Transformation

Beautiful Spring

“I want to feel both the beauty and the pain of the age we are living in. I want to survive my life without becoming numb. I want to speak and comprehend words of wounding without having these words become the landscape where I dwell. I want to possess a light touch that can elevate darkness to the realm of stars.”

Terry Tempest Williams

          Terry Tempest Williams holds two truths at once in her words, "both the beauty and the pain of the age we are living in.” Transformation almost always comes as a surprise, and, unfortunately, always involves suffering. This is one of the most beautiful springs I can remember. The air is cool and clean, the birds are singing, and all the world is green and fertile. And a pandemic gets the credit. It is a testament to how quickly our ecosystem can turn itself around if we take human emissions out of the equation. Animals are returning to habitats they haven’t been able to enter for decades. I saw a picture recently of a pride of lions resting in the middle of a road—basking in the sun. And, a mama bear and her two cubs playing on the beach on the outer banks of NC. The pain is in seeing all this beauty while knowing that it won’t last. As soon as we open for business-as-usual, the traffic snarls and smog will return. True, people need to work, have to pay the bills. We don’t live in the garden of Eden. And, yet…

          Don’t you wish we had the wisdom to see this and decide to make the changes necessary to keep the beauty? It would be expensive, but pandemics and wildfires and rising sea levels will be even more expensive. And they are increasing; there is a die-off of rabbits going on in the southwest right now. Just another casualty of habitat destruction causing disease--this time, hemorrhagic fever.  

          What I hope we will not do is become numb once again to the plight of the earth and her creatures. One reason the addiction rate is so high here in the US is that the human body-mind-soul is not equipped for the ever-increasing production demands of the never-slowing consumer economy. It is simply unsustainable. At some point, we choose to numb out just to catch a break. We don’t see this pace as a choice, but it is. We simply must have the collective will to force a transformation.

          There was another shooting death yesterday over the outrage of being asked to wear a mask. These days we must watch our words because of people packing guns as though there was about to be a siege. Is this truly what we want for America? Angry people toting guns? In this beautiful, clear-aired spring?

          Or, do we want to rise out of this pandemic like a phoenix from the ashes and become the country we imagine ourselves to be. We have an opportunity for such a transformation—but we must choose it. And then we must make it happen.

                                                  In the Spirit,

                                                  Jane