RANTIFESTO

By Cynthia Travis
Santa Barbara , California
March, 2006

War and misery, natural catastrophes and the dwindling green world. How have we trapped ourselves, and all of creation, in these stories? They settle on our skin like dust, covering every surface of our lives with their relentless, inevitable film that cannot be ignored, or swept away or disposed of. Shall we dare to speak our sorrows? Of our fear for the children? Of our love of the sea and the things that ache in our chests?

It is tempting to believe (we can almost convince ourselves) that if we did certain things we could continue our lives unchanged, improved maybe. If only we could... fight fewer wars or ‘better' ones. If we could capture the terrorists, pump more oil, conserve what's left, elect different leaders, create fewer landfills. Things might be fine. Really?

If these things were true, wouldn't we know it? Wouldn't there be evidence to convince all the skeptics and tempt politicians across party lines? If our ‘fixes' were working, wouldn't we have visible successes? Fewer refugees. Less extremism. More robust democracies. More freedom. Better balance. Healthier air. We'd be able to prove how much of which resources could be extracted, with what consequences. We'd know who had the ‘right' to consume them and how they should be recycled (since nothing can really be disposed of). We'd know what laws were needed to protect or promote what, for whose benefit and at what expense. We could calculate how much farmland we needed and how much we could pave. And we could say with certainty how many shopping centers could replace how many wetlands without undesirable consequences. All children would be readers. Voters would vote. Malaria would be cured. We could build high enough walls and efficient enough cars.

Surely, if we had evidence, we could agree on basic policies. Partisan bickering would diminish because we'd be busy getting the job done. We could do more of the good stuff and less of the bad. Or only good stuff and none of the bad, and because we would see results we'd end the vicious cycle of one political party or corporation or interest group succeeding at their ‘agenda', only to be undone by the opposite group a few years later. At least we'd be able to agree on what not to do because the damage would be visible and we'd know what to do to avoid it. But wait a minute, it is visible:

•  In its March, 2006 report, the prestigious Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) states that if current trends continue, global temperatures will rise mid-century by 2°C to 5°C. Computer models predict increases as high as 11 C. And, if we burn all the fossil fuels left underground, the globe will warm by up to 13°C. The Greenland ice shelf will collapse, the Arctic and Antarctic ice sheets (already melting at 36 cubic yards per year) will melt completely, the Gulf Stream ocean current will be disrupted and seal level will rise 6 meters.

•  Global forests are already at the limit of the CO 2 they can absorb. We must cut CO 2 emissions by 70% to 80% immediately simply to stabilize current atmospheric concentrations.

•  Almost half of the planet's original forests (temperate and tropical) have been destroyed during the last three decades .

•  Impending extinction rates are 4 times faster than those in fossil records: 1/2-2/3 of all species alive in 2000 will be eliminated this century. One half to two thirds of all species.

•  Protected ecological ‘hot spots' (areas of richest biodiversity) equal only .06% of the land surface on the planet (between 4.5% and 5.5% of their original extent).

•  17 to 25 million people worldwide are refugees or internally displaced due to wars or famine. 135 million people are at risk of becoming environmental refugees as a result of desertification due to climate change.

•  Half of the air pollution in Los Angeles comes from China .

•  Malathion and Chlorpyrifos (the two most commonly used pesticides in the U.S. ) were detected in elementary-school children who eat non-organic fruits and vegetables. After 5 days of an organic diet, the pesticide traces disappeared.

•  The current known uses of tropical plants is estimated at approximately $33 trillion (as of 2000, the world's total gnp was $18 trillion) yet ecological research budgets are shrinking.

Sources: ( University of Michigan ; Hot Spots: Earth's Biologically Richest and Most Endangered Terrestrial Ecoregions , Mittermeier et al, CEMEX & Conservation International1999; Worldwatch Institute, U.N., BBC World News online, N.Y. Times online, Co-op America , NewScientist.com)

Can you convince me this is acceptable? Can you convince yourself? Go ahead. Tell yourself, “This is acceptable. This is justifiable. This is necessary. This is survivable. This is worth it.”

Tell your children. I dare you.

I will never forget a conversation with my son two years ago, when he was 16. He was learning about the fall of the Roman Empire in his World History class. They were discussing similarities between Rome and the United States , speculating about whether we, too, were headed for a fall. He looked at me and said in a small voice, “The only difference is, no other civilization has taken the whole global ecosystem with it.”

Silence.

“What is it like for you to grow up knowing that?” I manage to ask.

His eyes well with tears. No words come. He smiles weakly. He shrugs, and pats his heart.

