In My Back Yard

For many years I have been searching for some way to bring attention, personal stories, and beauty to ecologically damaged places. In a way, I think this way of approaching life and death, joy and sorrow, and the strange beauty that can be found when we gaze at that which we least want to look at has been pursuing me all my life.

Over the years I've held small gatherings and longer programs in several wounded places, from a clearcut forest in British Columbia to Ground Zero in New York City to a coal-fired power plant for 350: the International Day of Climate Action last month. When I founded Radical Joy for Hard Times, I joined others who shared the vision of finding and creating beauty in wounded places.

And now, by strange fate or synchronicity, this long search is becoming very personal.

The Marcellus shale beneath the earth in Susquehanna County in northeastern Pennsylvania, where I live, has been found to have one of the largest reserves of natural gas anywhere in the world. In the past two years, the momentum has been building to tap this source of energy with new technology. Unlike more affluent counties in New York, just north of us, where people are fighting this encroachment, here in rural, low-income Pennsylvania, poor farmers are eagerly leasing their lands... and many are already regretting it.

The problems, not surprisingly, have begun: polluted wells; damage to the hilly, winding, rural roads by heavy trucks; and even the recent discovery that the water that has been used to shatter, or "frack," the shale thousands of feet in the Earth, may be radioactive after it is pumped back out.

Two months ago, to my surprise, my husband and I were offered $5,700 an acre for our five and a half acres, plus 20% royalties for a portion of a larger consolidated leasing area.

For weeks Andy and I were immersed in long, tearful discussions together and with friends about our options. Neither of us has much money, and we have lost much of what we did have in the current recession. If we leased, we would not only get a settlement up front, but a regular income. For me, however, there was never any dilemma. I knew I could not live with myself if I were to condone, and even profit from, the exploitation of the Earth.

We finally have reached a decision. As my husband said, "You founded Radical Joy for Hard Times to bring beauty to wounded places, and now the wounded place is coming to your own backyard." So we will be staying, at least for now, and we will not be signing a lease.

Some people we know, including a good friend, think we have made a very foolish choice. And as I look at the rolling hills, the long expanses of woods and fields near my home, my heart aches for the ugliness and scarring that is probably inevitable. But I also am seeing new opportunities for exercising the principles of Radical Joy for Hard Times—the main goal of which is to reconcile people and wounded places through storytelling, bearing witness, and creating beauty. As seekers have known for millennia, you never have to go far from home to find the revelation you so long for.

On Monday I leave for Melbourne, Australia to attend the Parliament of World Religions. Watch for more blogs from there.

Message to a Power Plant: 350!

On October 24, Radical Joy for Hard Times chose to take part in 350: The International Day of Climate Action in a very direct way. We went right to a power plant to present our message.

Nine people braved heavy rain to gather in front of AES Westover, a coal-fired power plant in Johnson City, NY and a major supplier of the electricity in our area. The message we conveyed to them and to coal-fired power plants around the world: We demand a planet where 350 parts per million of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is the absolute maximum!

The 350 event was organized over the internet by Bill McKibben, the environmental activist and author of The End of Nature and other books. 350 is the parts per million of carbon dioxide that climate scientists have determined to be the maximum level for a healthy environment. Currently, levels are at 389 ppm. McKibben urged people around the world gather together to demand that policy makers take drastic steps to bring carbon levels to 350 ppm. All people had to do was somehow depict the number 350, take a photo, and send it to the website.

As of this posting, two days later, it is estimated that more than 5,400 events were held in 181 countries around the world. Looking at the 350.org website or at the photo stream on Flickr is an amazing and moving experience. Soldiers in Iraq, children in an orphanage in Bali, large groups of people forming the magic number with their bodies and being photographed from a height, small groups with hand-painted signs, people in front of historic buildings, ancient temples, glaciers, and mountains.

Radical Joy for Hard Times chose to take the message right to the source of the problem: the coal-fired power plant. Although AES Westover recently installed $50 million of new equipment to reduce emissions, “power plants are the nation’s biggest producer of toxic waste, surpassing industries like plastics and paint manufacturing and chemicals,” according to a recent report in The New York Times.

What we had in mind, however, was not protesting or blaming, but simply giving people the opportunity to reflect, up close, on the source of power that, as much as we want to hate it, we are all complicit in using.

I had called the plant a couple of weeks earlier to ask their permission for a small group to sit in front of the gate for two hours. I also invited Westover employees to join us. However, plant manager Jim Mulligan denied my request.

Nine of us showed up anyway. After we had introduced ourselves, Dick Rehberg, a member of the Radical Joy for Hard Times board, gave an introduction to coal and coal use. Coal provides 22% of energy use, and 91% of coal goes into firing power plants. Among the toxins emitted by coal plants are sulphur dioxide, arsenic, aluminum, and mercury.

