Persephone Arbour

The following piece is timely. David Spangler’s clear writing about the BP disaster is totally sincere. The belief system behind the piece is not my own – but the place in the author’s heart from which it is written, touches me.

. . . . A Louisiana costal resident was driving down a road alongside the beach that is being hardest hit by oil at the moment. He was complaining about the lack of any clean-up crews on the beach and was venting his anger at BP. He had a large mustache that quivered with his indignation as he spoke, and his voice was rough and strained with his fury. Suddenly he stopped and jumped out of his truck. Running down along the beach with the news camera man right behind him, he suddenly stopped and plunged his hands into the oily sand. He then pulled up a bird small enough to fit in the palm of his hand. It was covered in oil, but it was still alive. “Oh, this poor bird,” he said, cradling it, his voice softening to one of caring and compassion. “This poor, poor creature.”

The news report ended at that point, so I don’t know what happened next, whether he was able to get the bird to one of the shelters where animals are being cleaned from the oil. And I have no idea how he had spotted this tiny bird from the road when a moment before he had been so focused on his rage. But in the twinkling of an eye, he went from shouting at the cameraman, his attention focused on BP and his anger at them, to someone perceiving the plight of another living creature and shifting his attention to doing what he could, revealing the depth of his caring. I found this very moving.

Over the next few months, I have no doubt there will be thousands of words written analyzing this event, assigning blame and expressing anger. This may well become the equivalent of an environmental 9/11 in terms of its impact on our society except that where the terrorist attack and the collapse of the World Trade Towers occurred in a two-hour span of time, the Gulf oil spill is a catastrophe unfolding over weeks and months, leaving us twisting in the wind with the uncertainty of how it will end. If as many fear, the storm surges and winds of the hurricanes expected this season carry the contamination of oil much further inland, including to populated areas and farming country, or if the oil enters the Gulf Stream and heads around to the beaches of America’s eastern coastland and then on to Europe, then the impact of this disaster will be much greater than it appears now and the ending may be years in the future.

If ever an event were worthy of our anger and sorrow, this is it. This is particularly true because this is no random act of nature like the earthquake that hit Haiti. It was an eminently preventable event. That it occurred comes as no surprise to many who have been predicting such a disaster for years, but it also comes as further indication of the deep structural flaws in our civilization, from our increasing dependence on resources that in fact are running out and are harder and harder to get, to the financial pressures and expectations that lead individuals and corporations to take shortcuts and neglect safety measures in order to save a dollar here and a dollar there. Yes, greed is involved, but it’s not just corporate greed. It’s our collective greed for a certain kind of lifestyle, a certain kind of dominance upon the earth, a certain kind of anthropocentric power to do with the world and its web of interconnected life what we wish, as we wish, when we wish. . . .

But if we are going to work effectively at a spiritual level through subtle activism with this event and its unfolding consequences, anger and sorrow must be set aside. Like the man in the news story who suddenly switched from expressing anger to taking action to help another living creature, we need to go beyond our anger and find our compassion and the presence of a healing light within us.

So, from my perspective at least, there is no single unified response of the inner worlds to this event. What this means to me is that I need to look to my own response. What do I feel? What do I think? And likewise, dear reader, what do you feel and think? For it’s out of our hearts and minds that we fashion our imaginative, mental, emotional, and spiritual responses, and our physical ones as well if we are in a position to take physical action. I don’t need a nature spirit to tell me it’s angry for me to feel anger myself or for me to feel compassion and sorrow and a need to do something to help.

Subtle activism is a way of offering help through the use of subtle energies of consciousness and life when we’re unable to help in more physical ways. It’s never a substitute for meaningful and appropriate physical action, but it can be an important complement. This is not the place to go into the whys and wherefores of subtle activism, its principles of operation and the theory of how it works; I have classes that do that if you are interested. What I would like to do here is just offer some specific inner responses you can make if you are inclined. However, there are two key ideas to keep in mind. The first is that all subtle activism is ultimately intended to create and foster wholeness. The subtle environment of the world is a place of important connections along which life energies flow, and when events like this occur, it’s these connections that get broken. The second is that inner work is done in a spirit of compassion, love and service. Wholeness is repaired or re-created through life-affirming energies, not through anger or blame, judgment or revenge. We must be like the man in the news interview, switching from our outrage to our compassion and reaching out to hold in our inner hands of love the life that has been impacted and that is threatened.

