Open Reality: Meeting the Polycrisis Together With All Beings

This writing began with the premise that humans are not alone in this world, and that our largest problems are rooted in imagining ourselves alone. The original focus was on climate change. During the years of writing, society fell apart in multiple ways. I found myself exploring human nature, through history and prehistory, and examining how we arrived at a culture that can destroy its own home while imagining itself magnificent. Finally I investigated what we might do, here and now, to find a new direction of wholeness and kindness.

All Living Things Speak Us Into Existence

It is common to confuse the end of modern civilization with the end of human life, to think it’s too late to stop the many crises we face, to forget the lives of other beings. Here, now, we remember those other beings, and consider that something may be more powerful than our own creations.

Our bodies are water, moving with the ocean tides. Our bodies are matter, hungering for the feel of the earth underfoot. Each is a cousin of the microbes in the soil and a relative of the burr oaks up the hill.

I write not about the sixty percent of the human body composed of molecules of water, but of water that moves in the air, flows in and out, rises and swells like ocean tides, flows from high places to low, bubbles over rocks, thunders down from the sky, carves a new path through the soft earth and even through rock. That water is our birth, our home.

Humans have known forever that we are small in a large universe. Only modern humans have imagined ourselves as gods, all-powerful. And only with this fantasy have humans come to the edge of destroying life on earth. Yet we call this the only way to live.

What if there were another way to live, embedded in a world of living, conscious, sacred beings? What if that were the way to save ourselves?

What if, by recovering the deep knowing of our ancestors, we could heal the trauma that we call normal life? What if we could save ourselves, our grandchildren, millions of children and adults right now from starvation, wildfire, drowning, enslavement, from becoming refugees in a barren world?

What have we got to lose? Well, yes, the entire life that we know; yes, safety, convenience, familiarity. What else? What if we could lose the violence of poverty, end our fear of strangers, stop the epidemic of depression, walk away from addiction, leave behind the utter loneliness of trusting no one?

This body belongs here. The winds blow through, the tides move, the earth holds, and some spark of awareness makes its home in this one body called mine, in these bodies we call ours.

Seeing each other, we create each other. We are no more separate than left hand from right.

Limits

The earth is finite. It did not always seem so. When I was growing up in the 1950’s, world maps still had unknown places. The outlines of continents under ice were merely sketched in, shown as dotted lines. The power of fossil fuels seemed unlimited. We imagined settling the moon. And a four-hour drive was a big deal.

For centuries before that, people’s personal worlds were small. Ordinary people lived close to home. The cost of travel, even for the wealthy, was time, money, and danger.

Except, of course, for hunter-gatherers — yet they generally did not travel thousands of miles to new worlds.

Oddly, the hunter-gatherers, who strictly limited their fertility and their belongings, experienced an unlimited life in many ways — wandering, roaming, meeting new people—until their lands dwindled due to colonization and settlement. Modern industrial humans, collectively refusing to limit fertility or possessions, constantly struggle with personal limits, with an unfulfilled sense of entitlement that we should be able to go anywhere and have everything.

Meditation and Ritual Change the Structure of Reality

Consciousness is who we are and what we are. This doesn’t deny bones and muscles, or electrons and molecules, but includes them. Everything is mind – not “everything is imagination” but “everything is consciousness.

There are rules that say only the mundane exists and there is no sacred; or that you are alone, or you are supreme. Meditation removes those rules. It creates an opening in which everything is open and flexible, things are allowed to be as they are. In meditation it’s possible to receive the creation of all the other beings of the universe, not just the devas but the rocks and waters too. It’s possible to send out creation into them, to recognize the flow of mutual creation.

This is about giving up the fight for control and for permanence. When we lose that fight, we can be alive. We are throwing our open and luminous stillness into the creation of everything.

In Zen, we use the word “zazen” for what most people call “sitting meditation.” Thirty years ago, when I was a baby Zen student, Teijo Munnich gave a talk that changed my understanding forever. She had been looking at a text that referred to the monks “disporting themselves in zazen.” She looked up “disport” and the Japanese characters translated as “disport” both of which meant “play.”  Play is what you do with no goal. Play is a natural expression of the life force.

Sitting zazen is about letting that be so, giving up the fight for control and for permanence. Zazen is play, and the structure of reality is different in play.

Finding Our Way Back

For millennia people lived lives immersed in nature and the sacred. This was true in the times of gathering and hunting, of nomadic pastoralists and small farmers. There is power in that connection. Just as deep meditation changes you and thus also your community, communal joy and ritual transform a people.

