Thinking Like A Mountain

Recently, I've been rereading the old classic Thinking Like A Mountain by John Seed, Joanna Macy, Pat Fleming and Arne Naess.

Only in hindsight did I realize what a formative influence this book had on my worldview. For me, reading it was an environmental and philosophical coming of age. It presented a broad enough container to hold the depth and breadth of the plight of our home planet and its inhabitants, and the full range of emotions that accompany this awareness.

image courtesy of Pixabay

In some ways it reminds me of Brian Greene's The Elegant Universe in scope, although its subject matter deals with time, the state of our planet, and our complex inner landscapes.

The thinking it inspires is what's needed for the times we're living in. We have the solutions to our problems, but are experiencing a profound failure of imagination. We're trapped in the very mechanisms we've created that our eating away at our future.

This theoretical container came just in time for me. My heart is breaking with the knowledge of the new lows our societies have reached. I understand how people in Nazi Germany didn't want to believe its people were capable of the legendary horrors inflicted upon those they considered undesirable at the time. We want to believe in the decency of our public officials. How do we look clearly at the extent of the cruelty and corruption we're facing so that we can find effective ways of confronting it? Because we must confront it.

We need to work through our denial, grief and disbelief to get to a place where we can turn things around. We can do it. It means we'll have to empower ourselves and each other and work together in ways we never have before. The future is in our hands, and we can't drop the ball on this one.

We've never had such powerful tools. With the internet we can share what works and what doesn't instantly. We can stay informed and keep each other up to date. We have alternatives to cruelty and destruction. We can turn off the TV, and put our energy into solutions instead of fear and anger. We can create the kind of future we'd want to live in. There are so many ways to seize our power. Lets do this!

image courtesy of Pixabay