Plan C

Roadmap To Creating Sustainable Change From the Inside Out: Part 2

Find Your Reset Point

Nick Kettles and Pat Thomas

Amidst the turmoil of debate, the successes and setbacks, the hope and despair in creating a more sustainable society – and set against the backdrop of protesters actively occupying the financial districts of the world – what is the value of retreat? 

What is the value of actually pressing the pause button completely to disengage from the world, including your quest to make it a better place? Of learning how to turn the mind inwards, and take refuge within the silence, the reset point, at the centre of your very being? 

How any of us achieve this is personal and unimportant. Some people like to meditate, others engage in mindful activities such as making bread. Still others like to walk in Nature and contemplate its beauty. What’s important is that you do it.

At first blush, the benefits seem profoundly individual, even selfish. But a choice to prioritise your personal peace, taking a retreat from the inherent madness of the modern world, is not a way of escaping our responsibilities. It is, instead, a profoundly revolutionary act.

Once the surface noise of our angry or despairing thoughts about the environment, or modern world, begin to quiet down, we begin to detach from the outcome we want to see and a more reflective and creative state of mind can emerge, one that can be applied, once again, to our quest for a better, fairer more sustainable world. 

Once we begin to trust the silence within as a source of nourishment, our fear and sense of vulnerability about the planet can be embraced as confirmation that we are, in fact, deeply connected to the web of life everywhere.

Above all, each time we turn inwards and retreat we challenge the prevailing paradigm that wants us to believe that moments of quiet reflection are purposeless and self-interested, that disengaging is synonymous with boredom, lassitude, lack of choice and the greatest sin of all: being out of touch with the next ‘new’ new thing. 

When we affirm that the emptiness inside doesn’t need to be constantly filled with the ephemeral whims of consumption, we give permission for others to also discover it as a resource rich in energy. In the silence, ideas which can galvanise our sense of purpose have space to grow.

Try stopping for 20 minutes, 3 times a day, to reflect and quieten your mind, in your own unique way.  In what ways do your thoughts and feelings about the environment change?

Roadmap To Creating Sustainable Change From the Inside Out: Part 3 ‘Adopt a new aesthetic’ coming soonish. 

 

 

 

 

Roadmap To Creating Sustainable Change From the Inside Out: Part 1

Accept Your Pain About the Environment is a Reflection of Your Own Suffering

Nick Kettles and Pat Thomas

 

When the Earth is seen as sick and dying, we position ourselves as in charge, and the Earth subject to our will. Humanity is in charge. Humanity caused the problem. Humanity will fix it. Humanity has misused the earth’s resources, now humanity will redistribute them more fairly.

Taking responsibility for our impact is an essential part of our evolution as a race, no doubt, and yet our awareness of who we are, in relation to what we are taking responsibility for, can make a big difference. Our perception of the Earth's suffering may actually reflect our own deepest feelings. It’s not the Earth that’s dying but our worldview.

Our sense of urgency for the 'fragile' Earth, is actually a projection of our own deep sense of fragility and of loss; of the pain that the institutions and way of life that we have invested so much faith in, are in fact crumbling, and no longer systemically sustainable. Our belief that we can 'fix' things with a lot of angry, unexamined, frenetic activity is just one example of the need to control that sense of loss. Indeed it's the kind of meddling that got us into trouble in the first place.

Consider for a moment, the possibility that the Earth is in charge, and we as a species, subject to Her will. Consider what it would be like if we knew intrinsically, that we were a part, an intimate part, of Her whole? A dynamic part of an ecosystem which includes all Her species?

If we recognised this, we can as Satish Kumar says move from an egocentric worldview, where I am separate from the world, and my needs are more important than yours, to an ecocentric worldview, where my comfort doesn’t come at the expense of another, and who I am is determined by my ability to relate to Other, including the Earth.

This may sound like the ramblings of dyed in the wool greenies, like a touchy-feely paean to deep ecology – like that made popular by the blockbuster movie Avatar – and yet, it is absolutely necessary if we are to rediscover our integral place within the web of life.

Rather than play the hero and act to rescue a dying planet because, yes, it’s the right thing to do morally and intellectually, but also maybe to glorify ourselves and our resourcefulness as a species, do we have the courage to restore our interdependent relationship with Nature instead?

Can we take the time to accept Nature as a teacher, by observing Nature’s cycles, by growing our own vegetables, making our own bread, staying long enough in Nature to see it with new eyes, until its interconnective web, of which we are a valued and important part, is revealed?

The act of saving ourselves may in the end be a passive one, one where we do less not more. And having stepped back in that way, would we then, secure in the knowledge that we truly belong, act less from fear, and instead with greater awareness of the best use of our time, energy and resources?

Take time to consider from what perspective you are viewing your relationship with the Earth?  Is She broken?  Are you the saviour? Is She able to heal Herself?  And if so, is our part in that active or passive, or both? What have you to learn from Her? 

Roadmap To Creating Sustainable Change From the Inside Out: Part 2 ‘Find Your Reset Point’ coming soonish. 

Plan C’s Road Map To Creating Sustainable Change From The Inside Out

Nick Kettles and Pat Thomas

It’s over 18 months since we began our quest at Plan C to shift the focus of environmental debate from ‘what kind of world do we want?’ to ‘what kind of people do we have to become to make that world and then live in it sustainably, peacefully, intelligently and courageously?’

During that time our intuition that who we are being in relation to our cause, is equally as important as what we are doing, has only strengthened.

Our discussions - on this site and off - have taken us into deep territory. From the nature of beauty, via our responsibility not to see the earth as a victim, to the role of intuition in guiding us forward, we have begun to recognise certain themes, certain signposts, pointing the way for people who are also beginning to intuit that sustainable change is only possible from the inside out.

Proposing a fixed road map, a prescriptive formula for how to become the dynamic intersection for the political, economic and environmental transitions we need to make today, is not our objective at Plan C.

However, it seems wise to try and articulate the terrain we see. Make clear some of the path.  Point out the pitfalls we've noticed that prevent us from being more effective in our collective quest to create a more sustainable and loving society.

Over the next few months, or however long it takes, we’ll be posting our Road Map to Creating Sustainable Change from the Inside Out, part by part.  You are welcome to read these thoughts as a set of linear steps to follow, or, enjoy them as different facets of the same jewel. 

We look forward to your comments and feedback.

 

We don't need another...video

Pat Thomas

 

I should have loved the Wayseer Manifesto video – which aims to unite those of us who stand outside the mainstream into a powerful, creative movement. But it left me cold and I think I know why. This is what happens when a 'gathering of the tribe' becomes a dysfunctional marketing exercise...

