once.

The opening words of the song came back to me just as the sun was coming out:

Look out of any window
Any morning, any evening, any day
Maybe the sun is shining
Birds are winging or rain is falling from a heavy sky

The song debuted on The Dead’s 1970 album American Beauty as a collaboration between bassist-singer Phil Lesh and lyricist Robert Hunter. Lesh wanted a song to sing to his father as he lay dying of cancer. He composed “Box of Rain” on the way to and from the nursing home, complete with vocal melody, but without any lyrics. Hunter listened to Lesh’s scat-style singing and added the words as a kind of “translation” of those sounds.

The meaning of the song—and especially its title—was debated by Grateful Dead fans for decades. Finally, in 1996, Roberts revealed in an email interview:

By “box of rain,” I meant the world we live on, but “ball” of rain didn’t have the right ring to my ear, so box it became….

I’d had a hunch about that for years. What else could it be? But Roberts was right. “Ball of rain” didn’t have the right ring to it, so he made it a “box” instead. Such a beautiful way of personalizing the sorrow of a whole planet by bringing it down to size. 

That was how I came up with the line “this house is a box of rain.” I wanted readers to hear that bittersweet song about Lesh losing his father playing like a soundtrack behind the syllables of the poem.

A note on roof leaks: In Haiku World, William J. Higginson observes, “Roofs—especially thatched roofs, still not uncommon in Japan and parts of Europe—often suffer damage from winter freezes, causing leaks with the thaws of spring.” But even with the best modern building materials, we can’t always keep out the rain. Especially as a house gets older, leaks are a fact of life. 

The post Best of the Haiku Challenge (March 2023) appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

Question: How do you feel when you think about the climate crisis?

“This uncertainty is gripping.” —D, 51 

“The collective inability to prevent further destruction has made me furious and disgusted and finally, resigned.” —T, 71 

“I feel uneasy, it’s daunting, and I’m worried for all young people. I’m worried about how unconcerned we all seem, kind of shut down, with business as usual.” —B, 65

“I feel sad for all those who suffer and angry at all those working against. Great suffering will happen, but ultimately humanity will prevail.” —J, 31

“I can’t think of this. I want a life.”— A, 21

***

We are planet people in an existential crisis because of human-generated climate change. This is causing untold suffering. However, even though most climate scientists agree on this diagnosis, the general public may or may not. A great portion of the population seems to be either in denial or so-called “climate nonchalance,” where we may have knowledge about the dangers of climate change yet shrug our shoulders and are unwilling or unable to engage. 

How can we best respond in the face of so much fear and confusion? Some go prematurely to hospice care for planet Earth. Hospice implies a terminal diagnosis. Those who argue that hospice care is the most appropriate response conclude that attempts to prevent climate collapse are too late. We propose that it is more accurate and helpful to think and talk about palliative care for our planet. Palliative care is about helping those living with serious illness to receive the care they need to experience the best possible quality of life, regardless of outcome. A friend recently said, “When I hear people talking about hospice care for our planet, I fall into a black hole of despair. When I hear the phrase, palliative care for our planet, my heart opens, and I feel more hopeful.” The way we frame this discussion and the language we use affects how we think, feel, and act. 

Hospice care is about providing the best possible care at the end of life. Palliative care does not use prognosis to frame its priorities and approach. Palliative care for our planet means doing everything we can to save what can be saved, while simultaneously acting to improve the quality of life of all human and more-than-human beings. Palliative care for our planet involves a paradigm shift in attitude. As humans, we tend to be preoccupied with outcome. Success is achieving our goals; failure is when we do not. As palliative care providers, we shift our focus to process, to whole person care, to tending with loving care the bodies, minds, hearts, and souls of all sentient beings, to supporting family and building community, to including, in a widening circle of compassion, all those suffering confusion, denial, and fear. 

We are so used to dualistic thinking, which here means either being in denial of climate change or convinced that “it’s already too late.” Palliative care offers a middle path towards healing between living and dying, where we can be with uncertainty, with each other, and with who and what matters most. We hold this space for others by being present, whether they agree with us or not.

We realize that there are many who will disagree with a palliative care approach. Some will see us as alarmist and catastrophizing, while others will dismiss us as climate deniers. The first group comprises those who deny that climate change is a problem, as well as those who accept that it is a problem but do not see it as an existential threat. The second group will say that we have already passed the tipping point of no return. A palliative care perspective, is, once again, somewhere in the middle. While recognizing that the damage is massive and, in many cases, irreversible, we hold that there remains much uncertainty about how things will work out in the future. What is certain is that our planet home is very ill. 

“Palliative care offers a middle path towards healing between living and dying.”

In our work with seriously ill patients, including those at the end of their lives, we have noticed specific patterns of psychological dynamics that appear to significantly affect these individuals’ quality of life. Understanding these hidden undercurrents can help to care more effectively. These dynamics are well described in a body of work from the field of social psychology called terror management theory. 

