Mother's Day Mourning; Waking up to our individual complicity in global tragedy is the challenge of these times. And to wake up we must overwhelm ourselves with tenderness
by Janet Thomas
War, hunger, disease, poverty""there is plenty for moms to mourn this Mother's Day. Our Earth Mother, too, has her own share of troubles""drought, deforestation, extinction of species, a plethora of atmospheric ills, not enough polar chills, and an assault on her very existence, let alone ours, from a reviving nuclear threat. It's a steady progress towards annihilation that seems to be the celebratory mark of this Mother's Day.
How do we break the stranglehold of despair and disillusionment that is the echo of these times? How do we heal ourselves, and at the same time help heal Mother Earth? How do we wake up to our complicity in the unnatural order of things and regain our place in the natural order of things?
In 1970, the anthropologist, Margaret Mead, said in a speech in New York City : "We have today the knowledge and the tools to look at the whole earth....I think that the tenderness that lies in seeing the earth as small and lonely and blue is probably one of the most valuable things that we have now."
Tenderness is not a public word of these times. It rings of privacy and intimacy, something less than manly, perhaps even less than womanly. Yet it is tender touch from which we thrive. And it is a great and patient tenderness with which the earth nurtures life. To live tenderly upon this earth means to be sensitive to the fragility of our being""as individuals, as peoples, as a planet. To be tender is to grieve for the loss of all life when it happens prematurely, unnaturally, violently--whether it's from loss of life in a war on the other side of the world, or loss of a species in our own backyard. For every coffin that comes home from war, somewhere there is a grieving mother. For every prostituted child, for every drug addicted child, for every child in despair, whether from illness, hunger, depression, isolation or activism, there is a grieving mother. And it is through grief that our tenderness prevails.
But grief is not cool in our culture. We are the have-a-nice-day society-with-happy-face-icons-and-a-new-SUV-in-every-pot, to poorly paraphrase Herbert Hoover. But even as we complain about gas prices, in oil fields across the planet some mother's child is threatened. Amnesty International recently announced new death threats against indigenous activists in Ecuador trying to help the Sarayaku indigenous community in Pastaza province protect their land from a foreign oil company. The rest of the world drives small cars and pays more for gas. Why shouldn't we? From oil fields to sweat shops, we are blind-sided by the implications and choose to stay blind. We cannot afford to make material sacrifices if we do not replenish our own souls and our spirits
After researching and writing my book, "The Battle in Seattle ," the extent of our complicity in the unnatural order of things plunged me into several years of paralysis and despair. For me, the streets of WTO Seattle were filled with tenderness""from farmers wanting the right to tend their own gardens to turtles wanting the opportunity to tend to their young. Yet it was the burning dumpster that got the world's attention; in it the flames of our tenderness for one another went up in smoke. As they did on September 11, when war became the rallying cry..
In his most recent book, "The Web of Life Imperative," organic psychologist Michael J. Cohen clearly demonstrates that to truly recover our sanity we must reconnect our psyche with nature's genius and restore its recuperative powers, balancing sensitivities and peaceful ways into our consciousness. Cohen, whose Project NatureConnect and Institute of Global Education is a special NGO consultant to the United Nations Economic and Social Council, echoes Thoreau in his work: "Nature is doing her best each moment to make us well. Why aren't we listening?"
Cohen's work taught me that it's not enough to escape into nature's healing places. It is only through consciously re-connecting to, and learning from nature's creative grace that I can keep re-connecting to hope. And only through hope do my actions have meaning. The reactive activist in me can only go so far; it's when I actively know and feel my partnership with nature that my experience has the depth and tenderness that sustains me from the inside, and supports my work on the outside.
And this is also true for those of us in the world who aren't lounging in the lap of materialism. Richard Schneider, head of the Institute for Global Education, runs the Mucherla Global School in a small village in central India . He uses NatureConnect activities to restore self esteem and gratitude in his young students""who represent the full spectrum of India 's caste and religious system. In a village where such things as snakes and drought make Nature an enemy, Schneider has his pupils growing gardens and talking to their vegetables. They stop their reading lessons to listen to birds and notice flowers. "Through connecting to Nature and the larger Universe, they connect to their own feelings," says Schneider. "They become more whole and more human."
We are all in this together. Waking up to our individual complicity in global tragedy is the challenge of these times. And to wake up we must overwhelm ourselves with tenderness, or risk being immobilized with bottomless grief and guilt. Only in tenderness is there hope for the future. And although it might be easy for us to take refuge in nature's tender ways; it's not so easy to let nature's tenderness run its course through us. But when we do, we will begin to see ourselves as we truly are""tender children on a tender planet. A happy Mother's Day, indeed.
--Janet Thomas is the author of "The Battle in Seattle --The Story Behind and Beyond the WTO Demonstrations." (Fulcrum, 2000)
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