If we let ourselves feel it, the hurt is unbearable. As it should be. The thought that everything we see, everything and everyone we love and all we hold dear is in dire jeopardy and may not be save-able, that everything that was given to us has been squandered, that nothing, nothing, is apparently sufficient to convince any of the world's policy makers to actually think and act like global leaders – this would stop us in our tracks. Why doesn't it? We should refuse to continue with business as usual, life as we know it for another single day, until everything that can possibly be done is being done, and we are spending our dwindling resources and all the brain power we can muster not on bickering and greedy grabbing, but on solving the overwhelming quandary we have created.

Leave aside for a moment all other dilemmas: terrorists, partisan politics, bird flu, hurricanes. It all ceases to matter if the planet goes. And stopping terrorism, even addressing and solving its root causes, does nothing to avert environmental collapse, although there are tie-ins we can, and should, be making between injustice and desperation (let's face it, most of us are either too comfortable or barely making it), over-consumption and pollution, fundamentalism and freedom, special interests and money and (lack of) democracy.

If the debacle in Iraq was called for in spite of contrary “intelligence” and even now merits a crippling national debt and the squandering of countless innocent lives, and unauthorized wiretaps are necessary because they might uncover Al-Qaeda plotters, then isn't the merest whiff of the possibility of planetary collapse worth perhaps a little preventive something ? Maybe even an empty gesture like signing the ineffectual, unenforceable Kyoto Protocol? Never mind that a growing portion of the scientific community would argue that it is already too late, that the tipping point has long since been reached.

We might find ourselves saying, “It will take a miracle.”

How does one live to create and sustain miracles? What would we do differently each day if we were convinced we could step into a miracle that is even now waiting for us to notice that it's there?

Ask the women of Liberia , who dreamed their country's 15-year civil war would happen before it came but the idea was too far-fetched. Liberia was America 's “little brother”, the prosperous jewel (and cold war pawn) of West Africa . Food was plentiful. Monrovia was sophisticated, modern, beautiful and alluring, like its neighbor, Sierra Leone . Liberians said, “War? Starvation? It can't happen here.” It did happen. Everything was lost, gone in a heartbeat, Sierra Leone pulled down with it, unending devastation for over 14 years until one day a group of women sat down and stopped the bloodshed within 2 months.

Liberians divide their civil war into ‘World War 1', ‘World War 2', and ‘World War 3', in order of magnitude. During ‘World War 3', in early 2003, a small group of Muslim women active in peacebuilding wondered what they could do as women to end the war. Soon there was a core group of 12, from a mix of religious and tribal groups. Hoping to attract 20 or 30 more, they called a public meeting and 500 women showed up. One of their colleagues in the peacebuilding community, a man now serving in the newly elected government, tells how he watched, weeping, as the women kept pouring in to their tiny offices. For months on end after that meeting, he managed to raise almost $500 US a day to help them keep their families fed. From sunrise to sunset, with rockets and bullets flying overhead, the women gathered on the side of the road, then in the road, sitting on the ground in searing sun and torrential rain. They refused to speak. They refused food and water. They began visiting rebel camps, listening to ‘their boys' and collecting guns. Within two months, Charles Taylor had fled (“I can no longer refuse the women. If they want me to leave, I will go.”) and a ceasefire had been called. Peace talks were convened in Ghana . Of the 75 delegates invited to attend, only one of the women was invited. So they took money that Charles Taylor had tried to bribe them with, and sent an additional 13 women to monitor the talks. Standing at the door of the hall, word came that the ceasefire was in jeopardy. So they locked the delegates inside and left the premises with the key. No food or water, no bathrooms, for the people inside. Needless to say, the ceasefire was signed. And now, three years later, democratic elections have been held and Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, modern Africa 's first woman president, has been elected. Prominent peacebuilders and environmentalists are being appointed to government positions.

The Liberian women created a better reality by gathering together and literally sitting in it. They followed classic Gandhian nonviolence strategies (without knowing that's what they were doing). They insisted on a miracle and it was so.

Pablo Picasso said, “Anything you can imagine is real.” What if the story of the women was just the beginning? What if we could see that other miracles were happening? If we could see that we, too, are in a miracle, right now, and that there are miracles all over, not just in Liberia ?

In the words of visionary writer and healer Deena Metzger, “ Who would we become and how would we live? ”

What if the women of Liberia insisted on stopping ecological plundering and demanded restoration of sacred forests and waters?

  What if the world's environmental scientists began acting like the women of Liberia ?

What if we all did?

  What if environmental headlines were front page news every single day, and the political same-old was tucked away on back pages? What if Democrats - Republicans, for that matter, anybody, besides Al Gore and a few of us aging hippies– got busy and created some real and unrelenting noise?

  What if mainstream media was flooded with stories of peacemaking and restoration and stories of violence were only mentioned incidentally (“Reporting from the West Bank, where there was no violence again today…”).

Imagine: People in the United States and Europe going into parks and talking to the land, the animals, the spirits, the ancestors and expressing their love and remorse…as people have begun to do in Liberia .

