This week I’m excited to share an excerpt from a book written by one of my favorite blog authors, Rebecca Hecking. What I love most about her writing is she effortlessly weaves science and spirituality together without “experting” at the reader. She invites you to think along with her … to consider, puzzle and imagine. Reading her writing is a bit like sitting at the kitchen table having a great conversation. Enjoy! And if you’d like more, she tells you where you can find her book here.
(Excerpt from Chapter 23, “Widening the Circle” from The Sustainable Soul: Eco-Spiritual Reflections and Practices, Skinner House Books, 2011.)
Six degrees of separation. You’ve heard that one, haven’t you? It’s the theory that each person on Earth is connected by six steps or fewer to every other person on the planet. The theory may or may not be literally true for every single person. Of course, it’s impossible to know for sure. But the idea that we are all interconnected more closely than any of us had imagined is absolutely true, although perhaps in ways that the theory doesn’t consider. In fact, our entire global biosphere (including humans) is interconnected in ways that we are just beginning to understand. J.E. Lovelock’s Gaia hypothesis, first proposed more than thirty years ago, considers the entire Earth as one integrated self-regulating living organism. It has gradually gained acceptance as an ecological paradigm for the twenty-first century and beyond. The fact is that there is no such thing as “away.” What we do to one part of the Earth, we do to the entire Earth. What we do to the Earth, we do to ourselves.
As is frequently the case, indigenous people are far ahead of industrialized cultures in realizing this truth. David Suzuki and Peter Knudtson describe the view of the Amazonian Desana people who see themselves as embedded within an unceasing energy flow. “When a Desana elder looks out upon the sacred circuit of sunlight that oozes slowly through the vast rain forest that engulfs him and his community, he sees inherent to this system a mandate to human beings to ‘borrow’ no more than they absolutely require from these precious, primal flows and to give back to the great system, through prayer and practice, gifts comparable to what they have been given.” Imagine a world where this ethic is translated into our own culture and becomes the norm.
We are deeply interconnected. Drought in Africa churns up dust into the atmosphere. The dust travels across the Atlantic, and affects cloud formation over the Caribbean. A man orders a burger in a fast food restaurant. The burger, shipped from South America, came from a cow raised on land that was formerly part of the Amazon rainforest, now burned and cleared for grazing. An empty plastic bag floats across a parking lot next to a suburban big box store in the U.S., and ultimately ends up floating in the middle of the Pacific six months later. On the other hand…
A woman purchases a bag of fair trade coffee at her local co-op. Somewhere in Sumatra a father buys school books for his children with money earned from his small family coffee plantation. A teenager, after learning of the crisis in the rainforest, decides to skip the trip to the burger place and packs a lunch instead. A couple serves locally grown food at their wedding reception, supporting the farmers of their foodshed in the process. A retired man spends a Saturday morning cleaning up a stream with a conservation group, ensuring that hundreds of pieces of plastic will never make it to the ocean.
We are also embedded within larger systems upon which we depend for our very lives, as the Desana elder so wisely recognized. Trees take in carbon dioxide, and give off oxygen. Water evaporates, and then falls as rain. Cycles of ocean currents keep northern Europe warmer than latitudes alone would allow. Soil bacteria break down dead plant matter, making nutrients available for new growth. Fungi break down environmental toxins. Even the planet Jupiter plays a role. Its gravity helps deflect asteroids that might otherwise bombard our planet into a lifeless rock. Not only are we a part of larger systems, we ourselves are a system. Each of us exists in symbiotic relationship with millions of helpful bacteria that digest our food and in so doing make our very survival possible.
We really are connected, like it or not. No one is an island. Moving forward toward creating truly sustainable societies in the twenty-first century requires that we not only acknowledge, but embrace that fact. The choices we make ripple out from us like a pond ripples after a stone is tossed into it, and have implications far beyond our immediate small circle of community. Figuring out those implications, and changing the way we relate to the world based on what we learn: this is the great challenge of our still-new century.
To explore connections in a deeper way, try the following:
Exercise:
Meditation: Degrees of Gratitude. Sit comfortably, and recall a meal you ate recently. Offer thanks and gratitude for the people, animals, plants, and Earth systems that interacted to bring that meal to you. For example, if I ate a cheese sandwich, I would offer thanks for the person who made the sandwich, the cashier who sold me the bread and cheese, the dairy clerk, the baker, the workers at the cheese factory, the person who drove the milk truck from the farm, the farmer, the cow, the hay and the pasture that fed the cow, the sun for making the grass grow in the pasture, the flour mill, the wheat field, the soil in which the wheat grew, and the rain that fell on the field. I might even offer thanks for the evolutionary process that brought into being cows and cheese making bacteria, or the wild ancestor of cultivated wheat. Get the idea? This meditation can be as simple or as involved as you wish. It’s a sort of spiritual cousin to the Buddhist tradition of lovingkindness (or Metta) meditation.
Rebecca J. Hecking
Rebecca Hecking is the author of The Sustainable Soul: Eco-Spiritual Reflections and Practices (Skinner House, 2011). She blogs at rebeccahecking.com and lives in northwest Pennsylvania with her husband, children and three cats.