Terror management theory hypothesizes that in attempting to protect ourselves from the unbearable awareness of our own mortality, we repress our fear of death, burying it deep in the unconscious, while simultaneously identifying with the dominant culture—that is, the institutions, values, tribes, and processes that maintain the status quo. Because the dominant culture is something greater than us that will outlive us as individuals, it functions as a symbolic immortality, affording us some temporary protection from death awareness. At the same time, we pull back from what is different or unfamiliar, and we denigrate, and, if necessary, destroy what is perceived as a threat to the status quo. These reactionary behaviors can lead to societal fragmentation, polarization, and scapegoating.  

We believe that terror management processes are also seen at a societal level. Could collective death anxiety triggering terror management processes be why we see autocratic leaders coming to power around the world who promise to preserve the status quo and punish any who they perceive as a threat to that status quo? Could this be why we see increasing cultural polarization with the loss of any middle ground? Could this be why immigrants and minority groups within a given culture are being persecuted by the cultural majority? Could this be why we treat the natural world as a supply house and a sewer? Could this be why we are seeing a rise in hate crimes and mass shootings? And at an individual level, could this be why we are witnessing a global pandemic of anxiety, depression, and suicide, especially among young people? 

Fear causes us to contract, to curl up in a ball, to pull back into a shell of self-protection. This leads to disconnection from others and our world. We need to recognize that our collective task as a human community is to care for what is existentially threatened and terrified within us. Doing so may free us from the unconsciously driven destructive behaviors that are feeding denial and despair to engage in life-giving ways.

Even when we are not in control, we still have the capacity to choose. As Victor Frankl, author of Man’s Search for Meaning and survivor of Nazi concentration camps, tells us: “Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms—to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.” We can make choices now that will affect our grandchildren and their grandchildren and theirs. 

However, we cannot change collective attitudes and values alone. Palliative care is a team approach. Healing begins when we realize our inseparable interconnection and interdependence with all other beings on this planet. This is what His Holiness the Dalai Lama emphasizes in all his teachings. It is what our indigenous teachers have been telling us all along. It is what the mystical strands of all the great spiritual traditions teach us. It is what science, as in ecology and quantum mechanics, shows us. So, how can we proceed? 

The most powerful antidote to overwhelming unconscious fear are practices that give us a sense of deep inner security and allow us to let our guard down and meet others with an open heart. “Heart” is understood here as the energetic heart, the pulsating hub of connectedness with the rest of life. It is a radical act to consciously step onto a spiritual path that brings us into an experience of our interdependence. This frees us from preoccupation with the endless needs of what writer and philosopher Alan Watts calls “our skin-encapsulated egos,” and we naturally feel a sense of deep belonging and concern for the welfare of others. 

We want to highlight three approaches that we and others have found helpful in reducing our fear and realizing our interbeing, enabling us to be present with what is. Firstly, there is Joanna Macy’s, The Work That Reconnects, an approach that makes Buddhist teachings more accessible. The spiral of the work that reconnects begins with gratitude, which grounds us in the heart. Macy points out that gratitude is a revolutionary act, which allows us to step off the treadmill of “not-enoughness” that a consumer culture depends on. The next step involves honoring our pain, which begins by turning towards rather than away from our distress for the world. Macy says, “We are called not to run from the discomfort, or run from the grief, or the feelings of outrage, or even fear. If we can be fearless with our pain it turns, it doesn’t stay static. It only doesn’t change if we refuse to look at it. But when we look at it, when we take it in our hands, when we can just be with it and keep breathing, it turns, it turns to reveal its other face; and the other face of our pain for the world is our love for the world, our absolute, inseparable connectedness to all life.” This insight radically changes our perspective, so that we now see with new eyes, and want nothing more than to go forth, in the final step of the spiral, to act for the greater good. 

A second set of practices are what we call Earth Connection Practices. These are simple practices that help us to remember our kinship with our living planet and all her people, human and more the human, through sensory awareness with the natural world. An example is the simple act of breathing. This process, which is usually automatic and unconscious, is an opportunity to phenomenologically experience our interdependence. By bringing our awareness to the rise and fall of our body’s breathing, we are experiencing our reciprocal relationship with all oxygen-producing beings on this planet, on whom our life, literally, depends. As Native teacher Wolf Wahpepah tells us, “Something glorious happens when we bring our awareness to what already is.”

A third set of practices are three Mindful Awareness Practices. These practices, which derive from Theravada and Mahayana Buddhism, are now widely available as secular teachings in the West. The first of these is mindfulness, what author and teacher Jon Kabat-Zinn calls “moment-by-moment-non-judgmental-awareness.” Mindfulness helps us to focus our attention and allows us to find a place of internal calm. The second practice is awake awareness practice, which allows us to tap into the sense of the effortless, spacious ease that is already right here, even when unrecognized. This can be experienced when our awareness expands beyond our conceptual mind, and this spacious, knowing way of being becomes the perspective we are living from. Pointing-out instructions and other non-dual practices enable such a shift in outlook, allowing us to view our fear and contraction from a wider perspective, and naturally empowering us to be open-hearted and engaged. The third practice is about cultivating feelings of the heart, such as kindness, compassion, generosity, gratitude, and forgiveness, through specifically dedicated meditations. With a lessening of our reactivity and fear, and a greater capacity to love, we are free to contribute to the healing care of our world.