Imagine: the defense budget is shifted to become a Defense of the Planet budget. There is an interim plan to ensure national security and an intermediate plan for creating consensus among world leaders on how best to encourage political freedom, the end of tyranny, and social justice. Governments invest heavily in education, peacebuilding, health care and infrastructure, within a framework of intensive ecological research and repair. Led by citizen diplomats, the West agrees to listen deeply to the rage of the Muslim world and the disenfranchised, and Islamic leaders call off suicide bombers and come to the negotiating table.

Imagine:

President Bush goes before the people of the United States and the United Nations and says, “I thought we had chosen the right course of action but now I'm not so sure. Actually, I caused these blunders out of ignorance and greed, although I do sincerely wish that all people could be free and live better lives. But now I realize that this cannot happen if we don't make radical changes to save the planet first. I am weary and bewildered and want to find another way. The specter of environmental collapse, of unending war and fear, is unacceptable. We must make a course correction of a magnitude that has never been contemplated in human history. We must succeed. And remember, we can accept nothing less than a full restoration of the natural world and fair, livable conditions for every human being. There is no time to waste.

“I have decided to convene a Wisdom Council – not just experts, but true wise ones. Spiritual leaders, elders, those who have suffered, and those who have prospered, for we each have something to contribute. I ask for your nominations to this council, for your dreams and for your suggestions on what might be done. The selection process will be public. The deliberations of the Council will be public, and there will be a structured, public process, with a series of town hall meetings and other gatherings, to be sure the Council has the benefit of your input and that you, the public, has an ongoing reporting of the Council's progress. I propose that we spend the next 6 months in emergency deliberations and that, based on our findings, several pilot programs be put into place, with full disclosure of progress and challenges, and a permanent, rotating working Council to be maintained in the future. I further propose that we enter into a similar process at the United Nations. The hour is late. We must leave our partisan bickering and self-interest behind us. No one of us has all the answers. Only by working together can we create the scope of vision needed now. I thank you for your patience. I apologize for my grievous errors. And I count on your creativity and your wisdom. Remember, we cannot accept, nor will we pass on to our children, anything short of a fully flourishing world.”

Until our leaders dare to take this step, we must do it for ourselves. We must imagine for them. Then we must teach them to think and behave in exactly this way. We must insist that we all learn to live in dedication to a vision large enough to meet and transmute the danger we are in.

If I told you (as all ancient wisdom traditions will tell you) that the Earth is most definitely alive and brimming with sentient, pulsating, communicating, alliance-making life in the tangible, ancestral and spirit worlds, could you take that in and could we ponder together what that means?

Doesn't it make much more sense than believing that the Earth is an inanimate conglomeration of parts that happen to work in perfect, mind-blowing, multiple layers of interconnected and interdependent symbiosis? Are we humans the only species that, although extremely recent and, like everything, arising from and dependent on this very system, nonetheless behave as if we stand outside it? Does it not trouble us that we are symbiotic with nothing, not even each other? Do we truly believe that we have the undisputed right to destroy whatever we want regardless of the consequences, endowed, as we are, with the only possible solutions to the mess we've created, solutions that will benefit primarily ourselves and are squeezed from our logical, destructive, greedy, separated minds? Do you prefer to believe that a wrathful, omniscient God (and only your wrathful, omniscient God, of course, and no one else's) has caused us to behave this way so that everyone and everything who is not like us will suffer and perish until God comes back to teach us a lesson and fix everything?

What do you say to Matsuro Emoto, the Japanese scientist who has proven that water responds to meditation and to words? He has photographed water crystals ‘before' (polluted, discolored, misshapen) then ‘after' being meditated and prayed to (lustrous, whole, symmetrical); in a jar labeled ‘Hitler' or ‘I hate you' (discolored, broken) and in a jar labeled ‘I love you' (luminous, complete).

What of the fact that water's hydrogen bonds break and re-form in an active relationship at a rate of one trillion times every second? ( Nature 379 (1996) pgs. 55-57, Luzar & Chandler.)

Does that convince you of the possibility that water is sentient and alive?

If the natural world is in relationship to itself, and we are in relationship to each other, shouldn't we attend differently to our relationship with the natural world? In a healthy relationship, there is dialogue, respect, generosity, mutuality, reciprocity, joy and caring. If we were in healthy right-relationship with the natural and spirit worlds, wouldn't we engage in ongoing, respectful dialogue, and seek ways to behave selflessly and generously? Would we take without asking, without gratitude, without giving back? And if we were in a healthy relationship with nature and spirit, wouldn't we by definition be at peace with each other?