We can find our way back and forward, we can connect again with the earth and her spirits, and we can reach both the depth and the power held there.

I propose to you that what worked for thousands of years could work again – not in some magical way but as the power of life, like the power of a healthy immune system to defeat infection.

And I propose that we begin to act as they did. Recognize the earth as our home and all beings as our family. Treat them well, work for their well-being, and partner with them in the common cause of the well-being of the Biosystem, of all of us and each of us. Join the Alliance that both defends and restores Life.

Foundations

My house is immovable. I’ve slept in it through giant storms – including one that pushed rain through the edges of perfectly good windows – and nothing shook. Nothing moved. The storm woke me, but the house was rock solid.

Might it be possible to live in a mind that won’t shake or crumble in a storm?

I don’t know every way to enter such a mind. I know one: the practice of zazen. We sit comfortably erect, and refrain from physical movement. When thoughts come up, we release them. We allow the present to exist, in pleasure or discomfort, and our mind to gradually settle. Thoughts clamor “me, me” or “warning, warning” or “outrage” or any other such thing. We allow them to slide up and over and past, without shaking us. And when shaken, we allow the emotion to slide also.

Years of such practice creates a foundation that rests quietly without disturbance. That can endure tornadoes. That can thus become a shelter.

Another practice is that of community. Spiritual community, based on shared intention to deepen and open in this way. Practical community, doing a work together. Nourishing community, tending each other and also playing together. Ecstatic community, deeply bonded by knowing the sacred together in our bodies. These communities will include some humans and perhaps some others – animals, trees, berry bushes, the creek, the grasses.

Ask for Help

A tragedy of this age is how we’ve thought ourselves alone. As individuals, families, towns, workplaces, states, nations, or the human species, we’ve imagined ourselves separate and independent. Thus we’ve been unable to imagine help from spirits, or gods or God, we’ve not asked help from forests even while our scientists describe the many ways forests help all of those within them.

Relying only on ourselves, we’ve damaged the others who might have helped us. Who have been helping us all along. The deep wilderness is the vital heart and soul of the whole of Earth, the entire Biosystem. Rather than logging and mining, we could return to worshiping. Listening. Receiving. Meditating. Making offerings. Ceremony. Humility. Prayer. Gratitude. And faith.

If you close your eyes, you can feel the energy of land and creek, rocks and bluffs, grasses and red cedar trees, blue sky and snow, all of it together.

There are practices, with the earth family or together with human community, that can help this slowing down, opening, breathing in life and the long mourning of every leaf and fallen stone, every brittle grass and broken tree, and the eternal joy in the rippling of water over stone and rustling of wind in white pine trees and the call of the mourning dove in the spring. For now, pause one moment and inhabit your skin.

In the long-term dream, we sense each other, small or large groups all around the earth, and go to the sacred spaces closest to us, and make offerings, of beauty and music and dance, of silence and witness. Our intention is simply blessing, whatever words we may put on it. Each gathering finds its own way, in stillness or movement, silence or sound, words or just voice.

In my near-term imagining, we come to know each other, we use internet and telephone and speak friend-to-friend; we name a date when we will join, each in our own places, and each group finds its own way. Like a thousand flowers, each circle blooms in the languages and ceremonies that belong to its own place and the humans who come. None are the same tongue, and all are a shared heart.

Then the Alliance is manifest: mountains and waters, forests and marshes and deserts and oceans, microbes and fungi mice and deer and spiders and hawks, humans of all kinds, and a great energy rises up.

I dare to say it is possible this alliance may heal the damage in our world. I’m certain it can heal our hearts.

Shodo Spring has belonged to the natural world for as long as she can remember. She grew up in northeastern Ohio, with long days outdoors alone in the woods and creeks and on the beaches of Lake Erie. Her new book is Open Reality.

Along the way Shodo started one of the first battered women’s shelters, was a community organizer in inner-city Cleveland, was a psychotherapist for years, explored spirituality, practiced nonviolent social change, and finally entered the practice of Zen Buddhism. She has lived Zen for over forty years and taught for twelve. Shodo is her Buddhist name, and means “right path.”

Shodo has participated in long retreats, public sitting meditation as activism, and walking hundreds of miles, including leading the 2013 Compassionate Earth Walk along the planned northern route of the KXL pipeline. Mountains and Waters Alliance expresses her vision of humans working with the beyond-human world to heal and regenerate life on earth.