As we engage in heart practices such as these, our fear lessens and we find ourselves relaxing like a child held securely in her mother’s arms, allowing us to look outwards with openness and curiosity at our wounded world. These practices are also a powerful antidote to burnout, compassion fatigue, and moral distress.

So, let us take the middle road of palliative care! Let us leave apocalyptic thinking and planetary hospice behind, as well as our denial and nonchalance. Let us have the courage to see clearly what’s happening to our planet and walk towards it, rather than burying our heads in the sand or trying not to think about it. Let us cherish what is to be cherished, let us grieve what is to be grieved while doing what we can to ease what can be eased. Let us shift from focusing on what we do to focusing on how we do what we do. Let us be present and open-hearted to what is, rather than what we hope for or dread. 

The path to reclaiming our identity as planet people means learning to be with pain and suffering, our own, others, and our world’s. The sea of grief is fathomless. We can only survive the relentless tsunami of suffering if we let it flow through us, our feet rooted in what is not afraid and what does not die. Then the energies of aliveness and creativity are set free. A spoon of salt in a glass of water tastes salty, while it is tasteless in a vast and open mountain lake. Our Mother Earth needs each of us to find our own way of becoming, for her sake and for the sake of all her children, that vast, wild, and generous mountain lake. 

♦

The post Three Practices to Combat Climate Grief appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

Back in the 1980s, Small Is Beautiful, a book by contrarian British economist E.F. Schumacher, became trendy among counterculture intellectuals. Schumacher posited that the conventional understanding of capitalist economics, based on ever-increasing growth and wealth creation, was wrong and would lead to planetary degradation. That was over forty years ago—before the internet, before social media, before climate change and all the planetary crises of today that made Schumacher look like a prophet and sage. As it often is with prophets, his salient words were largely ignored. It’s interesting how some forward-thinking ideas have cachet for a brief time, and then are subsumed into the greater cacophony of world affairs and then fade out.

It turns out that at the same time Schumacher’s teachings were trendy, there was another less well-known economist—Herman Daly—who was exploring many of the same ideas. Now Herman Daly is in his eighties and his lifelong interest in the notion of a “steady-state” economy is getting a second look. A recent New York Times article had an interview with Daly and summarized, for a new generation and a new era, his ideas. One of Daly’s teachings that stood out for me was his statement that “the earth is not expanding.” The earth is a steady-state system, he says, and it always has been. It isn’t growing and never will grow. We think that our economy, and peoples’ standard of living, is constantly expanding, but that, Daly says, is because we only measure the benefits, we don’t measure the costs. The gross national product is only a measure of what we produce. The myriad costs—from environmental degradation to climate change and health issues—are not subtracted. If they were, we might discover we are not growing at all. We might even be shrinking.

It occurs to me that the economic model of ever-expanding growth is similar to a model of military conquest. I think of the Mongol empire of Genghis Khan, or the Roman empire of Julius Caesar. From the standpoint of the Mongols or the Romans, their empire and their wealth grew. The ambitious warlike men who developed and perfected the technology of horseback warfare or the phalanx formation were, in their own time and perspective, geniuses of growth. But from the perspective of the steady-state earth there was no real conquest, no real expansion. It was just one warlike people conquering and exploiting other people for their own selfish gain. That’s the way it has always been.

Things are no different today. We live in a world of competing nation states, now armed with nuclear weapons, and it seems as though that is the “real” reality. The wealth created by the so-called “developed” nations seems to be expanding nicely. But the greater and more inclusive reality of a “steady state earth” sees that entire process as a fool’s game. For example, for the last 200 years the developed world has been fueled by the fossil deposits of the entire planet’s three-billion-year history. Once those deposits are gone, they will be gone forever, and somehow we will have to engineer a wrenching transformation from a fossil-fuel economy to a renewable-fuel economy—probably in the end some kind of solar or fusion technology. This process has already started, but its progress is slow. This fact is depressingly obvious, yet no one in a position of power is really willing to make that wrenching transformation now, particularly because no country, no nation-state is willing to go first, giving other, less evolved nation-states, the short term advantage. “Let’s let a future generation deal with that,” is the thinking. Meanwhile, the conquistador thinking of those in power—no different than Genghis Khan or the Roman Emperors—rules the roost. Growth is king.

Herman Daly covers all this ground, and more, in the New York Times interview. He comes across as a real prophet-sage of a possible future, one who has been consistently presenting his views for the last half-century. I’m sure in the world of economists he is regarded as a well-intentioned and interesting theorist. But in the world of current events, and current decision making, his thoughts and theories seem as far-fetched as Schumacher’s “small is beautiful” thinking of the heady counterculture years. It was an epiphany, after the moon landing, to at least see for the first time a real-time photograph of the “whole earth,” a blue orb floating in vast space, our only home. But that epiphany didn’t last long. Ok, whole earth, fine, I get it, now let’s get back to the real world of never-ending growth.