We in peacebuilding and human services have had it wrong all this time. We've got it backwards, twisted, upside-down. We've been busy trying to create some kind of order and peace among humans, thinking that if and when we can do that, we will surely turn our attention to ‘the environment'. But it's the other way around. If we were in harmony with Spirit and Nature, we'd automatically know how to be harmonious with each other. We are each other. Reality is telling us, screaming at us, that we need to re-think not only the mess we're in but the way we approach it.

Is it really Peace if people are managing in the here and now (which they're not) but the environment is dying, and there are no mechanisms to ensure a viable future? Peace is not merely about resolving conflicts among humans. It is nothing less, nothing less, than the restoration of right relationship with Nature, the dead and the unborn. And if you splutter, ‘That's crazy!' then could you please tell me a viable definition of what Peace is if it does not include Everyone and Everything backward and forward through time?

(Is it Peace if the dead are unburied, unmourned and not at rest? If death, like life, is a mere scientific phenomenon, why do we bother to honor the dead at all? Why the funerals, the obituaries, the national holidays? For the living, yes, but for the living to ‘pay their respects' to the dead and continue to honor them by keeping their memory alive and being grateful for what they gave. Even the U.S. Dept. of Defense spends over $50 million a year searching for even a single tooth of a dead soldier to send home, rattling around in a life-size aluminum coffin. ( New Yorker magazine, Oct. 25, 2000 )

And while we're on the subject of the dead, why do we wish to convince ourselves that the Ancestors are not real and need not be honored? That we do not come, directly, from the rocks in the earth's crust and core that were once living organisms? That the oil we burn was once alive and may be as vital as the ice caps and the rainforests and the oceans in maintaining conditions for viable life, including ours?

The Ancestors and the stones gave us life, directly. They live in us each day that we live. They are with us each time we look in the mirror or invoke their memory. (“As my grandmother used to say…”; “S/he looks just like his/her grandfather…”). Why do we go to such lengths to convince ourselves that the earth isn't alive and therefore cannot possibly be sick or in pain and trying to heal herself (rainforest trees and ocean algae increase emissions of compounds that seed clouds to increase rainfall when temperatures rise too high); that animals are expendable and don't try to communicate with us, being, in fact, incapable of intentional communication (except sometimes dogs, horses or parrots, but that's it, no others, especially wild animals, oh, except the occasional lion or elephant); that every single living thing is alive, has a musical note to play in the symphony of life and is, to some degree, sentient (laboratory yeast cells ‘scream' as they die and male mice ‘sing' to attract mates, and perhaps for other reasons); that my grandchildren apparently don't deserve to live and neither do yours; that only monotheism is real; that the bible is literally true, not the Koran or the Sutras; that atheism is logical but nature spirits are illusions and shamans are idolaters or crazy people or perhaps just so unique that their experiences are impossible and/or irrelevant and/or inaccessible to the rest of us; and that dreams are purely psychological ‘vents'?

It is literally killing us to believe that it is up to us to determine the level of consciousness or value of other life forms merely based on whether those life forms serve or profit us in an immediate, tangible way.

How does it threaten our beliefs to include the Earth and all life as having intrinsic value? Doesn't it, in fact, even fit with Intelligent Design (for those of us who wish to go that route) to imagine that who or whatever ‘created' life had a purpose in mind for each and every tiniest thing, whether we understand it or not? Can't a Christian or a Muslim or a Jew or an Atheist cherish all forms of life and still believe or not believe in their God, see all forms of life as an expression of the Divine, or as a scientific ‘fact' worthy of respect or at least protection from harm? (And by the way, when was the last time a Buddhist committed an act of war or terror? And I'm not Buddhist.) And also, by the way, I have highly religious Mennonite friends who are comfortable with God and nature spirits and the ancestors, and I'm a nice Jewish girl from Los Angeles who sings to hawks, so all our beliefs and all our ignorance and all our uncertainty can, indeed, co-exist.

How can we devalue life without devaluing ourselves?

Wouldn't the world, quite simply, be a better place if we revered life? And even if we aren't quite convinced, wouldn't it be a good idea to act ‘as if' in the meantime, while we figure things out? Wouldn't it make sense to devote millions of dollars to researching and understanding and appreciating the natural world before we destroy it?

Imagine what might happen if each day we took a moment to pay homage to our Ancestors, to the Earth, and to all life? Wouldn't it break our hearts just a little (or a lot), and wouldn't that be a good thing? Shouldn't it give us pause that there are those among our fellow human beings who care so little for life that they see no beauty in it and can think of no other way to communicate than to blow themselves up? Or to realize that we ourselves are so unimaginative and so greedy that we are willing to cut down and dig up every beautiful place just to extract something that can be sold once?

[By what perverted inversion of common sense am I trying to prove, with evidence and logic, what has been millenially obvious but destroyed in the last few hundred years by the mind that demands evidence and logic?]