Once, in a former incarnation, I sat in a room full of pregnant women. I was facilitating a workshop on the practical, emotional and spiritual aspects of home birth. During the course of the afternoon it became apparent that many of the women felt keenly just how outside the system their thinking and their actions were and how disapproving so many of the people around them were. I asked, half joking, “How does it feel to be a freak?”. As we began to explore the F-word in more detail half the women in the room burst into tears.

I saw my own life experience being mirrored back to me.  “Don’t be such a dreamer”. “You’re being impractical”. “You romanticise everything”. “What do you mean you ‘just know’?”. “That’s not the way we do things”. "You've got to learn to fit in”. “Don’t be so sensitive”. “You just have to develop a thicker skin”. My mother told me, repeatedly, that I would never have a husband because I was too clever.

I’ve lived with it all my life. I know, as these women did, that the very traits that society says are my weaknesses are actually my strengths. In fact, I sometimes think that women, living in what is still such a macho society, know this best of all. We either believe in ourselves, love ourselves, or we die a slow, agonising pseudo-death which leaves us walking around in the world with nothing holding us up but that thicker skin so highly prized by the patriarchy.

So why did I feel so mad when I watched the new video, Wayseer Manifesto by author Garret John LoPorto?

This ‘manifesto’, aiming to unite the freaks of the world into a powerful creative movement, was posted without comment on one of my favourite websites just to see what everyone’s reaction would be. It’s an alternative web community so most of the reactions were from the same dozen people who always react in the same old way “Fucking brilliant” “Just what I needed” “WOW!”.

One newbie waded in saying it seemed more like Bono-like proselytising, reminding everyone that the main purpose of the video was to sell the book and that the video would probably end up being the template for the next Apple or Nike advertising campaign.

In fact, it has already been an Apple ad. 

Said newbie was given short shrift by the ‘community’. So was I when I made a small joke about the length of the video being incongruent with holding the attention of a community of people with ADD/ADHD, bipolar, schizophrenia, OCD, dyslexia, narcissism, Asperger’s, anxiety, depression, risk-taking and sensation seeking tendencies and addictive personalities. Some of them may well watch it 20 times in a row and decide that LoPorto is their new guru, but some may lose interest or feel overwhelmed or decide to go off and make their own video after the first couple of minutes.

Garret LoPorto, it turns out, is an advertising exec/inventor whiz kid who, like many of us outsiders, has come to the conclusion that when life gives you lemons, you make lemonade. So he has chosen to focus on the strengths of his own Attention Deficit Disorder rather than its weaknesses, and encourages others to do the same.  It’s a good plan. I like that he advocates dealing with mental illness through something creative, something other than drugs. But at the same time I’m not sure a high-octane, fast-cut video is the best way to sell the message to what is a very specific crowd with very specific needs.

What is more, not all outsiders have a mental illness. Not all are unable to function in the world. Some of us simply choose not to participate. Some of us just think – and therefore act – differently. 

The kind of upheaval we are seeing in the Middle East and in parts of the US where workers are fighting for a basic right to join unions and organise, makes us all ache for change – a change of thinking, a change of direction, a change of scenery, of values, patterns and narratives in our lives. We want it and we want it now, with the ease of a mobile phone upgrade.

Not only that, but the way this upheaval has been framed in the media makes us think that change is fast – and linear and lasting. It isn’t. Anyone can throw a stone or hold up a banner. Anyone can make a video about how crap their life is and how misunderstood they are and post it on your tube, anyone can tweet about revolution. Real changemakers are, by their nature, a rare thing. They are often very insular and their influence like water on stone; drip-drip-drip until the shape of a thing begins to change.

As influenced as we are by media it is all too easy to be sucked into an uncritical assumption that if someone says something loud enough and long enough and makes a flashy video where his own face is intercut with iconic footage of John Lennon, Albert Einstein, Bob Dylan, Mohammed Ali et al, he must be saying something profound. Time will tell.

Meanwhile the clock ticks and the water drips...I’m still trying to figure out what made me so mad.

I think it was the idea that 90% of society is wrong and we – the 10% of the population who for whatever reason see things differently and have to endure being called crazy for it – are right. The truth is creative, crazy geniuses need some sort of anchor or structure for their great ideas to take form, otherwise all you get is the crazy without the creative. Every crazy fucker who ever had a crazy idea for change, had a wife or a mother or mentor or an agent who held the rest of their life together – who did the dishes and paid the rent and reminded them to eat and bathe once in a while – so they could be totally free to think big thoughts and buck the system.

I think also it was the way that the Wayseer Manifesto – underneath the feel good message and the glamorous presentation – was promoting EXACTLY the kind of exclusion behaviour and derision of others that has caused so much damage and pain to those of us who stand outside the mainstream. Is this the new tribe, the new generation, the leading edge? Or is it just “Meet the new boss...same as the old boss”?

If the continual environmental disasters and political upheaval we’ve been witnessing over the last few years tells us anything it’s that none of us is immune, that the personal is political and vice versa and that we are all in this together. When the next nuclear meltdown happens, when the next wave (real or symbolic) sweeps over us, it’s not going to care who is a ‘freak’ and who is ‘straight’. Screwed is screwed. Dead is dead. We have to find a way to stand together or we fall alone. And to be part of the group whilst maintaining personal integrity and resilience – and the confidence to be whomever you might be – requires tough inner work and feminine receptivity, not slick superficial sloganeering and macho posturing.

This post was originally featured on Pat's wbesite, Howl at the Moon. See here.

 

This is the show, and it's not going to get any better, any time soon, without you. SO STOP WATCHING THE TV AND GET ON BOARD!

Nick Kettles and Pat Thomas

Have you become a natural disaster junkie?  It makes compelling viewing doesn't it?

Check the body count for a few days after the earthquake in Christchurch, New Zealand.  Monitor news daily to see if the fourth nuclear reactor has blown up in Japan, after the recent tsunami.

Did you keep track of how many flights were grounded last year, when the Eyjafjallajoekull volcano in Iceland erupted?  Shake your head as the Haiti earthquake death toll rose to 250,000 plus. Hold your breath over last year’s Sumatran earthquake and the resulting tsunami; would it be as devastating as the 2004 Indian Ocean quake/tsunami the force of which was helpfully measured by the scientists as being the energy of 23,000 Hiroshima-type atomic bombs, claiming at least 225,000 lives? And what about those Chilean miners and their two months underground?

Be honest, are you secretly pleased by every new distraction that our earth is offering up with increasing frequency?

These are devastating acts of nature – for which we believe there are no explanations and over which we have no control. In many ways it is easier to live with the cold quantification of these disasters, the body counts, millisieverts leaked, the tonnes of wreckage, the cubic litres of ash, hours of oxygen left than it is to feel anything real.

Yet, perhaps, this is to be expected. The natural human tendency to stand like a deer in the headlights, in front of a truck rushing towards us does seem to beggar belief, but should we really wonder?

