Hope Beneath Our Feet_ Restoring Our Place in the Natural World - Martin Keogh [95]
We have spoken thoughtfully of action to heal human damage all over the world, but it is enough, really, to enter into, to craft, beautiful conversation to know that our time in Bali was well spent. If we have understood in our days together the need for good conversation, for generous, attentive, courteous, and respectful exchanges, every strategy for change we can imagine will have a good foundation.
We cannot save things. Things pass away. We can only attend to relationships, to the relationships between things. It is here that we see the most beautiful images we are capable of apprehending or imagining—the relationship between a mother and a child, the racket of sunlight on pooling water, a bird alighting on a limb.
Conversations are efforts toward good relations. They are an elementary form of reciprocity. They are the exercise of our love for each other. They are the enemies of our loneliness, our doubt, our anxiety, our tendencies to abdicate. To continue to be in good conversation over our enormous and terrifying problems is to be calling out to each other in the night. If we attend with imagination and devotion to our conversations, we will find what we need; and someone among us will act—it does not matter whom—and we will survive.
We need to thank our ancestors, who knew trouble was coming and whose prayers have brought each of us to Bali to meet, to draw wisdom and strength and renewal from each other. We need, each according to his or her gifts and by his or her own lights, to be the servants of beauty. We need to prefer being in love to being in power. We need to know that as we have met and now come to a close here in Bali, others with hearts like ours have been gathered—in Islamabad and Chengdu, in Winnipeg and San Miguel de Allende and Santiago, in Sapporo and Irkutsk and Sydney. In the villages of Alaska and India, of Nigeria and Oceania they are embracing, affirming diversity and solidarity, making vows and stepping off like blazing torches into the thousand nights that lie ahead.
Just like us.
Cherish each other. Travel in beauty. Our lives depend on it.
Barry Lopez is the author of thirteen books and numerous articles and short stories that have appeared in the United States and abroad. He received the National Book Award for Arctic Dreams and is a recipient of the Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters; the John Hay, John Burroughs, and Christopher medals; and awards from the Academy of Television Arts and Science and other institutions. His short story collections include Resistance and Light Action in the Caribbean, and his essays are collected in Crossing Open Ground and About This Life. For more, see www.barrylopez.com.
Fostering Light in Dark Times
VIVIENNE SIMON
I have always been fascinated by change and transformation. For most of my life I’ve been an activist in international environmental and human rights efforts, and for much of that time, immersed in various kinds of personal growth work as well. Despite having spent a lifetime engaging opportunities to foster growth and change, I now find the world has become a real-time living laboratory for observing and participating in transformation on a scale beyond anything I’ve known. We have reached a tipping point, and the natural and human-made structures are imploding and transforming before my eyes. For wisdom and guidance facing these troubling and challenging times, I reflect on what I’ve learned over many years of activism, and even more so, on my longtime Buddhist practices.
Hours of sitting on a meditation pillow, and the wisdom of many teachers, have taught me that the way to face everything—regardless of magnitude—is with