If I told you that in 2004 I had a dream and then a vision of the dead being mourned and this led to my non-profit organization working with local Liberian elders and shamans to restore traditional Mourning and Reconciliation Feasts in a war-torn Liberian town, and that Muslims and Christians worked together for the first time in 15 years to organize it and it was a huge success, with over 5,000 people in attendance; if I told you that people are still talking about it throughout Liberia, and among Liberians in the United States and as far away as Ivory Coast, and people have been requesting help in creating these and other traditional ceremonies for peacemaking and cleansing; that other NGO's and even the U.N. are now supporting traditional peacemaking ceremonies… if I told you these things would you think it impossible or crazy?

And if I told you that on the eve of the ceremony, flocks of egrets and herons appeared out of season, in great gusts, at 2 a.m., circling the sky over the meeting hall where we were to gather the following morning, and that the local people regard them as omens of peace and messengers from the sacred forest and the Ancestors?

If I told you that since that time, my Liberian colleague and ‘twin brother', William Saa, has been visited in dreams by his brother Raymond, who was tortured to death during the war; that Bill arrived in Liberia earlier this month to unearth his poor brother's shattered bones and give them a proper burial, to cleanse the stone where his brother was chopped to pieces, and bless the land that has held him these past years; then to meet with Raymond's killers and seek not only reconciliation but ask them to take Raymond's place in the family? (“I still miss my brother, his death has left a huge vacuum for me. And I want these men who killed him to be my brothers now.”) Would you think it impossible that the dead can come in dreams and help to heal so many hearts?

If I told you that while in Botswana this past fall, as we waited by the river at twilight, an elephant came with his family, caressed the trunk of his mate, walked towards our truck, stopped, looked at us, picked up an ancient elephant bone and threw it to us, then bowed down on his knees. Would you say ‘That's impossible!'?

What if I told you that while in Botswana I wearied everyone saying I wanted to see a leopard, and one week later, in Liberia , our cars broke down and Bill met a former fighter named General Leopard who, in telling us his story, decided before our eyes to become a peacemaker?

If I told you that in February, 2006, West African author and shaman, Malidoma Some', of Burkina Faso, holder of a PhD. from Brandeis University and a post-doctoral degree from the Sorbonne, performed a traditional divination for me and my community, and, knowing nothing about our work or our experiences, ‘saw' that the ancestors have asked me/us to bring them home; that Nature spirits have ‘checked in as a member of the team' so that I/we ‘can bring the forest back' and with it a reverence for all living things; that he saw ‘the restoration of songs, stories and visions' and that ‘the old village storyteller is narrating something'.

If I told you that my organization, everyday gandhis® , exists to tell the story of Peace through images and words, but he didn't know that, would you say that Malidoma's divination was merely a coincidence?

Now, if I tell you we are in a miracle, do you begin to believe me?

I used to think that the alive, multi-dimensional shamanic world was real only for shamans in traditional cultures in traditional settings (jungles or deserts, mainly) and that the de-spirited Western world I inhabited, although an uncomfortable fit, was the ‘real' world, the one I inherited at any rate, and, therefore, the only one accessible or, well, logical for me or rightfully ‘mine'. The scientific, linear world missed the ineffable, and the ineffable world was intangible, and I was caught in the middle. Still, I thought I had to meet the linear world on its own terms, and tried, at first, to ignore this dilemma and then to cobble together a spiritual refuge as best I could and in private. Then I told myself I had to take that spiritual crazy quilt and sew it into an identity I could wear in public. Spiritual Fashion Police!

In my teenage years, like many of my generation, I went through spasms of activism, cynicism, apathy, and partying, then got caught up in a struggling marriage and raising my children. Then I got divorced, and scared, and then ill, and found myself filled with longing to make a meaningful contribution to the now, to the future, to stop the slip-sliding of everything good and beautiful into an abyss of destruction.

I longed for a calling. I filled dozens of journals with that longing, and then with dreams of the natural world and the dead. And I longed for a calling.

My initiation has been glacial (the old-fashioned, slow kind, not today's quick-melt variety). And it's ongoing, constantly renewing itself and scraping me into unknown landscapes. I am so grateful. I have no answers. But my questions are improving:

Can we cherish our unspeakable blunders as our most revered teachers?

What can hold our grief and transform it into possibility?

Are we willing to exchange our comfort – and our destruction – for a future?

Do we dare to dream the reweaving of a flourishing world and devote our lives to it?

What begins to change if we live this way?

Why are we so devoted to logic and reason when they have served us so poorly?

Why do we insist on protecting our standard of living when it is killing us? And everything?

What is it about comfort and greed that we so willingly sacrifice to them rather than to the ancestors? The ancestors were directly responsible for bringing us here. What have comfort and greed done for us that can match that?

Like the Precautionary Principle – which places responsibility on business and government to first prove that no harm will come before proceeding with mining and development – why shouldn't the burden be on us to prove that linearity, logic and tangible, material gain deserve our devotion?