Afterall, Hollywood has done such a fine job of anaesthetising us to the reality of significant weather and earth based phenomena, with an endless stream of disaster movies, dating back beyond Towering Inferno from the 70s, that we are left unable to distinguish the difference between a tsunami in the film 2012, and the tsunami that destroyed so much of Sendai last week.

Emotionally numb we may at best be moved by one event – but dare we connect the dots and not just consider whether they are related, but whether we are culpable; whether human-created climate change is driving these disasters?

But how could they be?  A volcano in Iceland, surely can't be connected to an earthquake in Japan, or a flood in Australia?  We can relate, perhaps to a hurricane being linked to climate change, but a causal chain including earthquakes, and or volcanoes is harder to grasp and more often the domain of people who knock at your door and invite you into a discussion about the Old Testament.

And yet the possibility that the greenhouse effect causes the earth's tectonic plates to shift is something that serious scientists are now willing to speculate on, see here and, here.

It’s possible – but hey, why wait for the data before deciding what to do?

You know the moment it comes in someone's going to dispute it, and even if they don't, it won't lead to anything more than incremental change on a governmental level, so why not do something completely different as the basis for making your own mind up.

Granted, this something isn't that easy when your head's full of the latest news reportage, so you may want to switch off your TV set before you try it.

What we're proposing is that you listen to your intuition.  That's right.

Undervalued and at best recognised as a so called soft skill in the business world, intuition, or our gut instinct or sixth sense, is probably the most powerful barometer of what to do that we have today.

It takes courage to say, y'know, I don't care whether the idea that Climate Change is man-made is disputed, or whether there are in fact cyclical patterns of extreme weather historically, I'm still going to change my behaviour in relationship to the earth, because that's what my intuition tells me to do.

Today, our hearts tell us that humanity has a reciprocal and interdependent relationship with the earth, and that if we all acted in harmony with Her we would experience a fundamentally different world.

We'd cling less to dramatic headlines and the comfort of our TV experts, we wouldn’t blur the lines between natural disaster and man-made catastrophe, we'd sync into natural cycles and JUST KNOW what our place in all this was.

Humans are the only living things that compulsively live and work against their own natural cycles, and as such against their own well being. Homosapien is an entire race of Homer Simpsons sticking its fingers into a light socket over and over again to see if maybe THIS TIME we get a different result. Intuition cuts through this crazy behaviour.

Our hearts tell us that living simply and closer to the land is not just common sense but ultimately the key to lasting happiness and a fulfilled life.

That individual rights and social responsibility are not mutually exclusive, and that in fact loving service of others is the key to Self discovery.

Our intuition tells us to reject the idea that we are all helpless victims of life. And most importantly that we don't need another extreme weather event to verify our intuition to live in harmony with the earth.

As the earthquake rocked Japan and split open her nuclear reactors, Nick arranged a barter with his neighbour, to acquire his first Bee hive that will soon help to pollinate his family's vegetable plot and increase its yield.

Pat planted seeds. Just three windowsills and some pots – but in the middle of the city this is her Eden, her way of staying grounded and putting something back.

What does your intuition tell you to do?

 

 

 

Seeing stars

Pat Thomas

 

Early in January BBC2 broadcast Stargazing Live, a three-night experiment in looking at the stars. The programme, truth be told, was nearly as dull as the night skies over that period. Until...

Dara O'Briain said it first: “Let’s get this straight once and for all, astrology is rubbish”. Then Brian Cox, agreed: “in the interests of balance on the BBC, yes astrology is nonsense.”

This was the second time I’d heard the normally pleasant Brian Cox say something like this and while I admire both men, they completely lost me at that point. I switched off.

Offended is too strong a word. I’d have to care about their opinions to be offended. So, 'miffed' maybe. Because I enjoy astrology as a hobby, and who the fuck are these big-headed blokes to tell me that my hobby, something that I derive pleasure from, is “nonsense” or “rubbish”?

I was miffed, also, by the beside-the-pointness of it all. If Madonna had exposed her breasts on stage, or Russell Brand had humiliated yet another unsuspecting victim live on radio we would all have dismissed it as a tiresome and rather desperate grab for attention. Since the clouds in the sky failed to part during their three-day, mid-winter experiment in real time astronomy, maybe that’s just what it was.

The Guardian’s ‘proper science’ bores got involved in the ensuing controversy this week. When the British Astrological Society started up a small petition to ask the BBC to apologise for this unnecessary, ignorant outburst,  reporter  Martin Robbins, the ‘Lay Scientist’ (surely an oxymoron, since in the 'proper science' club the right credentials are sooo important) said he wanted to start his own petition for people who think astrology is rubbish.  

Robbins marvelled at the “continued ability of the astrological industry to lift hundreds of millions of euros, pounds and dollars out of the pockets of customers each year.”

All I can say is phew!, and thank goodness that ‘proper science’ hasn’t been corrupted by money. It would be a disaster if it ever got hijacked by the corporate machine and started concluding conclusions that were predetermined by whoever footed the bill.

For instance like in the 2005 a survey of 3247 publicly funded scientists, published in the journal Nature, which found that 15.5% of those questioned admitted to altering design, methodology or results of their studies due to pressure of an external funding source. Nature light-heartedly referred to it as Scientists Behaving Badly.

The same year the New England Journal of Medicine explored what it called Academic Medical Centers' Standards for Clinical-Trial Agreements with Industry and revealed that a similar proportion of the 107 medical research institutions questioned were willing to allow pharmaceutical companies sponsoring research to alter manuscripts according to their interests before they were submitted for publication.

Think things have got better in the ensuing 5 years? See the report Science and the Corporate Agenda: The detrimental effects of commercial influence on science and technology by Scientists for Global Responsibility. 

Glass houses? Stones? Cleaning up you own back garden first? Anyone? Seems to me that it’s not astrology that needs defending. Or criticising.

With that in mind I would venture, however, that good, intelligent astrology – as opposed to the pap that the Coxes/O’Briains/Robbinses unfailingly hold up as relevant examples – is a journey into in perception and non-linear thinking. It is a journey into symbolism, metaphor, alchemy and psychology. It is also a journey into humility, since it reminds us that we are not masters of the universe but simply, humbly part of a greater whole.

I enjoy Brian Cox and Dara O'Briain for their entertainment value – except possibly when they are doing a double act, which was frankly lacking in any real chemistry – human chemistry, that is, rather than the kind that gets so lavishly funded by Monsanto, Bayer, Dow, DuPont, BASF, Syngenta and all the rest. 

But clearly they are both very limited, linear thinkers and, it seems to me, deeply – if unconsciously – insecure about the limitations this places on their understanding of the world. Why else would they choose to make such beside-the-point interjections about astrology on a show about astronomy? The only thing that would have been more beside-the-point would have been one of Dara's famous rants about herbal medicine.