Before long, a young security guard, on his first day on the job, approached us and told us we had to leave. We simply went across the street and stood under a bridge—after first snapping a photo with our 350 sign (made by local school students and recycled to other 350 events during the day). Under the bridge, we still had a good view of the power plant, and we were out of the rain as well. Over our heads, a steady stream of invisible traffic provided an audio accompaniment to our reflections on energy use.

Then, as is the practice on all our Earth Exchanges, each person took some time to be alone and reflect on the power plant, on energy use, coal, and whatever else in that immediate environment struck their attention—while also paying attention to how what they noticed sparked emotions, memories, thoughts, and ideas.

Here are some of the fascinating comments, each reflecting a completely different sensibility, experience, and perspective that people made as we sat under the bridge only half an hour later:

“While I was standing across the street looking at the power plant, I was struck by how, from this perspective, this maple tree towers over the smokestacks. It affirmed for me that nature will prevail.”

“Until recently I didn’t pay that much attention to global warming. Now I feel I’ve lost my innocence. Part of me wants to go back to that innocence, climb that tree like a little kid and pretend everything is all right. But I know I can’t do that.”

“I was standing at the entrance staring at the plant, and the guard saw me. For a moment our eyes met. He seemed like a nice young man. I wondered what he is making of all this.”

“I’m a nurse. I take care of people with deep wounds. I feel I’m now being called to take care of the wounds of the Earth as well.”

“I was thinking about the shrubbery in front of the plant. When I was young and growing up in Chicago, you never thought twice about power plants. Now, with this shrubbery, it’s like they’re trying to hide what they are, what they do, to make it seem more ‘natural.’”

Besides calling attention to the urgency of bringing CO2 levels down to 350, our group had a personal encounter with the predominant force that suffuses the air with this planet-altering chemical. We all have a more personal understanding of what we’re dealing with and how, in matters of the environment, we are all deeply and personally involved in countless ways.

Message to Coal: 350!

Saturday October 24 was designated 350: The International Day of Climate Action. As of this posting, two days later, it is estimated that more than 5,400 events were held in 181 countries around the world to call attention to the urgency of attaining this number.

350 is the parts per million of carbon dioxide that climate scientists have determined to be the maximum level for a healthy environment. Currently, levels are at 389 ppm. The United States Congress, considering legislation on energy efficiency that won't

Seeking Pearls in the Waste

Old Persian legends relate the trials of Majnun, a man who devotes his life to searching for his beloved Layla. Majnun wanders endlessly in the desert. His clothes are ragged, his hair matted and filthy, and he becomes so exiled physically and spiritually from the niceties of human society that finally it is the wild animals who become his companions. Humans shun him and laugh at him, even though many of them recognize deep down that his search, dedicated to love, oblivious to external concerns, has actually brought him closer to the divine.

One day, a man noted for his piety came upon Majnun sifting through dirt in the middle of the road. “You claim such devotion to your beloved,” the holy man scoffed. “How can you say that and then grovel here, searching for such a pearl in the midst of all this rubbish?”

“Ah,” Majnun explained, “I seek Layla everywhere, so that one day I may find her somewhere.”

In his tireless search for his beloved, Majnun has discovered something extraordinary: the effort to become closer to what we love takes us to many places and puts us through many tasks, and in this process each encounter and event becomes beloved as well. Some events that sweep us up may be difficult, painful, and hard to bear. Yet, far from degrading our search, and especially the object of our search, they actually ennoble them. When the heart is filled with passion, with conviction that what it loves is wholly worth loving, protecting, and engaging ourselves with, then we see that every place that the search takes us to is part of that esteemed quest as well. Searching for what we love and abandoning judgment about what is good and bad and worthy and unworthy, we find worth and beauty in abundance. Even what has been used up and tossed out is valuable, since our hands and hearts sort through it mindfully and compassionately.

Radical Joy for Hard Times finds much to admire in Manjun. We are aim to seek out the lost, clearcut, damaged places, the endangered species, the waste places, and approach them with curiosity, community, and creativity, that we may find treasure there.

And so we do.

Magic Phragic Wands

In my blog for July 18, I described the Radical Joy for Hard Times retreat I led at the World Healing Institute at Cobb Island Station, Virginia on June 19-21. We spent one day considering the invasive common reed, phragmites, from different perspectives, the most startling and personal of which were the ones that emerged after each of us spent an hour sitting alone with the plant without any expectations or judgments about its place in the biosphere. As a result of what we gleaned from that exercise, we created a meandering path through the tall grasses as a way of interacting in a more personal way with their rampant, stubborn beauty.