Ecologists have wrung from global tragedy a plethora of elegant, quiet, scientifically sound ‘solutions', most notably the idea of global environmental ‘hot spots' and the practice of ecological restoration. But painstaking and well thought-out as they are, they fall short because they are by their nature reductionist, even minimalist (in the name of being ‘realistic') and they will fail because they accept the unacceptable. They are flawed because they arise from the mind-set that got us where we are today.

The idea of ‘hot spots' is to identify, study and preserve the earth's richest remaining caches of (mostly tropical) biodiversity. Ecological restoration lovingly studies and restores patches, sometimes swaths, of precious habitat – creek beds, portions of forests. But they don't go far enough. It is a fatal error not to insist on the seemingly impossible, to accept anything less than a miracle, especially when there are miracles being offered if we can but see them and make them visible to others. If we let economic and political interests name the terms of our future, we are doomed to a vocabulary of division, which becomes a vocabulary of relinquishment, parsing, competing interests, and, at best, some form of mitigation. We don't know what is or is not possible. And we certainly don't know what is or is not expendable. We don't know, for instance, how important, and in what proportion, savannah and permafrost and temperate zones are necessary. Years ago, before the current trend of guy lingerie – boxers and shorts in wild colors and bold designs – I had a quilting teacher who admonished us to be sure to offset the bold prints with what she called “men's underwear” patterns. The quiet is needed in juxtaposition to the profuse. Chaparral and tundra just may be the “men's underwear” of ecological equilibrium. And before we go relinquishing ever more rainforest, maybe we'd better find out whether we can make it with so little to begin with, and how much is ideal, and if it's the original equation that's needed in the long run, then if we want a long run we better figure out what the original equation actually means and how we can re-create it pronto. Why not? What better use of human ingenuity and resources could there be? How about starting by at least equaling military expenditures with ecological ones? It's never been done. But there is another ray of hope: According to scientist James Lovelock (author of the original Gaia hypothesis), new species arise out of perturbation of an environment, not equilibrium. Might we not be called to invent a new variant of our own species? Might new or extinct species be called into being if the natural world is restored?

And while we're at it and contemplating doing what seems impossible and what's never been done, why not create Gandhian non-violent armies? As long as there are soldiers willing to die and governments willing to send them, why not see what would happen if we asked ourselves to send our young soldiers into battle unarmed. It might stop some of the slaughter. Or at least make it conscious and deliberate. And please, let's not scream about how barbaric that would be. Killing without consciousness, without conscience, without respect or permission (as in traditional hunting for food) is already the order of the day. It is by its nature barbaric and unjustifiable, and self-perpetuating.

As Malidoma Some' puts it, when someone dies an unnatural death (ie at the hands of another) it creates an ‘energy vortex' that pulls more and more people into untimely death. In the Dagara view, conflict is the desecration of the sacred space between us. Therefore it is a fatal mistake to get distracted by personal blame when it is the sacredness between us that needs to be restored to bring peace.

On New Year's Day, 2006, a jaguar – elusive, prized, rarely seen, revered – is struck and killed in traffic on the road to the ruins of Tikal , Guatemala . Its body is hastily covered with brush and left to rot, until the stench catches someone's attention and the body is discovered, then buried. Why is a jaguar less important than a tourist in an automobile? Which contributes more to the world, overall? Can we honestly argue that cars trump jaguars, or that this was an unfortunate, isolated mistake? My daughter and I find ourselves driving on that same road – slowly! – ten days later. This world makes less than no sense, I think. We listen to the jaguar story as we strain our eyes looking for jaguars from the air-conditioned confines of a jaguar-killing-machine as we rush to arrive at the ancient pyramids built by the civilization that became extinct by devouring the natural environment around them. A tiny silver fox peeks out from the edge of the forest. We stop to get a better look. Next to the car is a beheaded female fer de lance (snake). Her back is patterned in a rich and breathtaking mosaic of interlocking diamonds and chevrons, the same chevrons that shimmer in Guatemala 's mysterious black-sand beaches as the waves recede, the chevrons still woven into the intricate designs of traditional huipiles.

Who have we become? What do we contribute to the wellbeing of any creatures except ourselves - and even that is arguable?

Is it acceptable – can we permit it to be acceptable – to settle for anything less than the complete (as best we can) restoration of the natural world and our connection to it?

Is it acceptable – can we permit it to be acceptable – to refuse the miraculous and continue as we have been?

What might be possible if, like acupuncturists and cranial-sacral practitioners, we ‘listen for the healthy rhythms' and work to amplify them? This would pertain to the environment, to dialogue, to peacemaking and healing.