Linear thinkers are, frankly, last year’s models. Linear thinkers’ obsessive focus on what is makes it impossible to envison what could be. The world is more complex and more wondrous than any of us can know and the creative, non-linear thinking that disciplines like astrology, mythology and psychology (not to mention all of the arts) require is what's in demand to solve our current and future problems. Sir Ken Robinson, an internationally recognised leader in the development of creativity, innovation and human resources, refers to the need for more non-linear thinkers as our learning revolution.

I for one would hate to look up into the sky and only ever see a bunch of rocks, dust particles, ice crystals and gases (though I appreciate the wondrousness of these things too). I want to look up and feel inspired, awed, comforted, proud of my human sentience but likewise humbled by how little I really know and full of anticipation of how much I have yet to learn.  

Humans have a long history of making sense of their lives through storytelling, metaphor and symbolism. It’s helpful particularly in situations that are complex or where there are overwhelming emotions to deal with, or new territory to negotiate. Some of us make sense of our lives by comparing our stories to those we see on TV or in the movies.  Others prefer older stories, symbolism and myth. Indeed Carl Jung the founder of modern psychology, believed astrology was an early human attempt at understanding the psyche and making sense of the world. He studied astrology in relation to his work on projection and collective archetypes. He noted in his book Modern Man in Search of a Soul: "We are born at a given moment, in a given place, and we have, like the best wines, the quality of the year and the season which witness our birth."

For some of us the stories and symbolism of astrology are just that bit richer, deeper and more consistent than EastEnders or Jordan's most recent love trauma or the latest Posh and Becks saga.

To dismiss something that, at worst, is a harmless pleasure for many and at best a means to genuine insight for others is not just insensitive, it’s crass. I broadly agree with the British Astrological Society. The BBC should own up to encouraging a kind of ‘profiling’ that characterises anyone with an interest in astrology as a brainless kook while holding up those who choose to criticise it as intellectuals. I doubt the BAS will get satisfaction. There is nothing in the BBC Charter that says you can’t be an arrogant asshole on TV.

Logic has its limits, as Edward De Bono would say. There’s room for all of us, for a whole diversity of interests and ways of looking at things. And I’d certainly match my brain, my ability to reason, my logic and my perception against that of Brian Cox or Dara O'Briain or the geeks at the Guardian who see themselves as defenders of some absolute, unbending 'truth'. Whatismore, it amuses me that none of these men seems to possess enough insight to ‘get’ that the need to somehow protect ‘proper science’ from astrology is indicative of just how fragile and unsteady and biased and unreliable that science has become.

More open-minded and less (pre)judgemental, boys – isn’t that the basis of all good science?

This post first apeared on Pat's website, Howl at the Moon.

Reframing the well-being debate: it’s political not scientific

William Bloom


There is an elephant in  the holistic healthcare room. It causes embarrassment. It triggers intellectual sneers.  The most experienced of practitioners and teachers may have trouble talking about it.     This creature is sometimes known as vitality, or prana, qi, or just energy. The challenge of bringing together mechanistic medicine with the more subtle aspects of life, is a big one. One worldview — contemporary mechanistic western medical science — finds the idea of prana preposterous.  The other — the complementary, holistic, integrative approach — uses it as a foundation for many of its healing models.  

My own first skirmishes in this paradigm war took place decades ago with my father, a medical doctor and Freudian psychiatrist. When arguing with me, his intellectual outrage at the idea of a healing energy became sublimated into a passive aggressive dismissal, suggesting (I am serious) that I might need psychoanalytic therapy to help me overcome this infantile delusion. For many years I felt diminished and infantilised by his patronising put down; and I see that same anxiety in many of my complementary friends who want the approval of their mainstream colleagues — as if their mainstream colleagues represented parental love, safety and acceptance.  

Decades on, however, I understand my father’s behaviour. His demeaning putdown was actually the defensiveness of a man looking down a barrel at a different perspective that, if admitted, would dismantle his paradigm, his sense of identity, his status and the way he lived. The concept of prana attacked his worldview. He hid from the threat behind a smokescreen of pomposity and regal certainty.  Enough! I know that you know what I’m writing about here.

When opposing paradigms clash, the fury of the disagreements is not simply fuelled by logic and methodology. It is not just ‘good science’ versus ‘bad science’. The fury is fuelled by the emotional and psychological investments made by the parties. For a while I was an academic social theorist and I was particularly attracted to the Frankfurt school of critical theory, which uses Marxism and psychoanalysis as a method for deconstructing the internal drives that glue us to our worldviews. In sociology there is a concept called Mannheim’s Paradox, which asks whether it is possible ever to think oneself out of one’s paradigm, because we are trapped by the very patterns of our thought process, and they themselves belong to our prevailing paradigm. It is the snake swallowing its own tail.

The laboured point that I am making is that the business of transforming a paradigm — in this case the prevailing clunky model of western medical science — is not simple. It is charged and it is complex. It is a psychological and a political process. Medical scholars in particular are rarely going to jump ship unless their status is maintained. With decades of neural grooves embedded in habitual, unconscious survival drives, what possible motivation could make losing their status feel okay? I remember reading the Hansard reports of debates around complementary medicine.  Apparently many MPs and peers who supported it had a personal experience of how holistic medicine had helped them or a loved one through a crisis. But otherwise, failing a moment of crisis or epiphany, people will hang on to their identities and worldviews for dear life.

Before looking more closely at the political dynamics, let us ask an important question.
  
What do we really want?  And is what we want radically different from the mainstream model? In answering these questions, I suggest that it is helpful to expand the argument away from the academic domain, outwards towards government policy and NHS management.  Best practice in UK personal and community healthcare is already explicitly seeking to be holistic. The policy directives are clear and sing from the same song sheet. The basics include good food, fresh water, safe accommodation, safe streets, education, social acceptance, being valued, harmonious environment, faith, spirituality and religion. In this public health model of healthcare, physical wellbeing is connected to psychological wellbeing, which is linked to social-psychological wellbeing.   Social-psychological wellbeing is itself connected to issues of faith and spirituality, and to the existential realities of the surrounding society and culture.

If this is the case, then what makes a complementary practitioner’s holistic approach so different from a governmental holistic approach? It seems to be the elephant in the room again.

The fully holistic model includes the idea that some sort of ‘subtle information’ connects these different levels of wellbeing.  All the medical and healing models of the East, particularly Ayurveda and Taoism, but also indigenous traditions the world over include this fundamental notion of connectedness.  All of these approaches consider prana, qi, benevolent vitality and healing energy to be an essential component of their thinking and working practice. According to these systems of medicine, being connected with the universe through the benevolent forces of nature is a fundamental aspect of health.  

To put it another way, the whole wellbeing project is hopelessly incomplete unless it includes prana, chi, vitality. Yet we know that mechanistic medicine and research are hostile to this notion of subtle information. Government policy, however, is on our side.  

