To Be Radical

In order to heal ourselves and the Earth, we find ourselves facing the daunting prospect of accepting a radical world view, only because it is we who have veered off course so far that what is healthy initially appears so radical.

I love the word: ‘radical.’ Certainly, it calls to mind televised images of rioting students hurling bricks, or furtive figures printing leaflets with symbols of fists and headlines of “Down with the…!” It seems very political, confrontational, and vaguely threatening violence. I envision scurrilous troublemakers with unkempt hair and sneers.

Actually, it is quite the opposite. It wasn’t until the 1800’s that we use in the sense of advocating fundamental reform. The word derives from the Latin radix, meaning simply ‘root.’ This ‘being in the ground’ left room to reference that which was fundamental to existence and vital to life.

We are looking at the prospect of going back to the roots, tracing what went wrong with the planting by following it down past its leaves and petals, through the stems and twigs down to the main shoot to where it disappears into the soil. Then we examine the nature of the twisting, turning root where it divides into smaller and smaller hairs until finally we peer at the soil, water, nutrition and drainage.

In other words, translating this to the human relationship with the biosphere, we are facing the task of looking at ourselves, at all that makes up human life and culture, and with a steady eye, refusing to blink as we struggle to determine what went awry.

For it seems, the worldview that makes up the contemporary problem of the human relationship with the Earth, is actually not a world view at all, but the failing to have done so. By looking to heaven for succor, the insides of a cubicle for our livelihood, and through a hardened glass windshield to where it is we travel to, we come to a distorted sense of what the Earth is, we have lost our relationship with her, and moreover, lost even ourselves.

And so, we look at turning ‘radical.’ We take a second, longer look towards the aboriginal, the indigenous, and those for whom the soil is not so distant and the Earth not so shielded from their direct gaze.

Turning radical, we set out to save the whales, perhaps by circling predatory whaling ships with tiny inflatable boats, and we set out to save the trees, sometimes even by chaining ourselves to them. Though a pod of whales may be briefly separated from the hunters, and though a tree may remain standing, such respite is not the greatest outcome of such passionate and noble acts. True change comes from changing consciousness. The tree and the man or woman chained there become symbols that live on in our memory, and transmit through the images of media into millions of homes, as do the activists in the tiny boat with the megahorn, pleading and taunting, like modern, desperate Davids before Goliath, challenging the whaling vessel bearing down.

But its not about just the whales, or the trees. The whales and the trees are just two of the leaves that are unnaturally wilting and falling from a planet whose people what forgotten how to live in a healthy way with the natural , interrelated world, amidst all of its beings and elements.

Some say that to go back to this world and truly look at it, we need to step out of our automobiles, remove our shoes and feel the soil or sand beneath our toes. Perhaps it is suggested that we can ask our employer if we might sit next to the window and if we can open it. If we get a frown and a ‘no,’ then we can bite our lips and wait until we get home and instead of the television, spend time in the yard, the park, or take a walk in the twilight when the sun is setting.

Yet, there is much we face in considering this reapproachment with the Earth, for so much of how we have constructed our world and organized our lives has left what seems like obstacle after obstacle in front of our connection with it again. For what are we to do! Abandon our cars, walk the two miles to the market, ride a bicycle to work? Certainly practical for some, exceedingly impractical if not impossible for so many others. Shall we ask our employer to move the company out of the city where, perhaps, we could just scatter ourselves around a field and happily peck away at our laptop doing company business while occasionally gazing at the grasshopper on a nearby stem of wheat grass? I think, the employer would probably resist the invitation, and we need our job.

Moreover, the cars and the employers' towering concrete, steel girded company buildings are not only the symptoms of huge problems, but have become parts of the problem as well. We need to trace down the city walls, and follow the lines through the cars and into our homes. With a steady eye, we must look clearly at what it is we have created, for we see the Earth wilting. The vitality isn’t there. We have built a civilization that is leeching toxicity into the biological, psychological and spiritual life of the planet, and perpetuates crumbling health in all of these.

Therefore, we must become radical. We find ourselves facing the task of retracing our steps back to the roots, back to where we began to deviate from living harmoniously with the Earth. We remind ourselves not to separate ourselves from the world, but to remain mindfully attentive and connected in it. For it is in our proximity that we can sense when something is wrong. And, where it hurts, we can tend to it.