Grenzbegriff blog ~ Holy Words of Truth

From the first time I read this blog of Phil’s years ago, http://www.grenzbegriff.com/, I had left the tab open for a very long time. I recently rediscovered it, and frankly, have done the same. I feel that his words are so powerful, because they so eloquently and incisively speak the truth. The message is a clearer, stronger and nearer the truth ~ holy ~ More so than anything I’ve read, ever.

Screenshot

http://www.grenzbegriff.com/

“I read this story at the Easter vigil at First Mennonite Church of San Francisco in 2019.  

Sitting at my desk.  Ergonomic chair, 30” screen.  Sunlight and cheerful coworkers all around.  We are the winners.  The tech-elite.  Making the world a better place, raising the standard of living.  Eventually we are going to meet everyone’s needs with solar-powered artificially-intelligent everything factories.

But somehow I hear another story.  Out there, our empire of civilization reaches its fingers into the last wild places.  Its eye falls on an unspoiled steamy jungle, thriving with humans and majestic animal kin.  It sees timber, metals, tourism potential, untapped markets, labor pools.  Smiling people, sitting on their dirt floors in their dirt huts, eating the bounty of the land.  And we call it poverty.

In march the well intentioned, the missionaries, humanitarians, entrepreneurs, peacekeepers.  Out go the animals.  The human bonds are replaced with money.  Plugged in to the empire.  A “developing” country.  Another billion users.  Growth.

Everything is business.  War is business.  Revolution is business.  Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria, Haiti, Venezuela, the list goes on and on and on.  The machine has many faces, the military-industrial-complex, the technological-educational-pharmaceutical-agricultural- industrial complexes.  Even the nonprofit-industrial-complex.  Most of us keeping the machine running can explain why our part of it is beneficial, and we probably even believe it.  Yet despite all our good intentions, the machine grinds away converting life and diversity and beauty into profits.

No one speaks of it like this.  Over lunch, I slip in a sad remark about Syria.  Awkward pause.  The conversation shifts to when will we settle Mars.  We are frantic.  We don’t have time to see the consequences of what we do.  Everything’s too complex, so we must pretend it is simple.  We plug in the numbers and poverty goes down.  If you don’t like it you’re a luddite.

 “You can’t say this all at once,” a well-intentioned colleague tries to talk sense into me.  “People will think you are freak and then you won’t be able to change anything.”

Must I really go on pretending like it’s all fine, so I can hold on to the golden handcuffs, the empire’s power, and somehow use it for good?  I stare out the window at trees quivering in the spring breeze.  I sit in a comfortable chair, I have warm food and health care and barely have to work.  I should be grateful.  But I do not belong here.  It hurts.

(pause)

Laying on the floor of my tent in the homeless camp.  Puddle of water in one corner.  Headlights in my eyes at night.  Screeching bart train in my ears.  I’m free!  Sure, I’m still in the empire, but now I’m with the oppressed and not the oppressors.

Marching on the street.  “What do we want?  Housing.  When do we want it?  Now.”

We demand the evil empire give us our fair share of this chopped-down paved-over concrete graveyard of a forest.  Our fair share of the plastic and minerals dug by slaves from the living earth five thousand miles away.  What if it was fair?  The seven billionth of us gets a comfortable room, a job, food, maybe an electric car.  Clean water, piped from some rare place whose destruction has not yet become an economic necessity.  Would the elephants say this is fair?  I love the people around me, and it is so complicated.  Must it be Team Human against all the rest of life?”

(pause)

Laying under a clump of redwoods in the forest I’ve been with the past year. 

My friend on the mountain says thirty years ago she’d get five to ten feet of snow each winter.  This winter, six inches.  Up the road from me they made new clear-cuts last fall.  They cut some special ancient trees in one particular spot leaving a sign saying it was for “fire prevention.”  Bullshit.  Money.  I hear the logging trucks rumbling on the road a mile away.  Will we ever stop?  We know that the trees bring in and hold the water in the earth.  As the trees go, the drought comes.  We’re killing them anyway.  Money.