We are looking at a paradigm conflict. Let us be realistic. We know from painful experience that until mechanistic medicine has devised some rigorous gizmo that can measure and can manage prana, there will be no transformation of the mechanistic paradigm. So let us forget about winning the academic, scientific argument and focus on the politics and the overarching framework. We should argue holistically, not scientifically. There are lessons to be learnt here from political campaigning, one of which is the art of reframing the argument. In the ongoing US debate over healthcare reform, for example, the Republicans consistently reframe the discussion so that it becomes an issue of patriotism: healthcare reform reflects they say un-American attitudes that would offend the founding fathers. British political campaigning, as we all know, is often not about policies, but about the framework within which the day’s discussion takes place.
 
Let us therefore avoid the good science versus bad science bickering, and instead think about how to reframe the wellbeing debate so that it works to everyone’s benefit.

We need to notice that the current language and priorities of the NHS explicitly support, encourage and insist upon including the spiritual dimension. (If you just google ‘NHS Faith and Spirituality Action Plan’ you will immediately find dozens of reports from NHS trusts on how they are putting the plan into action). It is also, for example, explicit in The Revised Guidance on Spiritual Care and Chaplaincy in NHS Scotland 2008, which states that, 'NHS Scotland is committed to providing or facilitating spiritual and religious care with equal commitment to any within its care'. And best practice in psychiatric care increasingly allows space for the patient’s own beliefs and spiritual story. (For more on this, visit the Royal College of Psychiatrist’s Spirituality and Psychiatry Special Interest Group.)

Professor Dawkins’ god-free ideas have no influence within healthcare provision. Politically this pluralism is partly due to the government’s need to avoid inflaming religious and racial conflict, and to integrate the Muslim community into UK citizenship. But it is also undeniable that the faith communities have a deep heritage of service ethos. Whatever your wider opinion of religion, in the past it has very often been a force for good in developing humane treatment and good care in medicine.     As for its future role, I see a dynamically new (or maybe it is ancient) model of spirituality fast emerging. The statistics and the general evidence are clear: although a substantial proportion of people in the developed world have moved on from being aligned with one particular religion, they have not become atheistic.  

Many have adopted a more general view of spirituality, understanding it as a personal experience of the wonder and energy of life, and sensing that this connectedness is good for our health and wellbeing.

That health and wellbeing are positively affected by spirituality can even be validated using theories borrowed from atheistic socio-biology and evolutionary psychology. In fact it was the father of socio-biology E.O. Wilson, who put forward the theory of biophilia.  Pointing out that humans are hard-wired for affiliation with the  natural world, from a grain of sand through to the night sky and mystery of the cosmos, and that this  is good and uplifting for us.  This connectedness he believed to be the primal source of the religious instinct, in that we feel good when we connect and are in rapport with the natural world. (E.O. Wilson, Biophilia, Harvard University Press, 1990.) His explanation for this deep sense of belonging to the natural world is that all that we are made of the same stuff that came from the Big Bang. This is not rigorous socio-biological theory, but it is a clear philosophical proposition and surely looks like spirituality masquerading under other name.

This then is the reframe.

Stop having the scientific argument. It is a waste of time and energy.  Reframe it as a simple statement:  ‘spirituality is an essential part of wellbeing’.  And take note that this statement, as well as the notion of spirituality as a natural sense of connectedness, has some serious scientific foundations. Then notice too that we have already won the debate and paradigm war.  Wellbeing is already part of the government’s health policy package, and Concern for Spirituality is clearly named as a marker of best practice in the NHS.

So we can take the high ground, stop the futile scientific debate and assert that the fully holistic approach includes levels of analysis beyond the mechanistic model, and that is already supported by NHS directives on best practice.

***

This level of political activity, managing the framework within which the discourse happens, also has to be grounded in real life one-to-one activity. Let me give a relevant example from my own work. For the last decade I have been facilitating workshops and trainings, which begin with a simple question. 

‘What circumstances most easily connect you with the wonder and energy of life?’

The answers that come from the participants cover a wide spectrum. They include, for example: nature, art, relationships, hobbies, dance, meditation and pets.

I then ask a second question, which is rhetorical, but helps people to remember the value of connecting.

 ‘Is it good for you to connect with the wonder and energy of life?’  

Please note that these questions can be addressed to anyone. ‘ Professor Dawkins, when you  look through your telescope at the magnificence of the cosmos or walk through nature, is that good  for you? Of course, it is. Why? What are the mechanics of your biophilic response?’  In this context, a simple phrase — not intellectualised — such as ‘connecting with the  wonder and energy of nature and life’ is  understandable and acceptable. It has no immediate connotations of faith and religion; nor does it directly imply the existence of prana. Yet this sense of connectedness and its benefits to wellbeing resist explanation by coherent and rigorous scientific methodology. The NHS is not bothered by this lack of theory and requires no explanation for what is self-evident, simply and clearly asserting that the inclusion of spirituality is best practice. And even the most hardened mechanistic cynics can sense that it is indeed good for them too.

There is then a third question that I pose to my groups.  

‘Do you know how to turn the volume up on your experience of the wonder and energy? Do you know the skills for anchoring the consequent sense of wellbeing into your ongoing health?’ This then leads us into a discussion about breath, relaxation, mindfulness, an open heart and gratitude. What are we talking about here? Is it spirituality? Is it scientific? What matters is that it provides a foundation for wellbeing, and in one way or another complementary practitioners have a feeling that this is exactly what they are doing: reconnecting their  clients/patients with the natural flow of  life.

***

We have here the beginning of a political logic. Think globally. Act Locally.  We start with ourselves. Then clients/friends/patients.  Then the polity.  Locally, it starts with each of us looking after ourselves properly. Part of this requires regular and ongoing connection with the wonder and energy of life — in whatever way works best and most easily for you. Most of us would if we knew how to, like to spend some time every day soaking in that experience of connection. We know how good it is for us, and we need to do it for our health’s sake.

Then with our friends, clients and students, we can practise our particular healing art and enable them to come into more fluid connection with the benevolent dynamics of the natural world.  And this congruence of personal and professional practice can give us greater integrity, maturity and confidence.  From that foundation we can confidently ignore or transcend or marginalise the good science versus bad science debate, because the real issue is whether are we enabling our patients/clients/friends to make more full and wholesome connections with the wonder and energy of life, which is the foundation, the fuel and the joy of well being.

We then, I suggest, need to expand this work into society in general.  One way of doing this is to give wider and deeper meaning to the word ‘holistic’, fully acknowledging that holistic healthcare has to include all aspects of mainstream healthcare. This can be supported too by writing HOLISTIC whenever you have to fill in a form which has a religion box — especially in the UK Census March 2011. This will help to integrate the emerging 21st century spirituality — connection with wonder and energy of life — into a medical paradigm that includes both the mechanistic and the subtle.