. . . .

You can help in this process by making available your own energies of compassion and wholeness to the situation through your loving attunement. You cannot do this in a state of anger or agitation, so don’t attempt this if your emotions about what is happening in the Gulf overwhelm you with sadness, anger, and so forth. Wait until you can find calm and peace within yourself. But when you do, then here is one way you can offer your help. Attune to a spiritual source of wholeness that is meaningful to you, that is, a source from which you would draw inspiration and presence to find wholeness in yourself. Draw that wholeness into you and merge it with your own calm presence, your own integration and sense of wholeness. In imagination and contemplation, project your presence into the affected areas of the Gulf where death and disruption are occurring to the life of the sea and the coastlines. Be a presence of wholeness and connection, as if you were a nerve cell connecting the spiritual worlds with the earth and water itself. In effect, you are offering your assistance and the energy of your presence to those beings who are seeking to “reknit” the subtle environment.

4: Be open to grief. Grief is part of the healing process of binding up broken subtle ties and connections. I’m not talking about wailing and gnashing of teeth and rending of garments. Grief can become mixed up with dramas of self-concern and victimization (the “poor me” syndrome), and you want to be clear of such dramas. You want to feel honestly the pain and sorrow involved with what is happening to the nature and the people of the Gulf. Grieving is part of the process of acknowledging the broken connections I spoke about earlier and thus of beginning a process of healing. Don’t be hesitant or resistant to grieving with the nature spirits and with the life of the Gulf that is being affected. You can share your own emotions of pain with them. At the same time, however, don’t assume or project that nature spirits feel that grief or pain in the same way; don’t anthropomorphize, in other words.

5: Eventually the Gulf will heal. Depending on the amount of damage that is done by the time this spill is cleaned up, that healing could take a long time, but it will happen. Harmony and balance will be restored, though it might look different than what is there now. . . .Here you want to gain the long view, the perspective of centuries and millennia. In attuning to the Gulf and the coastlines where death and damage are occurring, hold an image of these areas in their perfection when healing has taken place. See the area connected and whole. In other words, tune into the template of wholeness held by the vaster consciousnesses and hold the joy and beauty of that template; it forms a matrix around which healing can take place.

These are just some suggestions of things you can do, and they focus on the natural world. But the same suggestions, slightly modified, can be used to hold and bless the humans who are involved and who are being impacted. This goes for the engineers and others trying to repair this situation as much as for those whose livelihoods are being lost or whose health is being affected.

One important thing we can do is to hold the sorrow and grief of this event in our hearts without flinching. This takes courage because it’s a painful thing to do. And it takes wisdom and strength to hold that pain without being overwhelmed or constricted by it. Becoming despondent or despairing doesn’t help, but standing in solidarity with the people and creatures that are being affected and not turning away in denial can be very helpful. From an inner standpoint, it means our Light is available as needed.

No pun intended, but there is a gulf between where our society and our collective human consciousness are at the moment and where they need to be to fashion a world that is sustainable and that works for the benefit of all species of life. To write off this tragedy as “just another oil spill” and part of the price for doing “business as usual,” is to lose an opportunity to recognize the need to revision ourselves and our world and to move in a different, more holistic direction. If this tragedy has a deeper meaning, I believe it manifests in how we can seize this opportunity. (A new book that looks at how we can make this change in a most positive and creative way is Plenitude: The New Economics of True Wealth, by Juliet B. Schor, an environmental economist; I highly recommend it.)

Many years ago a friend of mine was involved in drilling oil wells in Louisiana. One day he gave me a small bottle of crude oil brought up from a mile or so under the earth. I was interested to see that it had a reddish color, which made me think of the way many indigenous peoples refer to oil as the blood of the earth. In many spiritual traditions, the spilling of blood in sacrifice is considered transformative. Perhaps we might see this oil spill as Gaia spilling her blood to effect a transformation in our consciousnesses that we may learn to truly think like a planet and to care for the world that sustains us. If so, my prayer is that this sacrifice is not being made in vain.