What we need and what we are ‘in' is so radical that even those of us who realize we are in it can't believe it. I am fortunate to be part of a community known as the Topanga Dare'. Dare' as we practice it derives from a Shona word meaning ‘to gather (in Council) for the sake of healing.' Each month, we meet for healing through music, meditation and prayer, to sit together in Council and to tell dreams. Over time, a certain synchronicity of stories and dreams has emerged, and with it an evolving conversation about the nature of reality and the possibilities for healing for individuals, the community and the earth itself. We have learned to take dreams at face value, as wisdomgrams from the unseen world, and we are continually astonished at both the accuracy and the ‘results' of this practice. We are learning to see the stories as interconnected within fields of similar or analagous story landscapes and reaching across geography, space and time.

We are now creating both a Dream Matrix and a Writing Matrix and will publish our first ‘story constellations' in April of 2006. The biggest challenge is inventing a form to hold them – one that can be entered at any point so as to be sequential but not linear, a synergistic hybrid of story cycles, hypertext, and/or holograms (hologrammar for the new language that is needed?). And there are two documentary films about the peace process of Liberia and Bill's journey of reconciliation.

Do we dare to invent the language that can hold these possibilities so we can speak of them properly? What if we pulled a Dr. Seuss: He was the children's author who wrote On Beyond Zebra – an entire alphabet that begins after Z? A world that is only possible and things that can only be named with those new letters.

Our Dare' Community is learning to see illness, like dreams, as coming to an individual on behalf of the community, and to understand that healing and peacemaking are one and the same, and can only happen in the context of community. That if one is healed, all are healed, and vice versa. Ubuntu comes to America at last! (Ubuntu being the timeless African understanding, simply stated, that, “I am because you are. You are because I am.”)

And Ubuntu is growing and reinventing itself: We are learning that illness, like war, can be a crisis of initiation, at an individual, community, political and even global level ( D. Wild, 2006 ).

We are beginning to shift our perception of Liberia and other nations with histories of shocking, unthinkable brutality. Liberia , Rwanda , South Africa , Germany ?, Viet Nam ?, each was a ‘poster child' for a particular kind of unimaginable violence. Might they actually be emerging from ruthless initiations that will lead to a robust health unknown before the wars they went through – not that one would wish for or even welcome such a thing. Only that we dare not compound the desecration by refusing the blessings of its particular lessons, or that we do so at great peril.

We understand that Liberia , like many so-called underdeveloped countries, has an opportunity and perhaps an obligation to avoid the trap of the ‘Resource Curse' – the acquiescence to allow multinational corporations to extract priceless timber, gold, diamonds and oil at little or no benefit to the people of the host country, in exchange for a pittance, ecological devastation and social breakdown. (In one of her first acts as President, Liberia 's Ellen Johnson Sirleaf cancelled all timber and mining contracts.) Like its tropical neighbors, Liberia 's pristine sacred forests and teeming wetlands may soon be seen for what they actually are: some of the world's last remaining healthy ‘lung' tissue and repositories of ancient wisdom in gracious but precarious right relationship with humans. And we in the West must come to understand that for every environmental “victory” we “win” - preventing another off-shore oil well off the coast of California, where I live, for example – means another well drilled in Nigeria or Ecuador, out of sight, out of mind, but only temporarily. The environmental movement in the U.S. must rewrite the “Think globally, act locally” mandate. Global IS local, there's nothing that isn't local anymore, and we must now bear this in mind in all we do.

The modern history of Liberia, home to 16 indigenous tribes with rich, ancient cultures, is a microcosm of the Colonial jinx that rippled throughout the world and brought us to this brink: a dumping ground for freed slaves; a pawn in the chess of cold war; a glittering commercial magnet; an untouchable ‘failed state' drowning in its own blood. And now, a thriving experiment in female leadership and inspired governance. The world may soon be begging Liberia not to cut down another single tree. Not one more towering Makore for one more wall of paneling for one more Canadian law firm – not, at any rate, until the unique West African elephants, upon whom the Makore trees depend to crack their steel-hard seed pods, are thriving again. We might then ask how to make use of its antiviral bark with its promise for curing AIDS,

I write this for those of you who know me, so you can know what has come to claim me. (As Malidoma says, ‘Before we embark on a journey, we own it. Once we have set foot on the road, it owns us.') I write this for my children. For all children. For my stunned parents and their perplexed friends. For our dear colleagues in peacebuilding, NGO's and aid agencies. For my neighbors. For my lawyers and accountants. For scientists, politicians and business people. For the waitress at the beach-side restaurant last week who looked at the little jar of milk I was carrying as I waited with friends to be seated for lunch, and asked, “What's that?” When I replied, “It's an offering. But don't worry, I won't pour it out on the floor,” she feigned disappointment and said, “What, nothing for the ‘homies'?” Of course for the ‘homies'!