Soon enough, Herman Daly’s and E.F. Schumacher’s view of the world will be proven right. And then we will all wake up, as though from a fevered dream—or perhaps we will all panic and go to war with each other in a frenzy of self-preservation and denial. Perhaps both will happen at the same time. Either way, once the dust settles, the steady-state earth will abide as it always has in whatever shape we have left it. When all of Greenland melts—and it has melted before in the vast pre-history of earth—the seas will rise thirty feet. Miami and Bangladesh will disappear. I won’t be alive to see it, but our children and grandchildren may. In the steady-state earth, the seas rise and fall. Continents come and go. This is the world that we are leaving them—the last final gasp of the conquistador mentality that, like the army ants of Brazil, have devoured everything in their path, leaving only desert.

At that point future generations can look back—those who are left—and say, “Well, some people saw it coming. We wish we had listened to them then.”

♦

This article was originally published on Lewis Richmond’s website and The Good Men Project.

The post Our Obsession with Growth Must End appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

We’re in an all-hands-on-deck situation on our planet right now.

As much as we need the expertise of scientists and environmentalists to guide us toward a sustainable future, we also need the insight and imagination of artists and writers who utilize their sensitivity and skill to break through our collective denial and illuminate the deeper truths of our current predicament.

The award-winning novelist and playwright Ben Okri issued a call last winter for “existential creativity,” a new mode of writing that responds to the extreme truths of our times. As Okri wrote in the Guardian, “We need a new art to waken people both to the enormity of what is looming and to the fact that we can still do something about it.”

On Earth Day 2022,  for the final event of Tricycle’s weeklong Buddhism and Ecology Summit, I had the pleasure of sitting down in conversation with Okri and the Zen priest and author Ruth Ozeki to discuss existential creativity and the role of the artist in a time of crisis. In an electric exchange, Ozeki and Okri discuss the truth-telling function of writing, the relationship between art and meditation, and how we need myth, symbol, and spirit in order to address the collective crises of our time.

—Carolyn Gregoire

Something I love about your work is the way both of you integrate the spiritual, the symbolic, and the mythological with the everyday and the material. You’ve said, Ben, that the problem with realism is that it doesn’t capture the full richness of reality. And Ruth, in your work the everyday is permeated with a spiritual awareness and Zen parables. What do you think about the power of myth and symbol in communicating these deeper truths about reality?

Ben Okri: I’ve always felt that realism is much less than reality. We need to demote the term “realism.” It actually refers to a kind of sub-realism. What we call realism is a heavy investment in the surface of things, the visible aspects of things, the structures that we’ve accepted. But if you look at the traditions that exist around the world, you will see that the great realist texts do not even begin to hint at the possibility of a world vaster than that which can be described by realism.

Realism is not only a diminishment but in some ways an outrage against the possibility of the human spirit. When I grew up as a writer, one of my key challenges was to mount a sustained attack on what realism is doing to our perception of the world and our perception of one another. It reduces us. It really does. If it weren’t for the special incursion of great modernists like Joyce and Woolf, the dimension of the inner world would not have been admitted into the surface of texts. Homer and Virgil, the epic of Gilgamesh, Hamlet, Faust, the Egyptian Book of the Dead, the Norse sagas, and the Upanishads all bore witness to the fact that a human being is a continent; a human being is a universe. We have dimensions to us. And if those dimensions are taken out of play, it makes it easy for us to be manipulated. It makes it easier for us to be taken down this road to “deserts of the heart,” to borrow a phrase from Camus.

I think one of the ways we’re going to be able to deal with what’s happening to us—the environmental crisis and various forms of injustice in this world—is by redefining what it means to be human.

As long as people are seen in a narrow context, it is very easy to dehumanize them. The minute you put the vastness of what it is to be human back into the picture, it’s a bit harder, because you’re dealing with a human being who is just as rich and complex and wonderful as you are. So the dimension of myth is crucial in dealing with the climate issue. Our ancestors understood this; it is the reason why they had forests as gods. They gave rivers names. It was a way of getting us to appreciate the fact that these are forces to be respected in the highest sense. It didn’t occur to them to pollute. Why would you pollute a river that you’ve raised to the level of myth? You wouldn’t do that. So you kill off the myth first. Then you can pollute the rivers. It’s easy after that.

Ruth Ozeki: It’s so true. It’s beautiful. It’s absolutely beautiful. Thank you for that. I was raised very much in a realist tradition, and that was my conception of what literature should be. At the same time, what I found myself yearning for was the literature of Gabriel García Márquez, the literature of the fabulous. I thought it was impossible for me to write myself, but in my more recent work, I think that’s what I’ve been trying to do. And I never really quite understood why I was trying to do it.

