“Empathy is a spontaneous experience that forcefully shatters all notions of being fully separate. Having empathy with other than human animals (and plants, forests, rocks, oceans, rivers, canyons, clouds, sunsets, marshes, etc. etc. etc.) means allowing ourselves to reconnect with those other-than-human-like parts of ourselves.” The words in parentheses are mine to expand on this quote from Martin Lee Mueller.
I read Caitlin Johnstone’s latest article in the Grapevine, which inspired me to add a few thoughts before you read the following poem I wrote. The idea that positive changes in behavior are preceded by an expansion of consciousness raises the question of how to authentically raise human consciousness. I suspect that many brainwashed humans need to decenter the conditioned socially sanctioned anthropocentric/civilized mind and replace it with an animistic/panpsychism worldview. Panpsychism arises out of direct experience and empathy for all life forms; in Thomas Berry’s words, all beings, even rocks and mountains and microbes are “a communion of subjects.” Animism, according to Stephan Harding, “places more emphasis on working out how to behave in relation to these subjects by rooting ourselves more explicitly in the perception of indigenous peoples.” Our indigeneity, like our empathy, (well sorry but I dislike viruses and pathogens), is innate like a seed inside a fruit; waiting to be planted and nurtured. When we decide, each and every day, to let the mind play with the inherent creativity of the natural world, we are then released from greed, hatred and delusion. This kind of empathy goes against the mainstream and allows us to love ourselves, each other and the natural world.
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Treason is Fertile: Empathy with Emily
A single gigantic Sequoia tree still stands
At the corner of Burnside and Finlayson Streets
Where once lay, a rebel ragged girl, in the cool shade of
mossy ferns, by an ancient creek.
A trunk wide as the Goldstream River, and as tall as a tall cumulus cloud.
I met You 53 years ago
Walking along a bleak Victoria sidewalk,
Lost in a cloud of despair and filthy air, then
Awakened by a spiralling, trembling Gaian Giant.
“Treason” she whispered through the roar of relentless cars,
booming airplanes overhead, screeching sirens, flashing used car lot signs,
stinking fast food joints/beauty parlors, and banging construction machinery.
You, with no forest friends, no creeks, no crickets or frogs,
stay alive, even thrive
withstanding the glaring lights, metal clang and hard hot pavement.
Emily Carr was out riding her bike one day
and stopped at the ocean’s edge and spied a treasure
A strange-looking seed from faraway, she guessed.
She put it into her apron pocket and
wandered up the hillside full of tall grass and wildflowers.
At the top, she ate her lunch and
all afternoon sketched the Garry Oak meadows
Pulling out her pencils, the seed escaped
following a wrinkle in time.
Treason, it is, to be a lonely forest/sky painter.
poet, writer, child and husband-free
145 years ago, laughing in the face
of Victorian repressive, straight-laced respectable society
Emily of the Sequoia Tribe,
the Orca Tribe, the Wildflower Tribe,
Listening to the wind off the cliffs
instead of dining at the Elitist Empress Hotel.
May hurting humans tread the path of empathy
Loving the atoms’ inside vibrating starfields
Loosening fear with the compass of compassion
Dis-solving into trees’ steadfast roots and rhizomes pathways.
May forest seeds spread
Over the highways, carried on winds into damp ravines where
New dreams might sprout and shout:
“Treason is the reason life is so fertile.”
