Healthy You • Healthy Earth • Healthy You

Joy to the fishes in the deep blue sea

Joy to you and me

~ Hoyt Wayne Axton

Working on the climate crisis can be exhausting and at times all-consuming. Just rereading My Climate Story makes me feel exhausted and I hope if you read that post it didn’t exhaust you, too! So, the first thing I’d like to share in this blog are some thoughts about staying in balance. If you want to posses the energy to make positive, healthy choices that care for the earth — or go even further and become a climate activist — you will need to take care of yourself.

One River, Many Wells by Mathew Fox

The bookclub I participate in just finished reading One River Many Wells, over 400 pages on ecumenism and spiritual paths. I liked the book immediately because the second paragraph spoke about climate challenges. When this book was written in 2000 hardly a soul was talking about climate change and carbon pollution! The author quoted Pope Francis’ Laudato Si’, Care for our Common Home who was summoning us to change, “We lack an awareness of our common origin, our mutual belonging, and of a future to be shared with everyone.”

Creative, Connected, Ease

A few years ago, I participated in a course that dedicated an entire week to contemplating a long list of words in order to help me tease out what was most salient. After careful thought, the words that floated to the surface were Creative, Connected, Ease (as opposed to disease). I found these same notions in One River Many Wells, too. The second chapter of the book was about creation and the forth about community and interdependence. The creative and connected parts of my life were moving along well. However, ease had become illusive and I was often feeling overwhelmed and out of kilter, which I think is pretty typical for a climate activist. When later in the book I arrived at the chapters on Meditation and Mindfulness and on Joy the writing pointed me toward the ease that I was lacking. 

In the chapter Meditation and Mindfulness, the author expanded on the subject of letting go and wrote “the most direct summary of this way of letting go and of mindfulness might be found in [Meister] Eckhart’s words: The soul grows by subtraction, not by addition.” In a world where we are drowning in the aftereffects of consumerism, subtraction and letting go of some of our stuff and our egos can go a long way to making us and the earth healthier. With less in our lives we open up space for joy.

Climate Activists are Called to be Spiritual Warriors

Mathew Fox calls all of us to service and compassion. He believes that young people — and I would add all of us — are seeking “something to live for, something to give their lives for.” And he posits that shopping and making money trivialize our lives. Instead, he challenges us to be spiritual warriors. 

How do mindfulness/meditation and joy, (suffering and sacrifice, too) relate to being a Warrior? Notice Fox’s description of the qualities of a Warrior and how many times concepts related to Creative, Connected, and Ease are included:

A warrior defends what is beautiful; a warrior defends Creation and its light; a warrior defends what the community cherishes; a warrior assists the community to survive. A warrior’s heart must be strong but also creative; it must be connected to the whole; it must know quiet and solitude as well as busyness and engagement. It must be familiar with nothingness and it must have tasted joy. It must know service as well as sacrifice. In short, it must know spirit.

Warriors 

• resist myths, particularly the myths of progress and consumerism.
• are very awake.
• are compassionate.
• assist their communities to survive.
• defend what is threatened.
• respond with moral outrage to injustice.

No matter how small a step, if you are taking action to fight climate change, you are a Warrior. But always remember — in addition to your activism — set aside time for ease by meditating and being joyful. My plan is to share some tips and resources for meditation and mindfulness in a future post. In the meantime, seek joy by heading out into the beauty of nature, dancing, eating healthy, being grateful, and letting go. And remember to sing!