Can our human empire just end already?  Must all of the salmon and orcas and caribou and wolves die first?  The ocean is dying.  The forest is dying.  Even the insects are dying.  God, are you going to turn this around?  What should I do?  What are you trying to tell me?  Why?

<><><><

I’m leaving Google at the end of next week.

There’s too much I want to say.  🙂

I spent the summer away from work, outdoors in Oregon, awash in beauty.  I learned a lot.  I wept at how we’re treating the earth, as I rode past mile after mile of logged forests, polluted streams, and lifeless monocrop fields.

I got to be part of what I’ll call “alternative culture”, to explore ways of meeting all of our human needs through local community alternatives to basically everything we currently use money for.  I wrote some about this time here on this blog.  I barely scratched the surface though.  More and more people, perhaps millions now even in the West, are devoting their lives to new (and sometimes ancient) ways of living in healthy relationship with each other and with the earth.  While they are usually partly within the current system, when all of these new ways of living come together, the current system becomes obsolete.  I see joyous glimpses of this everywhere.

Meanwhile our dominant civilization is killing its own foundation: the healthy web of life on earth.  Through deforestation and pollution we are destroying the ability of the planet to support all forms of life.  We can see this in the oceans where the fish populations are collapsing, the silent fields that were once thriving forests, and the deserts where millions of people go hungry in drought.  This ecological crisis can’t be solved simply by swapping oil for solar panels.  I’m no longer optimistic that we will soon fix these problems with some new technology.  It looks like climate change is exacerbating the storms and droughts and fires, and seems likely these will continue to become more and more severe in the next years.

The effects are not evenly distributed.  The unhoused breathe wildfire smoke while many of the housed have filtered air.  Some of us see our homes flooded or burnt while for others business continues as usual.  Most communities in the country and increasingly in the world have lost the ability to sustain themselves from their land, and now must import almost everything they need from elsewhere, which becomes precarious when those importing the goods see no profit in it (food deserts), or when disaster breaks down the supply line like in Puerto Rico.  Many communities no longer have access to clean water, or are losing it as I write.  On Monday I listened to a man from Guatemala talk about a new silver mine near his home that is polluting and drying up the water supply for many villages there.  Almost all silver is used to produce electronics, and demand is rising.  In Oregon this summer, ancient trees thousands of years old were cleared for fire breaks.  The entire planet is being saturated with chemicals that we ought never to have created.  These kinds of damage cannot be undone or fixed by technology.  The story for other species is even worse, as most wild animal populations have died off and we pack billions of animals in cages in horrific factory farms.  The coral reefs, the rhinos, the ancient forests, the whales, and even the insects… who speaks for them?  Some people do, and they end up in jail if their actions threaten profits.  Profits are made at the expense of Life.

And within our civilization, we have more prisoners and refugees, more drugs and anxiety and depression and stress and addiction than ever.  Even in wealthy regions, most people don’t like the work they do all day.  It’s also not physically healthy to be indoors or using a computer or riding in vehicles for as many hours as many of us who are “successful” do.  What is happening to us?

It seems the leaders of our world are apathetic or powerless, as they fight over the most gaudy deck chairs on this titanic.  While it pains me, I don’t hate them for this; their actions are the product of a traumatic history that touches all of us.  They don’t know what they’re doing.

I envision a more beautiful world where humans have a healthy part to play, to love and respect the earth, not to dominate and exploit it.  I see many people living that vision already, and want to live my life in service to it.  I see the extremes of both ugliness and beauty grow more stark.  Ugliness as we close down and protect ourselves from the ‘other’, beauty as we come together in community, in love with mother earth.  Will “society” as a whole make some kind of transition, or continue the march into dystopia and eventual chaos?  I don’t know.  It will be both at the same time.  Some people are already in an obvious dystopia, some are in a beautiful place yet in the shadow of a collapsing ecosystem.  To hope for a peaceful transition would be to ignore the incredible violence on which the current system lives.  It will be violent because it already is.  May we learn to be kind to each other as these changes unfold.