This article was first published in Journal of Holistic Healthcare, May 2010, and is reprinted here with permission of the author William Bloom.  To find out more about William’s work as a teacher, healers and author in the field of holistic development click  http://www.williambloom.com and here http://www.holisticmap.org

Toward a beauty-centric education

Sandra B. Lubarsky

 

The two statements I hear most often whenever I bring up the subject of beauty are "Beauty is in the eye of the beholder" and "Beauty is only skin deep."

Beauty, in other words, is subjective and superficial. End of discussion.

But until about the seventeenth century, most people thought that beauty was objectively present in things. In the East and the West, beauty was associated with holiness — and with the harmony and patterns of wholeness. The Buddha's friend and first disciple, Ananda, once remarked to his master that, "Half the holy life, O master, is friendship with the beautiful, association with the beautiful, communion with the beautiful." To this, the Buddha replied, "Say not so, Ananda, say not so. It is not half the holy life. It is the whole of the holy life."

For Westerners, beauty existed in the world because of God: God was understood as being both perfectly beautiful and the reason for all created beauty. The work of God was the kosmos, literally, the order of things, in contrast to primordial chaos. Now, the word "cosmos" has been claimed by the beauty industry: a cosmetologist is someone who puts your face in order. Likewise, the word "aesthetics" now refers to the art of manicure, facials, and eyebrow shaping. But the word literally means "to feel" — its opposite is anaesthetic.

For many reasons, beauty has lost its status as elemental to the structure of the universe. Our dominant value system today is one in which money and material goods are most coveted. We live in a world in which "time is money" and in which attention to detail and to the demands of beauty is considered unnecessary extravagance. Science tells us that beauty isn't objectively real because it can't be weighed or measured. In a scientifically oriented world, we are trained to seek clear definitions before we enter into sustained inquiry, but one of beauty's most notorious deficiencies is that it seems to be resistant to definition. Many feminists as well have happily washed their hands of beauty, having experienced the demeaning effects of beauty on women. In a world of genocide and ecological decline, many artists have felt that beauty is hardly adequate to the psychological and political landscape of modernity.

Any effort to teach about sustainability presupposes the resurrection of the natural world and its value. The shift from nature as machine to nature as organism must also include a shift from beauty as a subjective value, only in the eye of the beholder, to beauty as the value that clothes life itself. This is a dramatic shift, since we have practically lost our language for beauty and our confidence in speaking of it. But beauty is intrinsic to an ecological paradigm. Life is not value-neutral; to be alive is to embody intrinsic value.

While life and beauty are not one and the same, they dance cheek to cheek. In a rhythm of reciprocity, beauty enhances life and life reaches toward beauty. Life that runs away with itself, as in the unchecked growth of cancer cells, is self-destructive; it is life against life. Life that exists in harmony, coherence, and balance (all words associated with beauty) with other life is life-promoting. This is life that wears the mantle of beauty. We have called it by the name of health, too, and of wholeness, words that are in kinship.

If we endeavor to mould a civilization in which wholeness, coherence, relationality, and feeling are central concerns, in which refining and enlarging our sensitivities to the life that surrounds us and is in us, then beauty must be embraced as a guiding principle — not an aside or an "also" — but as a core aspect of inquiry in our educational systems.

Teaching about sustainability, then, requires more than teaching about ecosystem relations, biological processes, and policy development. Sustainable education involves teaching strategies for life affirmation. Such an approach moves us away from excessive dependence on what has become the standard goal and tool of modern education, critical thinking — which also has its philosophical home in a mechanistic worldview in which knowledge is the detached examination of parts. When critical thinking is our primary tool for understanding the world, we must wonder how we can avoid the mess on the shop floor — the motors, flywheels, screws, and gaskets lying helter-skelter after the lesson in taking the world apart. Education that is beauty-centric will not neglect to study the parts, but it will not mistake the part for the whole or the whole for a mere collocation of parts. Such wholeness is an aspect of both an ecological worldview and a beauty-centric education.

Wes Jackson, who runs the Land Institute in Kansas, often shows his audiences a photo of an old oil tank, rusting away in the middle of a farmer's field. For him, that tank is a symbol of the kind of farming that he is against — farming that depends on oil rather than renewable energy. But the tank is not only an image of unsustainable farming practices; it is also an image of ugliness. There is a relationship between sustainability and beauty, and we need to begin to speak that relationship in order to give emotional honesty to our ecological work. If we do not say, "This tank is ugly, and so are these buildings, and this land use," we continue to be yoked to the mechanistic worldview which deprived the intellect of an emotional life.

The psychotherapist James Hillman has posed the sorts of aesthetic questions that must be added to our educational agendas. "What is the cost," he asks, "to physical well-being and psychological balance of careless design, of cheap dyes, inane sounds, structures, and spaces? To pass a day in an office under direct glaring light, in bad chairs, victim of the constant monotonous hum of machine noise … among artificial plants … and then, at day's end, to enter the traffic system … fast food, project housing — what does this cost? What does it cost in absenteeism, in sexual obsession … overeating and short attention span, in pharmaceutical remedies and gigantic escapism industries of wasteful shopping, chemical dependency, etc? Could the causes of major social, political, and economic issues of our time also be found in the repression of beauty?"

For the past two hundred years it must be admitted that we have failed beauty. We have allowed it to remain in the background of almost every human endeavor. And in failing beauty we have become a culture that cannot distinguish between longing and craving. Perhaps worst of all, we have made way for a singular value system — economism. What has been left empty by the death of beauty has been filled by relentless acquisitiveness. Indeed, until beauty becomes part of the foreground of our cultural life, we will not see a successful shift to an ecological paradigm.

If beauty is a core dimension of life, then to diminish it and belittle it is to diminish and belittle our own lives. Allowing beauty to play a role in the kind of education that we offer, encouraging our students to contribute to the beauty of the world, is, I believe, one of our most important strategies for sustaining the world.

Sandra B. Lubarsky is founding director of a masters program on sustainable communities at Northern Arizona University (http://home.nau.edu/sus), where she is also professor of religious studies.  She has written on religion and the environment, pluralism, and process thought and is currently at work on a manuscript on "Beauty and Sustainability."  She can be reached at Sandra.Lubarsky@nau.edu.

This essay first appeared at http://www.ecoliteracy.org.

How to find spirit in the sludge

Pat Thomas

 

It was with some trepidation that I recently  tweeted an unconventional prayer for the Gulf of Mexico. Bang goes my badass eco persona. And possibly my intellectual credibility.

It’s extraordinary that those of us who identify as ‘spiritual but not religious’ (SBNR – there’s even a facebook page) are so often afraid to admit to our esoteric sides for fear of being dismissed as incapable of rational thought or scientific understanding – or worse lumped in with the extreme end of the spectrum goofy narcissistic new-agers.