But I think you’ve just explained something to me about my own development as a writer that I hadn’t quite understood. At the end of my first book there was a line that said something like “Maybe sometimes you have to make things up to tell truths that alter outcomes.” In other words, we need to make things up first before we can make change happen, and we can’t do this alone. I think this is the vital function of the imagination—that we can create worlds and inhabit them and invite people into them, and that inviting in is such an important part. That’s what we’re trying to do as artists, as writers: to initiate a conversation between ourselves and the people who are reading our work. That kind of collaboration, that reaching out and making connection, is also part of the magic. That’s part of the enchantment, to be able to share that.

BO: Ruth, you’ve talked about living with ignorance and denial, which is something that I’ve been struggling with as well. How do you write into that space, into that mindset? What does that do to your art?

I think this is the same problem that the great spiritual teachers faced, whether it’s Jesus or Buddha: How do you awaken? How do you remind people about what they already know, but about which they go on living in willful blindness?

“What we need is a richer, more complex worldview in order to be able to do the kinds of things that need doing.”

RO: Ignorance and denial are self-protective mechanisms. They’re something that we slip into when the world is overwhelming and we need to simplify. We need to not see. So ignorance, the choice to ignore, becomes a coping strategy, and it’s a very easy choice to make because it’s marketed to us constantly. We’re quite literally buying into it all the time.

What you’re describing is a kind of cognitive dissonance, I think, between my very comfortable life here and what’s happening in the rest of the world: I’m in my room, and I have a very nice computer, and I’m talking to you, yet I know what’s happening outside. I know. How can I reconcile what I know with the reality that I am sitting in right now? It’s the opposition between those two states, the duality in Buddhism, that causes a kind of cognitive dissonance that ignorance and denial can help soften.

There’s enormous tension and discomfort in holding those two opposing notions in the mind, which is why most people turn away. I know I do, too. It’s just too much.

To look at this through a Buddhist lens, what strikes me is the bodhisattva vow, and particularly the second line: “Delusions are inexhaustible, I vow to end them.”

This is an interesting vow, because what it’s doing is recognizing the paradox. It articulates the paradoxical tension between the two opposing states in Antonio Gramsci’s famous quote “pessimism of the intellect and optimism of the will” from his Prison Notebooks. We understand that delusions are inexhaustible, and while that might normally lead us to a kind of pessimism, we instead vow to act optimistically to end them. We vow to do that even if—and perhaps because—delusions are inexhaustible. Somehow, thinking of the world in that way—having a model to engage with the world in that radical, nondualistic way—resolves the tension a little bit. That’s been a guide to me in writing recently: to be able to create a fictional world that can clearly see and hold those dualisms in a nondualistic way and invite readers into a space where they can do the same. In a way, this is selfish, because for me it’s also about creating a space where I can sit and hold this paradox myself.

What we need is a richer, more complex worldview in order to be able to do the kinds of things that need doing at this point. This is just a way of describing an “either-or” mindset—which is a kind of flattening mindset—or a “both-and” mindset, which is a larger, more all-encompassing and all-inclusive mindset. That’s what I’m trying for in my writing.

BO: Here’s a fascinating problem: We don’t want to know. Yet that which we don’t want to know is going to fall upon us if we don’t know about it. So not wanting to know is hastening the very thing that we don’t want to know about. Except that we will then know about it in a way that is much worse than being told about it. It’s a terrible paradox. Every year, all the various institutions tell us about the escalating environmental conditions. We know these facts too well. Every year, these facts become more frightening. We have heard of islands that have been submerged. We are aware that water levels are rising. We know there’s desertification spreading in Africa. We know the temperatures. The other day, I read in the newspaper that it was raining fish somewhere in America. There were photographs of it. We know all kinds of strange and bizarre things that are happening. We don’t want to know, and yet they’re coming. It’s like being in a house and the water level is rising, and you don’t want to know. Every time you don’t want to know, it’s risen two inches more, and then a foot more.

You’re speaking to the capacity of art to break through with the truth of what is. Another incredible writer, Terry Tempest Williams, joined us earlier this week and said that the arts also have to lead the way in holding a vision of where we’re going—that we’re dreaming reality into being. Do you agree with that? Should artists play a role in finding solutions? Does a writer have a responsibility to show us the way? Is there some moral obligation to hold an optimistic vision of the future that we can all move toward?

BO: I don’t know about that. I’m very uncomfortable with the idea that the artist ought to give solutions or provide an optimistic vision. Again, let’s take the analogy of the room. You’re in this room and the water level rises two inches. Here I am, here Ruth is—we’re artists, and we’re telling you who are in this room about what’s going on. Now, if I say to you with an optimistic vision: In the future, it’s going to be great. We’ll get through this, we’re human beings, we’re amazing. We’ll get through this—meanwhile, I’m seeing the water rise another two inches. And you’re saying that the artist must say I’ve got to come up with a vision of how to deal with it. Well, that is asking that the artist not only be the one who tells the stories and creates the conditions by which we can be aware of what’s going on but also be the scientist or the environmentalist who has all those specialist skills—someone who actually has the answers. I think it is unrealistic to ask for all those things in a single person. I think the solution ought to come from all of us. It cannot be solved by one person. It can only be solved by all of us, working together.