I write this for the ancestors. For the hawks and bluejays who came unbidden generosity to teach me. For those who are incredulous that one can carry on a dialogue with the animals, the trees or the dead. I write this for those that are shocked or mystified by the thought of anything other than a technological ‘fix' to our wars and our woes. For those who believe it is God's will that we be destroyed because it will bring the second coming. That we deserve better than anyone or anything else no matter the cost. That the cost will not be paid by us. That global warming is ‘natural' or its drastic effects hypothetical or exaggerated. I write this for the good people making plans with their fine, precise, well-trained minds and their generous, aching hearts but not in active collaboration with the unseen and not, as a dear friend dreamed, belly to belly with whales.

I write this for the person I once was, in the words of the person I am becoming.

In Spanish, one dreams with , not of, someone or something ( Anoche soñe contigo – last night I dreamed with you.) Last week I, too, dreamed with Whale:

In Japan with a Liberian colleague. Ceremonial knives, like curved sabers, that must be properly washed. A tall tree on a grassy hill. A whale is watching us from under the sea far away.

If I simply stated to you, ‘A whale is watching us from far away', would you think I'm crazy? That it's impossible? Well, then, what do you believe is possible? Do you believe that the Earth and all life could die - or be restored - at our hands? Not so long ago no one believed that unseen germs caused disease, or that we could walk on the moon or surgically open or replace our hearts.

James Lovelock is emphatic that Darwinian evolution is accurate but incomplete – not only does our environment shape (evolve) us, but we organisms inevitably change our environment. Darwin may not have seen it, but it's painfully obvious to us now!

In the 1930's, Erwin Schrödinger posited his famous theoretical experiment – that a cat placed out of view in a chamber with a mechanism that might, or might not, kill the cat (a radioactive atom which, if it decayed during the experiment, as well it might, would trip a hammer that would break a vial of hydrocyanic acid that would kill the cat) was, until observed to be either dead or alive, both dead and alive. In quantum law, this became known as ‘superposition' and the dilemma inherent in the situation known as ‘quantum indeterminacy' or ‘the observer's paradox', illustrating that the outcome cannot be known until or unless it is observed.

Yet, at the subatomic level, particles can be demonstrated to be in multiple locations simultaneously (like Spirit? like God? Like miracles? Like whales?). At the very least, our assumptions about the nature of observable reality are called into question. The problem is, this dilemma, as it is framed, is, like so many created by science and logic, inherently flawed. It is a one-way street that conceives only of the possibility that our observation of a situation changes it, determines its nature, and whether a creature is alive or dead.

But what if we followed the cat onto the two-way street it arrived on? Actually, it's a roundabout at a busy intersection: How does the cat's dilemma change the cat, and us, and the elementals and the atmosphere and the rest of the animals (from the cat's family on up) and all of humanity? These are literal, not hypothetical questions. Schrödinger's Cat has influenced thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands, of scientists, students and others whose business it is to determine the nature of reality given a life and/or death dilemma,

If the cat finds itself in a chamber behind whose doors are several billion humans – including the one who put the cat in jeopardy and also all those who stood by and allowed it to happen, condoning the use of radioactive material and poison to make a point (without a plan for their safe disposal or storage after the experiment) and the humans had not only enclosed the cat in a potentially lethal situation, but themselves as well (trapping themselves with many more than one lethal substance) and the cat didn't know whether or not the humans would survive, or itself (except that the humans had choices and the cat did not), then what might the cat be thinking? How would its reality be forever changed? What assumptions would it make? What would its opinion be of the mind that could devise such a dilemma or its reasons for doing so? Would it be aware that it was in jeopardy? Would it be wondering whether, when the door opened, it would find the humans dead or alive? Would it assume that they already knew the dangers they were in? Or would it assume they were ignorant? Would it do what it could to warn them? Would it posit that, so long as the door remained closed, that the humans were both alive and dead? Or would it eat its can of mercury-laden tuna and leave everything for other cats to figure it out?

And what of the whale? It is no more (and possibly less) hypothetical than the cat. We don't yet know how it has been affected. But if it is observing us, then surely we are changed. If our willingness to observe the whale makes it real to us, then the whale watching us makes us real, too, in ways we don't yet know, and we enter into a relationship that is engaged and reciprocal. (And it adds a whole new dimension to the idea of ‘whale watching'!)

Later in life, Schrödinger is reputed to have said that he wished he had never met that cat (proving once again that even hypothetical observation changes the observer in literal ways). The cat undoubtedly wishes that s/he had never met Erwin Schrödinger. I'm sure by now they have met again and have come to know each other well, that they've already had this conversation, and many more besides.

But I do think we should introduce Schrödinger and his cat to our beloved whale.

Whale, meet Erwin and his Cat.

Cat, Erwin, meet the Dare' Whale.

Oh. And you'll be glad to know that the Earth and the humans are still alive. For now.