Nuts to that – I won’t be pigeon-holed.

My longheld belief is that we need to look at and understand the world, and each other, and current events from a lot of different perspectives in order to keep our thinking sharp and our souls courageous.

Besides, it wasn’t just that the poem that moved me. It was also my growing unease with the media scramble to be first with the biggest exclusives, the freshest perspectives and the hardest facts on the Gulf disaster. In newsrooms across the globe you can smell the testosterone, even amongst the women, as everyone elbows everyone else out of the way in the battle for a prominent byline and a place in the history of the event.

For politicians, likewise, the BP disaster is an opportunity to tough talk the spill in terms of national pride, economics, political gain and stock market prices. It’s a hot potato in the apparently ‘special’ relationship between the US and the UK. Same again with social network sites like Twitter which, at their best, can be rich sources of different perspectives and original thought, but which have become awash with received opinions and endless retweets of the same old (BP) stories.

The melee has plunged us into information overload. We are drowning in a sludgy sea of everything from number crunching the gallons of oil lost, to the bookies' odds on which endangered species will drift into extinction first. It’s an overwhelming tidal wave of ever longer strings of adjectives describing the horror of unfolding events.

I think I must be suffering from Gulf Fatigue, and I can’t help but wonder: if we continually respond from our heads, or worse from our competitive, cavemen (and cavewomen) selves aren’t we in danger of reinforcing the same kind of cultural shallowness and even arrogance, that led to the explosion in the first place? Doesn’t the overload follow the same dreary business-as-usual way of being and threaten to endanger certain things in us as human beings? Perspective for one. A thoughtful felt response for another. And I suppose a sense of spiritual wounding as well.

When I talk about a spiritual response to the Gulf, I am speaking less about lighting candles and burning incense and chanting and more about a well-rounded response that includes the raw facts, the number crunching, certainly, but also one that acknowledges the fear, the shock, the symbolic nature of the event and the grief. I am speaking of both head and heart.

Thus, in my state of spiritual and emotional Gulf exhaustion, those recent stories that have really grabbed me have been the ‘softer’ ones which are rich in the symbolism of the event and help connect, in a human way, with a disaster that would otherwise be abstract and incomprehensible.

For instance at Planet Waves, where civil action and political commentary meet thoughtful astrology (and a touch of liberated sexuality), the inimitable Eric Francis  riffed on the totem meanings for Pelicans (help us float above the surface of the water when life's trials and tribulations get intense), Turtles (guardians of time, and representative of the Great Mother) and Dolphins (guardians of breath, which take us to another dimension of reality) and looked at the watery overtones of the current planetary setup and the watery emotional dimension of the spill:

“Now we have an uncontrolled toxic release from below the bottom of the sea, contaminating the realm of feelings, dreams and visions. More significantly, the sensitive, fertile meeting places where land meets water are taking the worst beating, and will take the longest to return to a position where they can sustain life. This region where land meets water is where we go for inspiration, rejuvenation and those rare moments of relaxation. And now that space, on the Earth and in our psyches, is being fouled.”

At Common Dreams, Jill S. Schneiderman, Professor of Earth Science at Vassar College described the spill as “as a bellwether of slow violence” – a term coined by Rob Nixon to describe acts whose “lethal repercussions sprawl across space and time.”

She writes:

“Devastated communities and environmental refugees, dead or injured living beings, and absolutely altered land, water, and air...brutality in the guise of slow-moving and spatially extensive environmental transformations that are out of sync with the nano-second attention spans of the 21st century. But what will enable us unflaggingly to confront slow violence?

“In her memoir, Faith: Trusting Your Own Deepest Experience, Sharon Salzberg writes, ‘When we stand before a chasm of futility, it is first of all faith in this [the] larger perspective that enables us to go on.’ Some might scoff at the idea that faith has any place as a healing quality, a refuge, during this calamity and in the future it foreshadows. But human beings must begin to live and act in accordance with the reality of connectedness famously articulated by John Muir: ‘When we try to pick out anything by itself we find that it is bound fast by a thousand invisible cords that cannot be broken, to everything in the universe.'"

Amen. This is writing for the soul – as necessary as writing for the mind and too often absent from the ‘news’  in times of crisis.

What is more, this isn’t the SBNR new-ageism of yesterday with its 'me, me, me' overtones. With its spiritual materialism and chanting for abundance, for that lottery win and for that shiny new Hummer in the garage. This is intelligent spiritualism focused more on 'us, us, us'. On our interconnectedness, on our interdependence, on the solid understanding that our actions have consequences and on the bigger picture.

As the markets continue to collapse and BPs’ shares take a nosedive, there are some groups and individuals who are focusing on a nexus of economics and spirituality and who believe that the economic life of a nation is reflective of its spiritual attitudes. There are a lot of hurdles before we can start humanising economics; not the least of which is what green economist Molly Scott Cato calls the Rational Economic Man (REM) – the antithesis of the Earth Mother, who lives obsessively in his head and not in his body and nurtures a self-image of invulnerability and intellectual superiority. For me at least, the image of REM made the issue of economics personal again and reinforced my belief that we can’t get through all the tough times ahead by thought alone.

When we tackle the crises like Deepwater Horizon with our heads only we are aping Rational Economic Man, or Rational Political Man (or in the case of my profession Rational Journalist Man) winning at all costs but failing to get to the heart of things, failing to see where change needs to happen, and failing to feel our own sense of connectedness and responsibility. Without that spiritual and emotional IQ we’re only half as smart as we think we are.

It’s spiritual maturity or bust for our planet and its people. You choose. Which is it going to be?

A longer version of this piece can be found at Pat’s website Howl at the Moon, here.

Let’s talk about failure

David Key and Osbert Lancaster

with PatThomas

"I tell clients we can beat climate change, I don't say we might fail",  says a leading sustainability adviser. "It's like coaching a football team going up against strong competition, you tell them they can win. You don't tell them the opposition's tough and they're likely to be thrashed."

Variations on this analogy dominate discussion of climate change – especially communications to build public support for a strong and binding deal in Cancún in Mexico in November: “We've got to win, if we all try hard enough we will win...”; “Don't mention failure, no one will be inspired and we'll fail...”

As Football World Cup fever grows, flags are waiving and the chants of “win, win, win” are getting louder. But lose at football and you can play again. Lose at the climate challenge and climate related disasters affect hundreds of millions of people;  economic impacts could be hundreds of billions of dollars and sea level rises could affect 1 in 10 of the world's population.  And there’s no rematch.

'Got-to-win' is simply the wrong approach to communicate about situations where the possibility of failure is real, the impact of doing so significant and the opportunity for recovery limited.

We need honesty about the possibility of failure. Unless failure is an option, you can't make contingency plans. Without realistic contingency plans in development we lose valuable time if things do go wrong.