I’m not even sure that having the answers is actually art, when posing the questions is what art does best. I think answers are dangerous things for artists and for writers. We frame the conundrum so that it is clearest. We draw attention to the scale and nature of the problem. We pose the questions so that human beings—all of us, because we’re all in this together—can bring our combined intelligence, will, presence of mind, creativity, intuition, and sense of community to solve this problem together.

Our job as artists is most powerful when we bring you to the most intense realization of the unavoidable truths of the situation. That’s what the Greek tragic tradition did. The ancient Greek tragedians didn’t come up with a good message for us. That’s not what Sophocles did. They told us, Your world is about to fall apart, it’s about to collapse. It’s extraordinarily fast, this process of awakening through gnosis. I think that’s the most powerful thing we do: not coming up with a specific message, but with a sharp point of awareness, bringing us to a profound crisis, which parallels the very crisis that we are living in and avoiding.

RO: Beautifully said. I think it’s exactly that. Creating a work of art in which we can enter and see and face the things that terrify us leads to that cathartic awareness and understanding. I also think art needs to be anarchic.

I would never say that artists should or shouldn’t do this or that. I subscribe to Kurt Vonnegut’s “canary in the coal mine” theory of art, which is that artists are useful to society because they’re so sensitive. We’re super sensitive, and we keel over like canaries in the coal mines filled with poison gas long before more robust types realize that there’s anything wrong. So that’s our job. To be an indicator species. To squawk and flap around and keel over.

“Our job as artists is most powerful when we bring you to the most intense realization of the unavoidable truths.”

BO: We have to provoke a kind of crisis. The thing is, we cannot really gently get our fellow human beings to see what needs to be seen. Sometimes there’s not a gentle way of saying that you’ve got two more inches left in the room before you are completely submerged in water. At the same time, if it’s not said in a way that is gentle, it frightens people. It panics them. This is a paradox that I keep going back to. If what we say is too harsh, then we are like the crisis itself, which prevents people from facing it. If it’s too gentle, people are tranquilized and do not hear what is being said. Subtlety might be inappropriate for an imminent disaster. It’s difficult.

RO: This is what frightens me about dystopian literature. Is it normalizing dystopia? Is it normalizing climate change?

BO: Sometimes we need to imagine the unimaginable to keep from going in a disastrous direction. There are many uses for the imagination. One is to show us a future that we can embrace. Another is to show us a future that we must avoid. It’s like a road sign that reads: DANGER AHEAD.

Has dystopian fiction helped us, or has it added to the problem? It’s very hard to say. All I can say is that if you remove dystopian fiction completely, I think we’ll be the poorer for it. What do you feel, Ruth?

RO: I agree, it’s complicated. And it’s not an “either-or,” it’s not good or bad. I love dystopian fiction, and in fact that’s my problem: My mind goes there so easily. So again, I don’t struggle with the “pessimism of the intellect” part of that dialectic. I fall naturally under the pessimism of the intellect. It’s more the “optimism of the will.” How am I going to sit with the discomfort of knowing all these things? How am I going to enact the bodhisattva vow? Delusions are numberless, I vow to end them. Fine. But how do I continue to get up every day and read the newspaper?

BO: How do you, Ruth?

RO: I meditate a lot. Meditation allows you to sit with your discomfort. The sheer amount of information coming at us all the time has created a level of cognitive dissonance that has probably never been higher in human history. How do we sit with that information in our bodies, our very human bodies?

BO: There’s another thing that meditation does. It calms the part of us that panics about the truth of our condition. It’s not the truths that frighten us but our own panic. We feel there’s nothing we can do. We feel overwhelmed. The situation seems bigger than us. But meditation restores us to that calm, without which we cannot face the truth of our condition and think clearly about how we can get out of our predicament. Meditation also restores us to our essential magnificence. As a result, we don’t feel quite so powerless.

It is not enough to know the facts, or know that there are resources out there to deal with our condition. Our inner response to our predicament has to change. I think artists also need to function deliberately on a spiritual plane. That’s how bad things are. Realism is no longer enough. We need to have a spiritual dimension. It’s the only dimension that makes us aware that we have something in us that is greater than our crisis. It can solve our great problems and transcend our predicament.

You’re both really engaging with young people right now through your teaching and writing. What role can writing play for future generations—the ones who are going to inherit the problem?

BO: The act of writing—learning to write, writing well, and the infinite questions that writing brings forth—is the closest thing to spiritual practice for people who have no spirituality. The most profound thing about writing is that at its best, it brings us closer to truth. At least it brings us closer to the questions we can’t avoid. Writing is not really just about the craft; the craft also leads to these great questions. It’s very strange—the better you get, the further you are from perfection. In itself, writing is a quest.

How do you write a sentence that can catch the complexity of a single moment? Sitting in a hotel room, with this mustard-yellow sofa in front of you, and the sea outside the window—how do you do that with one sentence? You could spend the next fifty years just acquiring the craft that can do that.

