The Work That Reconnects workshop offered by islander through RRU

I get up in the morning, put the kettle on, clear away last night’s dishes, and watch the bronze ball of fire rise behind a strand of cloud. With a jolt, the thought of global warming incites its offspring thoughts and I wonder how many easy, secure mornings are left, to those of us who still have them.

While global warming is usually presented in hard-to-swallow facts about ice-melt, emissions, acidifying oceans and lists of changes we should make, it’s not the particulars so much as the whole terrible damage to planetary systems and the undoing of evolution that breaks my heart.

How does one move from a broken heart into action? What motivates us to start or or to keep taking action, especially when the situation we face gets more complicated or worse? It might not be global warming, it might be violence, or viruses or how to heal a difficult conflict.

Maggie Ziegler, who has studied with the internationally known activist and thinker Joanna Macy and now facilitates The Work That Reconnects, says, “Connecting to our gratitude for all of life and the beauty of the planet supports people finding a heart-felt direction to contribute to change. Hard facts can be motivators but can also lead to being overwhelmed and withdrawn.”

This process from gratitude to action is “a spiral movement in which gratitude grounds our abliity to honour our pain for the world, which in turn shifts our way of seeing, and moves us toward deepening action.”

Ziegler says, “When we find out that we can survive our pain we experience a big shift in how we see ourselves. Since our pain is also our love for the world, our relationship with the world is sustaining.”

Since we are only alive because of the web of life, Joanna Macy says, we are like a nerve cell in a neural net. We can’t control or see the long-term outcome of our actions and no single person or group can repair the whole world.

By releasing ourselves from grandiose goals, we relax into what we can do as a small part of a gigantic living system. This way we take part in self-healing, ours and the world’s.

In The Great Turning, the shift that leads to a globally life-sustaining society, Macy says, there are three mutually interdependent spheres of human activity.

The first sphere is activism or “holding actions” (such as the recent 350 rally on Salt Spring), which include protest and opposition to laws and practices that undermine life systems.

The second sphere is sustaining actions such as saving seeds, local food production, governmental and corporate decisions that support the healing of life systems, and the like.

The third sphere is the deep shift in consciousness based in interconnectedness. It can keep us centred as we work toward a life-sustaining world. Instead of shrinking from it, Macy affirms the power of facing the uncertainty of the future. People everywhere are uncertain, at all times, whether it is the outcome of a pregnancy, planting a garden or starting a new project.

No one knows either, whether our planet will devolve before we can return it to adequate health. We don’t know if self-interest at governmental and corporate levels will outstrip the basic human will for viable life systems.

This very uncertainty, Macy says, inspires and moves us. It makes us rely on intention more than outcome, it makes us live in the moment rather than rely on nebulous hope, it opens us to a sense of the bigness of our lives and our capacity to respond, and the immensely creative synergies we can apply to the future of a healthy planet.

Synergy, working together, is a different form of power than the old hierarchical model where energy flows vertically. Synergy gives rise to new patterns, which in turn create new evolutionary possibilities.

We may experience synergy when we “let life live through us.” Chloe Straw, who was at Macy’s recent workshop, says, “As a young person I felt I had a huge weight to carry, simply for having been born in a time of cultural collapse. Joanna’s phrase, ‘life is living through us,’ struck a deep shift in my perspective. I have been able to go beyond feeling paralyzed. I am finding my way. The breathing exercises, valuing my emotional reactions to the world’s suffering, and having access to a network of people who also feel this pain has been a beautiful gift.”

By speaking the truth of our experience, trusting that our responses are shared by others, being willing to take risks with new behaviours and actions, dropping old roles, we can regain the rhythm of life that can heal the well-being of the whole.

A link to Ziegler’s workshop, which runs Nov. 14-15, can be found at www.royalroads.ca/continuing-studies/certificate-programs/ecological-literacy-competency-framework.htm