This notion of failure raised its head recently in the lengthy debate between George Monbiot of the Guardian newspaper, Paul Kingsnorth of the newly established Dark Mountain Project and a multitude of readers. The debate itself began with Monbiot’s question of whether Dark Mountain Project’s call to withdraw from the fight against climate change and instead concentrate on building a culture that was strong enough to withstand the inevitable changes was an effective way to go. Monbiot thought not and suggested that a ‘sit back and wait’ approach simply conspired in “the destruction of everything greens are supposed to value”. Readers’ comments became more aggressive and focused on ‘got-to-win’ as confusion between a political movement and a cultural one became more entrenched.

Plan C’s Pat Thomas weighed-in briefly with a question about ‘failure’. She wrote: “Although superficially positioned as a response to the world out there, Dark Mountain seems to me to be more of a projection of an inner struggle that a many of us are currently facing. If what we have devoted our lives to, and what we know, has no real influence, if what we try to do isn’t working, or not working fast enough, if we have failed to communicate effectively, have we failed and, more significantly, are we failures?”

The question was ignored in a show-down between George and Paul that was just so... male. Even more of the same intellectual, techno-scientific, oppositional thinking that has created the mess in the first place.

At Footprint, our feeling is that the Dark Mountain Project challenges something fundamental and shadowy in environmentalism and in the wider world: the myth of control – and by association, of doing, of winning at all costs. It’s fascinating to see the environmental movement struggle with this myth – when control is a feature of the very system most of them are trying to oppose!

The challenge is to integrate into our lives our increasing clarity about not being in control. But this needs to be done in a healthy way rather than a nihilistic one.

The qualities of relationship that are healthy are always the same, whether they refer to our relationships with ourselves, other people or the rest of nature. Trust, empathy, compassion, humility, acceptance of a power greater than the individual – apply these to any relationship and healing will emerge.

In this respect, the idea of palliative care for our species is powerful and helpful. The obvious conclusions about death are easy to draw. But the truth is that palliative care – because of the emphasis on Being (the relational qualities) rather than doing – can lead, counter-intuitively perhaps, to healing. This is not uncommon. This healing arises from authentic acknowledgement and acceptance of death itself. 

Acceptance is the starting point to healing, not the point of resignation to the apparently inevitable.

It’s not that we should 'do nothing', nor should we enter some manic cycle of eco-anorexia where we all starve our souls in the process of trying to save all that we perceive as external (the planet). Like the Dark Mountain Project, we need to be honest about the likely outcomes of our current path (which we show no signs of stepping off) and start the hard work of accepting and then integrating this realism into our lives. 

The delightful irony is that this integration is likely to be congruent with living more lightly. It is not congruent with 'doing nothing' which requires the same type of denial as 'doing until you drop'.

In the mean time the debate around the Dark Mountain Project will either continue to polarise until it ossifies and gets totally stuck, or acceptance will dawn and, after a period of anger, sorrow and despair – a process of grieving – the healing can begin.

Perhaps this grieving is what we are witnessing now. Let’s hope so.

----------

David Key and Osbert Lancaster are directrors of Footprint Consulting, the mission of which is to promote ecological sustainability and social justice through personal and organisational development.

What do you do when the hand of fate presses pause?

Nick Kettles

It’s a rainy day at a fete in beautiful, rural South West France, near the Pyrenees.  The tannoy system is being manned by a jovial man in his fifties, tasked with the job of announcing the next event, prize winners and parking problems over the crackly microphone.   

He’s doing a Stirling job, not only with his key announcements, but also his charming, running commentary about local history, the minutiae of a typical French village celebration, and what it was like last year when it wasn’t raining.    

One suspects he may be filling the spaces between his key announcements, to keep people interested in spite of the rain, in the same way DJ’s waffle on in between records, or simply to avoid the whine and whistle caused by turning a tannoy on and off, too often.  But then something happens which reveals there may be a different reason for his bubbling banter.   

The generator which has been keeping the tannoy system running, runs out of petrol without warning, and leaves our announcer suddenly severed from his audience. 

Without his banter, the contrast is stark.  It is uncomfortable. We don’t know what to do. Everyone suddenly stops moving and talking, like marionettes without an animator. <

The awkward silence stretches on, people shuffle disorientated, heave and sigh, talk in muffled voices, avoid each other’s gaze, before finally, like a clarion call that life has once more commenced, the generator roars into life and after a long whining noise signalling the tannoy is back in action, the announcer reanimates us, and we shuffle on to resume our pre-interruption tour of the fete.

Could it be that even in rural France, where many still rise in the morning to the sound of the cock crowing people have become so conditioned to aural blight through different media from an early age, that they need a constant stream of background noise, in order to feel comfortable with themselves?

Or, more likely, that they are just like nearly every other human being in the Western world, who feels naked, exposed and vulnerable, when the system they have invested so much faith in temporarily breaks down?

I would venture that this is exactly how the many thousands of people left stranded by the grounding of thousands of air flights across Europe felt.

I wonder if any of them, saw it as an opportunity to reconsider their place in the world, and whether another way of living in relation to the earth and each other, is possible?   

How many will have considered what their lives might be like without the pineapple chunks form Ghana or baby sweetcorn from Thailand or cut flowers from Africa, which arrive on their supermarket shelves via air cargo freight plane?    

If some of them had stepped out of the airport waiting lounge, for a while will they have noticed that in the sky free of contrails, the birds were singing louder – no doubt appreciating the opportunity to call for a mate in daylight.   

Previous reports suggest that  London birds had taken to singing at night, because they couldn’t get a tweet in edgewise above the noise pollution to which air flights contribute significantly.

Or, might they have taken the opportunity to be curious about the people sitting next to them, beyond the fact they were waiting for the same flight.  If they had struck up conversation, how many would have reached the same conclusions Corrina Gordon-Barnes explores in her incredibly prescient blog post “When All The Planes Are Grounded.”?    

Or will people have simply associated these moments of quiet reflection as synonymous with boredom, lassitude, lack of choice and, more worryingly, the fear of being out of touch with what the next ‘new thing’ is? 

Always on, comfortably numb by degree, and completely oblivious of our place in the world, until the hand that turns the wheel of fate presses the pause button momentarily and we are forced to reconsider our raison d’etre for existing?   

We don’t need to wait for further Nature inspired interruptions, such as Iceland’s volcanic eruption, to wake us from our stupor, and knock us from our Hamster wheels, but that may be the only way we learn to reconnect with the web of life, where our inter-dependence is self evident in every choice we make.

If they do come, the first step will be to recognize that our fear and sense of vulnerability is not a sign of impending doom, but instead a powerful emotion which can be used to raise our awareness of not just how to deal with contingency, but to also consider a new way of being and relating with one and other.