At its best, writing is an act of truth. You are dealing not only with the world of things but also with the world of spirit, of being. You are dealing with the philosophical reality. Every single story, in one way or another, is dealing with the problem of existence.

The more serious you are about writing, the more serious you have to become about life. That’s why writing is a path of truth. Writing helps us clarify our thinking. It helps us observe the world. It’s a great tool of perception.

People think they can write without looking, without engaging with the world. Your writing really is only as good as your engagement with the world. You may have great craft, but if you’re not looking, if you can’t see clearly what’s in front of you or hear what you’re hearing, if you can’t pay the requisite attention to the mysterious drama of human existence, your craft counts for nothing, even if you’re a genius.

Writing is at the heart of what it is to be human, what it is to be in our time, what it means to be part of a civilization. The art of writing will be part of the future, and it will help to shape whatever future that will be.

The post Existential Creativity appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

What can be done to raise awareness about the urgency of the climate crisis? For this group of 700 activists led by the “Kung Fu Nuns” of the Drukpa Kagyu lineage, the answer begins with a 450-mile trek across the Himalayas. The 2013 film Pad Yatra follows the extraordinary journey these nuns take to inspire climate action throughout the region and across the world.

This film will be available to stream until midnight EST on Friday, August 5, 2022. 

Photographs courtesy of Wendy J. N. Lee

The post Pad Yatra: A Green Odyssey appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

Nothing is permanent, so everything is precious. Here’s a selection of some happenings—fleeting or otherwise—in the Buddhist world this week and next.

Activist Wynn Bruce’s Self-Immolation Raises Questions Within and Beyond the Buddhist Community

On Friday, April 22, Wynn Bruce, a 50-year-old man from Boulder, Colorado, set fire to himself in front of the Supreme Court in Washington, D.C. He died soon after. According to the Washington Post, Bruce’s father and others who knew him say that the activist’s self-immolation was a protest of climate change.

Following Bruce’s death, some Buddhist practitioners took to social media to share their views on his actions. Buddhist climate activist Kritee Kanko, who said she was a friend of Bruce, said on Twitter that his self-immolation was a “fearless act of compassion.” Kanko and fellow teachers at the Rocky Mountain Ecodharma Retreat Center, where Wynn frequently participated in retreats, later specified that they had no knowledge of Bruce’s intentions, and they would have tried to stop him if they did. Soto Zen teacher and author Brad Warner disagreed with Kanko on Twitter, calling it a suicide in a reply to her initial statement. Bruce’s father, Douglas, told the Washington Post, “I agree with the belief that this was a fearless act of compassion about his concern for the environment.”

PBS and others point out that Bruce praised Thich Nhat Hanh around the time of the Zen master’s death in January—a meaningful observation given Nhat Hanh’s statement on Thich Quang Duc, the infamous Vietnamese monk who set himself on fire on June 11, 1963, protesting the South Vietnamese government’s treatment of Buddhists. In a letter sent to Martin Luther King, Jr. on June 1, 1965, Nhat Hanh wrote: 

To burn oneself by fire is to prove that what one is saying is of the utmost importance. There is nothing more painful than burning oneself. To say something while experiencing this kind of pain is to say it with the utmost of courage, frankness, determination and sincerity. 

According to the International Campaign for Tibet, 131 men and 28 women have self-immolated since 2009 in protest of Chinese oppression. 

Read more about Bruce’s life, including more from his father, here in the Washington Post, and more on the response from the Buddhist community here in an article from PBS News Hour.

Myanmar Military Sentences Aung San Suu Kyi to 5 More Years in Prison 

In a closed door trial on Wednesday, Myanmar’s military sentenced deposed civilian leader Aung San Suu Kyi to five more years in prison on corruption charges claiming that she illegally accepted gold and cash payments totaling $600,000 from former Yangon chief minister Phyo Min Thein. Suu Kyi has denied these charges. The military had previously sentenced Suu Kyi to six years on corruption charges, so her complete sentence now equals eleven years.

The Junta Also Torches Villages, Killing Civilians and Buddhist Monk

Last weekend, Myanmar’s junta also set fire to nine villages in the Wuntho township in the northwestern part of the country, killing three civilians, the news website the Irrawaddy reports. One of those civilians was a Buddhist monk that asked the military not to burn houses, locals say. According to the Irrawaddy, roughly 30,000 people from the Wunthro and nearby Kawlin 

townships have been displaced this month.

Zen Buddhist Center Opens in Dublin, Ireland

This past weekend, a center for Zen Buddhism in Ireland opened its doors. Reverend Myōzan Kōdō Kilroy, a Soto Zen Buddhist priest in the lineage of Nishijima Roshi, will be the guiding teacher of the Dublin Zen Centre. Kilroy is also the founding president of the Irish Buddhist Union, and serves as a representative of the Buddhist community on the Dublin City Interfaith Forum. According to recent census figures, there are approximately 10,000 Buddhists in Ireland, an 11 percent increase from 2011. 

