Listening to public radio a couple of weeks ago I heard that Stevenson Ranch in northern L.A. County was being evacuated because of the fires raging there. I immediately called my friend Marilynn and she told me that she was indeed leaving her home as we spoke trying to get her dog and her medication together. Then she said, “This is coming at the worst time in my life, so much is going on and my brother just collapsed in a restaurant last night and had to spend the night in the hospital. We have no idea why he collapsed.” “Stress perhaps?” I thought.
As I was preparing to write something about the fires for my blog the question was posed to me, “What is this [the fires] doing to the collective psyche?” As I spoke with my friend I began to ask myself the inverse, “What impact is our collective psyche having on the environment?” I thought about this question again when I found out that many of the fires were set purposely and thought to be arson.
Is it possible that we, collectively as a nation, are having a profound effect on the environment not just through our abuse of resources and neglect of stewardship but through our stress, fear and indifference? Do these emotions or lack there of play a part in the natural landscape? Does nature pick up on our emotions? And is there a sort of call and response going on between nature and ourselves?
Before Al Gore was on the scene it was a lot easier to not notice ‘the environment’. Now we drive our cars and unconsciously pick off whose driving the gas-guzzlers and who has a Prius. We notice more frequently the trash on the side of the road or when someone throws something out of her car window. We watch the soapy suds run down the street from the guy washing his car and drip into the rain gutter and think of the sea animals who will be affected by this. Where once we were blind now we cannot help but see. Where once we were ignorant now we can spout statistics for the dwindling Ecuadorian rain forests and the disappearing permafrost in Greenland. And as we learn more about global warming and the threat of terrorism and dirty bombs and the death toll in Iraq and what’s actually in our shampoo and our detergents and our lotions our fear rises along with our knowledge. It seems to me this fear is what is being projected onto our environment and reflected back to us in perfect symbiosis.
Did you know that if you put a grand piano in one corner of a room and a cello in the opposite corner and then strike any key on the piano, the cello’s complimentary string will vibrate in sympathy?
In 1935 Albert Einstein and his colleagues Boris Poldosky and Nathan Rosen set out to disprove the predictions of Quantum Mechanics that particles at one point of space-time have no effect on particles at other points of space-time. This is what’s known as the Principal of Locality. Actually, Einstein’s thought experiments proved him wrong which is why the experiment is now known as the EPR Paradox. Einstein could never accept the idea of “spooky action at a distance” or what we might term synchronicity, events seemingly unrelated having an effect on each other. About thirty years later John Bell disproved Einstein’s thought experiment concretely showing that an event or particle introduced at one point of space-time does, indeed, affect an event or particle introduced at another point of the space-time continuum. This is what’s known as non-locality and it is the widely accepted view of scientists today that this is “the way the quantum world works”. And this is happening in our world unseen by our eyes on our gross, relative level of existence all the time. Quantum non-locality, things being affected by other things, is going on all the time. Quantum mechanics proves a symbiotic relationship between things, energy and events. Spooky action at a distance is happening constantly on the quantum level. Why don’t we take a leap of judgment and surmise that this phenomenon is happening in ‘nature’ and ‘the environment’ and that there is actually no nature ‘out there’. Nature is actually us and that this experience of things being affected by other things is happening as a natural phenomenon of existence. In fact, why don’t we just assume this is what’s happening the next time we look at a flower and realize that the flower is possibly affected by the experience of being looked at. There is no difference between the observer and the observed. If you look at a flower from this perspective you might actually see the flower differently. You might actually see it as not separate from yourself.
Like a child taking his first steps in the world, as he walks away from his mother he continually looks back at her making sure she is watching him. He instinctively knows that he needs his mother’s attention to keep growing and maturing just like a mother knows her attention is the secret ingredient of his well-being and advancement. I believe we have a similar relationship with our environment specifically and with nature as a whole. I don’t believe that nature is in any way a child to our parental stewardship. Rather that our stewardship is part of a deeply symbiotic relationship that has always needed attention. We have neglected this relationship for a long time and now that we can see ourselves driving off the cliff of evolution as a real possibility we are playing catch up. But this catch up is zealous, fearful, terrified and angry. Our attention to the Earth is currently rooted in these qualities. I think the Earth is rather uncomfortable with this kind of attention and is mirroring back to us this uncomfortable feeling, this fear, impatience and frustration. We have spent many years approaching our relationship to nature with a masculine (not male) thrust of action and doing. Now, maybe it’s time for a feminine shift of focus onto the simple beingness of beauty. The masculine asks, “What can we do?” “How do we do this?” The feminine instinct is to simply focus on the beauty of the thing, which appears deceiving as if we’re not doing anything. But you can’t make the kid walk, you can only watch and cheer and notice the beauty and eventually he rights himself and moves forward. This needs to be our approach to nature now.
And this brings me back to the fires. When I put my attention on the fires I can’t separate myself from what created them. I can’t help but think of the stress my friend was living in before the fires happened to her life. Multiply her stress, fear, frustration, impatience, etc. by millions and think of the energy created by that. The very essence of quantum physics is the very real study of how energy affects matter. Think of how ‘the environment’ must be feeling with all that adrenaline it needs to keep absorbing into its atmosphere just to keep equilibrium. Could you absorb all that and not go into a fiery rage?