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What Do I Value?

Am I an ecologist with ecological values or am I a hedonist with consumerist values? I want to accept an ecological ethos to make myself a good and pious citizen of the world. I also want the dress in the window.

I remind myself that consumerist values are destructive to the planet, destructive to societies and destructive to my well-being. Environmental degradation, inequality and angst about not having or being enough are consequences that I see as I consume. So, I celebrate every time I decide not to get the dress in the window because, really, I don’t wear dresses and I don’t need another one to hang in my closet. I don’t make the best choice every day, but I am making better ones.

I am making better choices that don’t undermine the foundation on which my house rests because I want to enjoy the world, selfishly, as a beautiful sanctuary, and I hope that my children and grandchildren can do the same.

What are ecological values? How should be look at them? From our basic metaphor of the world as a sanctuary, immediately follows that the right and inevitable attitude towards the world is that of reverence. Thus reverence establishes itself as the chief ecological value…

A true exercise of reverence immediately implies responsibility…Responsibility is not “heavy”, a burden, but a concept that gives us wings and enables us to practice our reverence as a cosmic dance…

Frugality follows both responsibility and our sense of reverence…IN our interconnected world, and within its limited resources, if some consume too much, there is not enough for others…”What you have and don’t need is stolen from those who need it and don’t have it”…Frugality is born of our awareness that the orgy of consumption is obscene and immoral, of our awareness that in overconsuming we put enormous stress on Mother Earth and therefore on ourselves in the long run…

Diversity, at first sight, appears as an unlikely candidate for an important ecological value…We must maintain diversity to maintain vibrant life…Evolution means diversity. Human cultures mean diversity. Fulfilling human lives means diversity.

Justice has been enshrined in all significant value systems of humanity…Ecological justice signifies justice for all–not only within our own clan and within our own society; not only among nations of people, but also with respect to all living beings; and with regard to the Mother Earth herself…

Ecological values are offsprings of ecological consciousness.”1

Ecological values can seem like lofty ideals. Each, though, can be grounded in daily actions: admiring the sunrise while the gulls, and geese, and swans wake on the sand after picking up discarded masks and coffee cups, in last year’s winter coat.

What decision can I make today that helps me line up with ecological rather than consumerist values? Start there.

“You must take action. You must do the impossible. Because giving up is never an option.”
–Greta Thunberg

  1. Skolimowski, Henryk. A Sacred Place To Dwell. Great Britain. Element Books Limited. 1993. Page 34-37

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Nature is Intelligent. Am I?

It was serendipity that lead me to Intelligence in Nature by Jeremy Narby. I had been signing “to a wonder-full year” on my new year’s cards and stumbled on this book on my way out the door for my walk. I was looking for a short book to listen to on a Saturday. This one was it. And it was wonder-full.

Jeremy takes us on his learning journey as he explores whether we should/could consider non-humans intelligent and he does it in remarkable, off-the-beaten path places: bees, slime mold, butterflies and parrots.

On a gray January, my world filled with light as I learned some astounding things:

  • South American birds like macaws, parakeets and parrots “were behaving in ways strongly reminiscent of humans, holding loud get-togethers and food fests and self-medicating by using the most detoxifying clay.” (Chapter 1)
  • Slime molds can find the shortest path through a maze. (Chapter 8)
  • Ants will dry out seeds to prevent mold. (Chapter 4)
  • And researchers might need to ask better questions to get the answers they seek: “when animals are found not to accomplish a given task, this is not proof of their stupidity. In most cases, the problem lies with the person conducting the experiment and involves incapacity of the researcher to develop experiments that pose the problem correctly and allow one to answer it properly. If you will: a negative result shows nothing in the final analysis; a positive result shows something, but when an animal cannot do something, the question remains is it incapable of doing it or have I not been clever enough in my research concepts and experimental design?” (Chapter 5) And when we design experiments well, be recognize colours, shapes and abstract concepts.

I liked Jeremy’s classification of nature’s intelligence as “chisei.” Using a word from a foreign language–to me as an English-speaker–allows me to consider intelligence in its many forms. It is not surprising that we consider mammals like my dogs and cat intelligent. They are responsive and adaptive. It is fascinating to hear that we do not have the knowing to understand nature in it’s glorious intelligence.

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Quick Trip To Hell

In the book, Getting Grit, Caroline Adams Miller wrote the definition of hell:

“Someone once told me the definition of Hell: The last day you have on earth, the person you became will meet the person you could have become.”

Imagine what that would be like.

When I do that exercise, imagining, a few things come to mind. I have heard it said that a desire is not placed in a person without the seed that holds the ability to accomplish that desire. I also believe that we don’t always accomplish that desire in a way that we expect. A boy with a dream to win a World Series could become a championship-winning coach. Another belief I hold on to is that the universe, once stretched, can be stretched again more easily, like loosening up a balloon before you blow it up.

What do these beliefs have to do with my quick trip to hell and seeing myself as I could have been? Perhaps I am reminding myself that the achievement of what I desire is still possible.

Who do I see when I look at who I could have been? I see a radiant yogi, a wonder architect, and a compassionate human. Last year, I did a lot of work on my identity from James Clear’s Atomic Habits:

The more you repeat a behaviour, the more you reinforce the identity associated with that behaviour. In fact, the word identity was originally derived from the Latin word essentitas, which means being and identidem, which means repeatedly. Your identity is literally your “repeated beingness.”