Artist Takashi Murakami’s Upcoming L.A. Exhibit Features Arhats, or Buddhist Saints

In May, the Broad Museum in Los Angeles will open an exhibit by world-famous artist Takashi Murakami titled, Takashi Murakami: Stepping on the Tail of a Rainbow. This is the museum’s first solo exhibition from the 60-year-old, Japan-born artist. Among the works is a 32-foot long painting titled “100 Arhats,” named for the Buddhist saints who have achieved nirvana. Other paintings incorporate depictions based on Daoist immortals, as well as “colorful, cartoonishly grotesque figures and motifs” from Japanese and Chinese history, a New York Times reviewer writes.

Coming Up:

May 4, 11, 18: Clinical psychologist Sameet Kumar, Ph.D hosts a three-part workshop on integrating Buddhist teachings and practices to help you navigate the inner journey of grief in these challenging times. Register for the Mindful Grieving Workshop here.

The post Climate Activist Wynn Bruce’s Self-Immolation Raises Questions Within and Beyond the Buddhist Community appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

Nothing is permanent, so everything is precious. Here’s a selection of some happenings—fleeting or otherwise—in the Buddhist world this week and next.

Dalai Lama Imparts Message of Urgency on Earth Day

On Earth Day, April 22, His Holiness the Dalai Lama released a message urging humanity to unite against climate change: “As human beings, living on this one planet, we must make an effort to live happily together. The threat of climate change is not limited by national boundaries—it affects us all. We must work to protect nature and the planet, which is our only home.” Click here for the full message.

Additionally, the Dalai Lama met with the participants of Dialogue for Our Future, a series of panel talks from various climate change activists inspired by the Dalai Lama’s plea for collective action. “We have to educate people about the factors that contribute to climate change. We have to pay more attention to ways to preserve our environment. This means making a basic understanding of climate change and its effect on the environment part of ordinary education,” the Dalai Lama said.

Tricycle Hosts a Week-Long Buddhism and Ecology Summit 

Over the past week, Tricycle held a series of live virtual events featuring leading Buddhist teachers, writers, and environmentalists exploring three dimensions of the ecological crisis: the spiritual and psychological roots, dealing with the difficult emotions that arise, and taking meaningful action. Events included scholar Stephen Batchelor speaking about embracing extinction; scholar David Loy asking if the crisis is also a spiritual crisis; Roshi Joan Halifax and former executive secretary of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change Christiana Figueres discussing our ethical responsibility to co-create the world we wish to live in; and Buddhist teacher and environmental activist Joana Macy on a path forward. Find a full list of the events here. Recordings of the events are available here. 

Medieval Zen Paintings on Display at Freer Gallery

Through July 24th, an exhibit titled “Mind Over Matter: Zen in Medieval Japan” is on view at the Freer Gallery of Art, part of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Asian Art in Washington, D.C. The exhibit features medieval ink paintings by influential Chinese masters and Japanese monks from 1200-1600 A.D. To provide additional education about key aspects in the history of Zen, an online interactive experience called Voices of Zen: Contemporary Voices – featuring audio from award-winning koto musician Yumi Kurosawa, Zen priest Reverend Inryū Bobbi Poncé-Barger, and curator Frank Feltens – will accompany the show.

Director David Lynch Launches $500 Million Transcendental Meditation Initiative Aimed at College Students

Twin Peaks director David Lynch recently announced his plan to launch a Transcendental Meditation training program for 30,000 international college students. Lynch, who has practiced TM every day since 1973, hopes to inspire the younger generation to become “peace-creating groups of meditation experts and leave a legacy of world peace.” The David Lynch Foundation for Consciousness-Based Education and World Peace partnered with the Global Union of Scientists for Peace to establish the program, with plans to invest approximately $500 million in its first year. The initiative will fund meditation training for 10,000 students at Maharishi International University in the US, 10,000 students at the sister school in India, and 10,000 students at partner universities in 10 other locations around the world.

Buddhist Digital Resource Center Profiles Librarian of Tibetan Books at the US Library of Congress

The Buddhist Digital Resource Center, a nonprofit that provides digital research tools and provides digital access to Buddhist texts, published a profile of Susan Meinheit, the Tibetan and Mongolian Specialist at the Library of Congress, this week—spotlighting one of the people behind the preservation of 17,000 Tibetan monograph volumes, 3,600 volumes of rare books, and thousands more texts on microfilm. Read the profile here.

Coming up:

April 29: In a Zoom discussion at 4pm ET, Zen priest and a professor Kurt Spellmeyer discusses the doctrine of emptiness, which he calls the open door that lets us step into awareness of the true nature of reality. Register here.

June 17: New York Insight Meditation Society celebrates its 25th anniversary with the return of its in-person, annual Dharma Rhythms celebration, featuring a drum circle led by Batala New York, an all-women, Black-led, Afro-Brazilian samba reggae percussion ensemble. On June 18, the sangha will hold a virtual event with live music. Learn more here

The post The Dalai Lama Imparts Message of Urgency on Earth Day appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.