Between Two Worlds
Today at brunch, we discussed Al Gore's Movie with the Father and girl friend of one of our fellow bruncheoneers. They had gone to see the Inconvenient Truth last night. We spoke about the strengths and weaknesses of the movie, but as usual, the strengths win out. Dad, who was an environmentalist before Rachel Carson made her clamor, was initially concerned about the notion that the solutions to the climate change problem were as fixable as Gore suggests.
Somewhere I heard in the spaces between his words, that we are fooling ourselves if we think that a little tummy tuck here and a little liposuction there will do the trick. That all we need to do is fix the way we suck up foreign resources and everything will be hunky dorey and we will thus be able to return to our environmental awareness oblivion daze and our credit driven consumer bliss.
Maybe I was just projecting.
But, as he spoke, I thought what a great opportunity we have here.
We have the opportunity to take what works in our world, to refine it, shine it up, and put it on our mantle of methods that allow our civilization to be productive and evolutionary.
But we will also be forced to reassess those things that do not.
We must toss out our nationalist views and become Global Citizens.
We must toss out our notion that markets can achieve justice.
We must toss out the weird programming that convinces us that we have the right to possess weapons of mass destruction, but others do not, when in truth, why should any group or nation have the right to hold its neighbors hostage to its technical ability to kill?
We must toss out the idea that energy is found only in solids.
We must toss out the false concept that there is "not enough" to care for us all. If the total resources of the globe were equally distributed among all its shipmates, we would all be wealthy. Just the energy from the sun makes each of us all richer than the richest oligarch.
We must toss out the reasonable and embrace the extraordinary.
According to the Maya, we are between worlds. The old one ended in the late 80s, and new one will begin in 2012. I have no explaination for why an old meso American culture that used round calendars but chose not to stick sticks in them, so they could have wheels and axels, should have any relevance to our day.
How their priests would be able to predict when an old world ends and when a new one begins, I don't know. But then, let's be fair, we have a square calendar whose singular strength is the picture space above it, where naked girls and other endangered species can be viewed for slightly more than a moon cycle.
The traditions imply that this new world will be shaped by our acts
and the energy that is created during this netherworld period.
We should therefore dream vividly of the kind of world we want.
We should write and speak of how our human settlements
should be shaped and governed.
We should give life to and nurture the mind forms
which will become the foundations of this new reality.
We should let our fears dissolve into an ocean of hope,
even as the despair of decreation surrounds us.
We should strive to see the world for what it can be,
not what is has become.
We are between two worlds.
One is finished.
The other comes.
It is our job to shape it.
HOME
What it is About
Earthfamily Principles
Earthfamilyalpha Content II
Earthfamilyalpha Content
Links
LANGUAGE TRANSLATIONS
two worlds art by MC Escher
posted by oZ @ 1:01 PM
5 Comments:
Totally meaningless comment
Arriba la Copa Italia 5 to 3 on penalty kicks.
Now if you could harness that energy you would have something.
Everyone in the World except the Gringos were payinh attention.
Iggie
What is a Copa Italia? What is a penalty kick? Just kidding.
Loved the ideas in "Between Two Worlds." It squarely calls for us to accept responsibility for using bright ideas to solve the problems facing the world--to think outside the barrel. My social life has come in a burst of funerals and memorials over the last months attesting to our individual mortality. I mourn Luis Jimenez, who died in his Hondo, NM, studio while moving a Mustang sculpture. I believe it was the one I saw when it was here in front of Bass Hall, monumental in size. Oz, I plan to send you a piece on the artist written by Lonn Taylor of Fort Davis, TX, formerly of Washington, DC.
FM
As a fellow brunchioneer and son of Dad, I think what he may have been saying was that he had no faith in many people, especially those in leadership, to recognize rational self interest, perhaps because they are just wired that way. There is no other explanation for the failure to address global warming in this country. I think that the movie may have encouraged him that a critical mass of reasonable people working for the common good might be able to change this.
Always good to have brunch with people who share hope for the common good. Cheers.
"We have the opportunity to take what works in our world, to refine it, shine it up, and put it on our mantle of methods that allow our civilization to be productive and evolutionary."
Beautifully written while bringing together the important concepts if we are to make it comfortably from one world into the next.
Wow,
Very inspiring and potent words.
I am beginning to wait for the next blog.
Thank you.
Post a Comment
<< Home