The Seduction of Ease...
... the disastrous affects that our obsession with comfort and acquisition has wrought.
There is so much more to what is happening to the world than we can see. Broader karma. Observing without getting drawn into the maelstrom is nearly impossible; taking action while trying to live even more so, for most of us. It is not just the degradation and discounting of vast swaths of humanity that we face, again. That is horrific enough. It is the very destruction of the planet itself that we are facing.
We hide from the affects of our existence, seduced by the ease with which the water pours from a turned tap; by the dropping of a bag of trash into a receptacle that is whisked away out of sight; by the flushing of a commode that removes our waste so neatly and pristinely. We get into our vehicles that release clouds of ozone-destroying gasses and we drive to a store where our food is packaged for us, often into containers of plastic origin, all the processes that it took to bring it to us easily forgotten in our desire, in our hunger, in our boredom. We suddenly dislike the color of our couch and put it out by the road and buy another; our phones are not the newest model and are replaced; our clothes boring, so they too end up discarded. Even our prayers cause destruction as the balloons they are written on and in plummet back to the Earth to filthy our seas and injure other living things. Our detritus appearing to vanish as we collect, hoard, discard in an endless cycle of unconscious consumption.
It is not just humanity that we risk in our reckless, foolhardy, arrogant existence on this beautiful planet. We risk that which is unseen, that which we refuse to see, and that which we may never see because our actions wipe it out of existence. As our numbers increase we claim more and more space from the wild ones, not only for food and multiple houses and packed storage units we never visit, but as if it is our right to do this. As if we own this planet, and are not part of it. Even the best and most consciously aware among us cannot escape their imprint on the environment. The human world is set up to discard and exploit, not to reclaim, recover, re-use.
I long for the day we wake up and mature as a species, but I despair it already may be too late. The threshold of retreat and repair has been crossed, at least for us, at least for those we have made extinct. And there is nowhere to run; there is nowhere else for us to go. Despite our dreams and desires to explore and expand beyond this planet, despite megalomaniacal narcissistic promises, despite and in some ways because of "scientific advances", despite religion's promises of eternal salvation, consider this fully:
There is nowhere else for us to go.
We are here. We are only here. And there is no one coming to 'save us'. We must save ourselves. WE are responsible for this mess.
We have raped, scoured, over-populated and abused this planet for aeons. Control over is not just reflected in our politics; it is reflected in our belief as a collective that we get to do whatever the hell we want. We do not want to believe that anything besides us have rights; a too-large segment of our population does not even want to extend those "rights" to all humans. And yet, we keep going as we have always done, our potential as a species dying with the planet we claim to rule.
The Earth will continue, but whether she remains a place conducive to human life is another matter. Life will go on, but it may not look like anything we have been graced to exist as part of. What a profound loss that will be; what an opportunity, wasted. We will have fulfilled our own dire prophecies, and at great cost. A cost that has nothing to do with coin.
And the question remains: What are we going to do about it? Are we going to let the seduction of ease continue to influence our behaviour, or are we willing to risk that comfort, that ease, to bring about the changes that will be necessary to correct this doomed course we are on? What more will it take for us to claim responsibility and make amends? Do we have the courage, or are we willing to let it all fall because we are not humble enough to live as part of this world, and not above it. Time, as always, will bear Witness to that answer, even if we are no longer around to see it.
I will leave you with wise words from Rhyd Wildermuth, of A Beautiful Resistance on Gods and Radicals Press and From the Forests of Arduinna:
Nature doesn’t desire to be remade, altered, transcended, fixed, or modified, and almost all our civilizational conflicts and modern crises derive from our attempts to force nature to conform to our desires, rather than its own.
Original Content | 11 March 2023
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