It’s been said that we need the darkness to see the stars.  We can open ourselves to what is happening, feel and honor our pain, grieve what is lost, and revel in our deep gratitude for the beauty of life.  I don’t mean to be a downer pointing at all this ugliness.  I feel that we have a deep need to see it and acknowledge it.  It makes the beauty that much more precious and worth living for.

“Tell me, what else should I have done?

Doesn’t everything die at last, and too soon?

Tell me, what is it you plan to do

With your one wild and precious life?”

-Mary Oliver

What should we do then?

I don’t know exactly what we should do.  I don’t have a rational “here’s what everyone needs to do” that will resolve all of these crises.  I want to let go of my need to control what happens, because I’m really not in control.  At the same time, even if I let go and accept whatever comes, I am a human being and it is natural for me to care and want to help, to serve what I love.  I will not deny that part of me either.  So I find myself thinking about how to help, even if it seems “hopeless” overall.  I need not stress about the outcomes, but I will still act.  What else would I do with my few short years here?

So what might I do to be practical?

I don’t believe our technology is serving us well.  We, the wealthy humans near the top of the power hierarchy may see it as indispensable, but if we consider the animals or the fish or the trees or the laborers in the sweatshops and mines and plantations, it’s not working out so well.  Yes, our technology relieves some suffering in some places, but at what cost?  We simply do not, and probably cannot, count the costs of development.  I am not enthusiastic that further technological progress will heal us.

I also don’t believe that our problems are mostly due to money being in the wrong hands.  Measuring everything by monetary value seems to me one of the roots of the crises.  The mentality that values money over life drives much of the pollution and resource extraction and oppression around the world, since humans first accumulated “property” and enslaved each other.  I don’t feel that getting as much money as I can and giving it to the non-profit side of the system is the best way for me to serve what I love.  I feel that the money abstraction and the distance it puts between us and the effects of our actions makes us feel disconnected and alone.

I also don’t like our culture’s valuing of measurable impact over everything else.  Much of what is precious to me cannot be measured.  What’s the measurable value of a 5000 year old yew tree?  What’s the measurable value of caring for a disabled child?

“May what I do flow from me like a river

no forcing

and no holding back

the way it is with children.”

-Rilke

So I don’t know what we all should do exactly, and I don’t know what I will do beyond the short term.  I’m skeptical of money and the dominant culture’s value system.  I want to trust what makes me feel alive over our culture’s normal stories that usually are rooted in fear.  I recognize that I’m one of the most privileged people in the world.  I know most people do not have the options that I have.  I don’t mean to judge, only to encourage.

Right now what’s happening is I’ve been living in a homeless protest encampment in Berkeley the last couple months, which has given me still another perspective on our society.  It got interesting this weekend and we’re fighting eviction, hoping to benefit and inspire homeless communities around the country.  With all of the disaster and war refugees today, and housing crises in many places, there are more and more people who can’t have regular housing, and we could learn to live together with more kindness and understanding.  I’m also involved with the community here in other ways like Food Not Bombs.  I expect soon I’ll be moving on to other places, to learn and to live in service to what I love.  To restore soil and help plants grow and be community.

I’ve learned I don’t need much money to live well myself, so I don’t need to earn it for myself.  Perhaps my perspective on money and impact will change and I’ll eventually decide that earning money and supporting my many friends who don’t have much money in their various causes is the best way to contribute, and then I might return to a job, but we’ll see.  “It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society.”

Wherever I am, I’ll be with some kind of community learning how to live in healthier relationship with each other and with the earth.  There’ll be dark moments and joyous moments, and this is life.  Life is good.  Whatever comes, I will give attention to the beauty around me, the beauty of community and of nature and of every form.  Beauty everywhere begs our attention.”

“An eye is meant to see things.

The soul is here for its own joy.

A head has one use: For loving a true love.

Feet: To chase after.

Love is for vanishing into the sky. The mind,

for learning what men have done and tried to do.

Mysteries are not to be solved: The eye goes blind

when it only wants to see why.”

-Rumi

Copied and pasted shamelessly from Phil’s grenzbegriff blog

http://www.grenzbegriff.com/