A few days ago I had an email from Annie Hess, the WHI administrator. She wrote that they had held a program for children a couple of weeks after the Radical Joy for Hard Times event. In one project the children made magic fairy wands out of the dried phragmites stalks. They called them phragic wands.

This is how we can remake the world we live in: by having the willingness to enter into relationship with it, listen to what it has to tell us, and respond with creative acts that come from the heart. And we can invite our children and grandchildren to explore with us, and perhaps teach us a whole new way of perceiving beauty—and even magic—in what we have formerly considered waste.

Touch the Monster

At first the prospect of confronting a place that has been damaged by toxic waste, clearcutting, urban sprawl, industry or some other cause can seem daunting. Why would we deliberately choose to engage with some awful situation we would much rather turn our backs on? Because sometimes it is necessary to touch the monster we fear and hate.

Lieutenant-General Roméo Dallaire, the United Nations representative in Rwanda during the genocide that took place in that country in 1994, writes in his book of a meeting he had with leaders of Interahamwe, the death squad organization that would ultimately be responsible for the death of more than 800,000 people. At that meeting Dallaire was introduced to, and shook hands with, a man whose arm and white shirt were spattered with dried blood. “I felt I had shaken hands with the devil,” Dallaire wrote, noting that afterwards he felt disgusted with himself for having automatically used that customary form of greeting with a genocidal murderer.

Dallaire fought for the people of Rwanda even when no one else in the world would come to their aid. So what did it mean that he shook hands with a man he equated with the devil? Perhaps, on some level, he had to find out who this devil of an enemy really was. The man with the bloody hand and shirt, an agent of torture, rape, and murder, may have seemed like a force of pure evil, but when Dallaire shook his hand, that hand turned out to be simply human flesh. Perhaps by shaking that hand and then freeing himself from the grip, Dallaire realized on some level that the perpetrators of the grotesque war he was fighting were indeed human and perhaps in that instant, too, he recognized an even stronger reason to keep fighting: because there was something to fight, and it was human and tangible, and human enemies can and must be resisted.

The great contemporary scholar of myth, Roberto Calasso, has remarked that the big mistake Oedipus makes is that he fights the Sphinx with words alone. He doesn’t get down and dirty with her. “The monster can pardon the hero who has killed him,” writes Calasso in The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony. “But he will never pardon the hero who would not deign to touch him.” Touching a piece of the monster in Rwanda and finding in his grasp the shape of a human hand may have empowered Dallaire to keep up the fight.

Similarly, because those of us who love the earth know in our deepest hearts and most compassionate souls that we must confront the reality of the Earth’s degradation, we decide that we will shake hands with the monster: we will confront the reality of what has already degraded and endangered lands and species that matter to us, so that we may gain strength to love what remains to us and fight it for its survival.

Life Lessons from a Pest Plant

Guests at the World Healing Institute at Cobb Island Station, on Virginia's beautiful eastern shore helped launch the first-ever Radical Joy for Hard Times retreat on June 19-21. It was a particularly diverse and inquisitive group, composed of two Methodist ministers, an architect, a biologist, an artist, and WHI center coordinator Annie Hess.

Plans for the weekend included a walk on Sunday with a biologist to visit and perhaps do ceremony on a stretch of endangered beach. However, on Saturday our attention was repeatedly drawn to an environmental problem closer at hand. This was the common reed that grew abundantly between the institute's front lawn and the bay. Phragmites (frag might eez) has become a reviled plant along the eastern shore, even though it grows on spoils, such as dredged land, where no other plants can survive. The Nature Conservancy, which owns the land at WHI, has tried repeatedly to poison it, but it keeps coming stubbornly back.

The mission of Radical Joy for Hard Times is to bring attention and beauty to wounded places. Gradually our group came to realize that phragmites itself is one of nature's wounded. We discussed the plant at length, getting the facts about how it grows and where, then each person spent an hour sitting alone among these tall grasses with their round stalks and sandpapery leaves. Afterwards, everyone came together to tell the story of what had happened. All the comments were striking in their individuality and in the precision of the way observations of the plant all around had dovetailed with inner experiences and reflections. I was particularly moved by what one of the ministers had to say:

"I was thinking about inclusivity and exclusivity. There's a movement in our church these days to exclude gay people from worship services. I think this is wrong. Everyone should have a right to worship God and His creation. And every plant should have a right to grow, because it, too is a part of creation."

As in any Radical Joy for Hard Times event, we ended this excursion with an Act of Beauty. This one had two parts. First we all made a path through a long stretch of phragmites, a kind of meandering ramble that might serve as a counterpart to the beautiful Chartres-style labyrinth cut into the grass between the building and the (phragmite-lined) bay. Finally, when the path was complete, we cut stalks of phragmites, arranged them in a glass vase, and placed them on our dinner table.