After many trials, I settled on who I wanted to be: a radiant yogi, a wonder architect, and a compassionate human. And I am doing my best to live into those by repeating behaviours that exemplify those identities.

To be a radiant yogi, according to Krishna in the Bhagavad Gita, is to live with virtue:

Fearlessness, purity of heart, perseverance in acquiring wisdom and in practicing yoga, charity, subjugation of the senses, performance of holy rites, study of the scriptures, self-discipline, straightforwardness, non-injury, truthfulness, freedom from wrath, renunciation, peacefulness, non-slanderousness, compassion for all creatures, absence of greed, gentleness, modesty, lack of restlessness, radiance of character, forgiveness, patience, cleanness, freedom from hate, absence of conceit–these qualities are the wealth of a divinely incline person.

With that comes the eight limbs of yoga: Yama (restraints), niyama (observances), asana (posture), pranayama (breath control), pratyahara (withdrawal of the senses), Dharana (concentration), dhyana (meditation), samadhi (pure contemplation).

To be a wonder architect embodies the principles from Christopher Alexander’s A Timeless Way of Building:

“To seek the timeless way we must first know the quality without a name:…3. The search which we make for this quality, in our own lives, is the central search of any person, and the crux of any individual person’s story. It is the search for those moments and situations when we are most alive.”

And Peter Block’s The Answer to How is Yes:

“An architect cares as much about the beauty of things as their more practical properties and how to make them work…architecture brings aesthetics and utility into harmony.”

As a compassionate human, my best self would be an exemplar of Kristin Neff’s definition of compassion (for self and others) in her book, Self-Compassion:

“Compassion involves the recognition and clear seeing of suffering. It also involves feelings of kindness for people who are suffering, so that the desire to help–to ameliorate suffering–emerges. Finally, compassion involves recognizing our shared human condition, flawed and fragile as it is.”

As I lie on my death bed, I hope that my best self, the self I was capable of being is that: a radiant yogi, a wonder architect, and a compassionate human. My best self looks down on my current self and gives her the gift of time. She is urging me with the fiercest intensity not to waste another moment because “it is never too late to be what you might have been.”

Going All to Hell, Roy Martell Mason
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The Semantics of Acedia

My friend and I sat on a cool patio after the climate march, sipping tea, and we discussed the predicament that too many issues bring to the climate crisis. I explained that I felt we were in the grips of acedia. She asked for an explanation.

When I am asked to explain what I am working on, I am always asked what acedia means. I repeat Kathleen Norris‘s definition: The word literally means not-caring or being unable to care, and ultimately, being unable to care that you don’t care.” The response to that is often, “oh, like apathy.” Not quite.

Then I try John Cassian’s description which includes disgust…disdain and contempt…lazy and sluggish…unreasonable confusion.” They try to pigeon -hole it to sloth. That’s not quite right either.

Acedia was first described in the fourth century by monks who created communities in the desert, and, in some cases, particularly at around the noon hours, failed to do the things required of their tradition. For the monks, there were eight bad thoughts, the worst and hardest to avoid, was acedia. Eventually, St. Thomas Aquinas evolved those thoughts into the seven deadly sins. Defining them this way allowed the church to include actions and thoughts. St. Thomas rolled acedia into sloth. The desert mothers and fathers expressed these “sins” as a mindset. They were thought temptations that took one off the holy path. Thoughts are distractions.

The descriptions of acedia from the fourth-century writings of Evagrius Ponticus shows that acedia is much more than sloth:

The demon of acedia—also called the noonday demon—is the one that causes the most serious trouble of all [emphasis added]. He presses his attack upon the monk about the fourth hour and besieges the soul until the eighth hour. First of all he makes it seem that the sun barely moves, if at all, and that the day is fifty hours long. Then he constrains the monk to look constantly out the windows, to walk outside the cell, to gaze carefully at the sun, to determine how far it stands from the ninth hour, to look now this way and now that, to see if perhaps one of the brethren appears from his cell. Then too he instills in the heart of the monk a hatred for the place, a hatred for his very life itself, a hatred for manual labor. He leads him to reflect that charity has departed from among the brethren, that there is no one to give encouragement. Should there be someone at this period who happens to offend him in some way or other, this, too, the demon uses to contribute further to his hatred. This demon drives him along to desire other sites where he can more easily procure life’s necessities, more readily find work and make a real success of himself. (p. 4)

Acedia becomes relevant to today when we expand the definition to include the fullness of the word:

Acedia is:
• intimately linked to the deepest roots of man’s affective and volitional life,
• a form of “spiritual laziness” manifest as a fundamental lack of the commitment required by a relationship of profound love,
• that, for acedia, participation in the divine nature of grace is possible, but unappealing,
• acedia is a manifestation of the breakdown in the individual and/or cultural structures, a disjunction between the cultural norm and the cultural structures for achieving these norms, and
• acedia is a pre-rational state, driving the behaviors of avoidance that manifest as fearfulness, laziness, and self-righteousness.
Finally, acedia is a choice. (pg. 64)

One could argue that it is all semantics. It might be. Where I stand, we still need to look for a way out.

Source: Dave MacQuarrie, MD PhD. Acedia: The Darkness Within: (and the darkness of Climate Change). AuthorHouse. Kindle Edition.