Spirit in Action

Deeper Relationship with Earth - Process & Practice

When building relationship with Earth, the best advice may be "don't just do something, sit there!", and 3 participants of a weeklong workshop did something like that, sharing their process, experience, and fruits in this program. eric maya joy, Mary Jo Klingel, and Mary Conrow Coelho speak of roots & fruits of a Quaker Earthcare Witness (QEW) experiment.

Broadcast on:: 11 Aug 2013
Audio Format:: other

[music] Let us sing this song for the healing of the world That we may hear as one With every voice, with every song We will move this world along And our lives will feel the echo of our healing [music] Welcome to Spirit in Action. My name is Mark Helpes Me. Each week, I'll be bringing you stories of people living lives of fruitful service, of peace, community, compassion, creative action, and progressive efforts. I'll be tracing the spiritual roots that support and nourish them in their service, hoping to inspire and encourage you to sink deep roots and produce sacred fruit in your own life. Let us sing this song for the dreaming of the world That we may dream as one With every voice, with every song We will move this world along We have all kinds of people doing world healing work on Spirit in Action And since I know a lot of Quakers, and a disproportionately large number of Quakers are doing such work, they can get perhaps overrepresented on my program, or maybe not. There are so many ways to come at world healing, and I'm pleased today to bring you a panel of three members who have been meeting daily for the past week as a subset of an annual U.S. Quaker event called Friends General Conference Gathering. My three panel members are part of a group of six whose focus, each day as they met, has been a deeper relationship with creation. I'll let them put it in their own words in a moment. But it's a process of reaching for that power which motivates and enables us to best care for the Earth. I'm also pleased to note that underwriting support from Northern Spirit Radio comes from Friends Journal, a monthly magazine whose mission is to communicate Quaker experience in order to connect and deepen spiritual lives. On line at friendsjournal.org. You too can support Northern Spirit Radio by contacting us. So today we meet with Eric Maya Joy, Mary Jo Clingle, and Mary Conroe Quelo on the campus of the University of Northern Colorado in Greeley, Colorado. Welcome Eric, Mary Jo, and Mary to Spirit in Action. This is Eric Maya Joy. Mary Jo Clingle, and this is Mary Conroe Quelo. Thank you very much, all three of you, for being here today. You've been going through a process this week about deeper relationship with the Earth. Would one of you care to introduce us to what you're doing and why you're doing it? This is Eric, and for years, 25 years now I've been working with a thing called Friends Committee on Unity with Nature, which is now called QEW, Quaker Earth Care Witness. And over these years, I've recognized that we get together for meetings and we do lots of business, lots of busy work. Yes, we do have worship sharing times, we have speakers often, but we've never really had the time to be together for a length of time over a number of days and look more deeply at some of the issues and how do we get more deeply in exploring our relationship with Earth. So when I realized that Quaker Earth Care Witness was going to be meeting just before Friends General Conference, I thought, well, maybe this would provide us the opportunity to have that time together and working it out with Friends General Conference. They've provided space and the support. So that's what we've been doing about three hours a day. For the last four days, we have one more to go. And so, are you discussing? Are you sitting in silence, listening, walking? What kind of format are you using? Mostly worship sharing, what I like to call nurture sharing. And there's some discussion. There's also times when we're not actually in the room and things come up when we work through those. And although we had kind of queries to be working on and tentative schedule, we decided right from the start that Spirit, that whatever was emerging would take us in the direction that we need to go. So we've been following that a lot. We and the other folks observing in the room are all Quakers, so those terms like worship sharing and queries are second nature to us, but maybe I'll quickly explain them for our listening audience, since I do think that they are useful practices that could have a wider utility to non Quakers as well. Of course, the elements of the Quaker way have migrated, at least to some extent, into the cultural mainstream with adaptations, like our sense of the meeting process, which is similar in many ways to consensus decision making. But first, worship sharing. Instead of a back-and-forth discussion or debate, it invites participants to share out of a listening silence without cross talk or cross comment from their center. That's a rough description of worship sharing. And queries are questions, questions that invite us to explore our evolving understanding and experience of important topics. There is not assumed to be a right or wrong answer, just an invitation to look within for deepest truths and to try to put that into words. But let's continue with your process this week. Mary Jo, what led you to be a part of this process? Is it because you're a regular part of Quaker Earthcare Witness, or was there something else that specifically drew you to the process? It was a bumpy road. I am a member of the steering committee of Quaker Earthcare Witness, and Eric shared his idea with me, and I remember saying, "That's really lovely. It's a pity I won't be there." Having just this clear internal knowing that I really needed to do this. We spend a lot of time in queue seeking answers relevant in Quaker Earthcare Witness seeking way forward in taking care of and healing the earth. But the meetings tend to be busy and exhausting, and the idea that we would have the luxury of almost 15 hours to sit. I guess I've known for a long time that spirit exists in the spaces, and so to create space for us to allow what wants to come forth was just an invitation that was too inviting for me. I really, I said, "Okay, okay, I'll be there." And Mary, I've interviewed you before for Spirit and Action, and folks can listen to that via the Nordenspiritradio.org website. What led you here today? Well, of course, you've been a part of Quaker Earthcare Witness for quite a while. Yes, as we said, we went around the first day we gathered on Monday and asked that very question, "What had drawn us to be part of this five days together?" And one of the answers, and a couple of people answered, including myself, was looking for a felt participation in a group that has concern about the earth. So, a mixture of belonging as a group and as in human terms, but also belonging in the larger Earth context together. So, I want to try and nail down some snapshots of what your processes look like. The parts that have been most meaningful or maybe powerful for you, what have you experienced that's made a difference that's brought you to the depths? As I remember the sequence, the first day we did a lot of worship in saying what had drawn us, the second day was a really nice, sort of friendly day of sharing stories. The third day feels to me like it was deeper and more difficult. I know I left the third day going, "Oh, this whole process is ridiculous. I don't even know what I'm doing here. I was irritated. It didn't seem like we were getting anywhere." It certainly didn't seem like we were getting deeper. And that deeper feeling of what do we need to be doing for the Earth really called me here. So, I think on some level that perhaps I can't name, we all came in redder this morning and I would describe it that we as a group took a dive into the depths where we needed to be. Through conversation, through worship, through worship sharing. And a lot of it, the theme for me had to do with pain. It is painful to think about the Earth. We ended up talking about personal pain, about some of the pain about Native Americans, about some of the pain about the Holocaust, and the deepening into those spaces both helped to create us as a tighter group. And then I think it was Mary who said, "And allowing us to go to this pain," these are my words. You probably have your own. "Gives us the doorway back up into the transformation and toward the light." So, for me, it was like amazingly wonderful today. Does that reflect your experience, Eric? Yes, I had, first of all, I'd like to say I had the privilege of being with five women, only male, and I very much appreciated the openness that that provided, as well as the space to share things. I think I was really concerned last night when I went to bed, and I have to thank Mark for the help in scheduling this, putting a little pressure on to really look at what does it mean to go deeper, and thinking of, I guess I was thinking in terms of communication at a deeper level, communication with the natural world. When I woke up this morning, I had this whole experience that kind of expressed that, and I was appropriate, I could share a bit of that. The first thing that I really put it together with was, from the time I'd been in fifth grade, I had a tent out in the backyard during the summer, and that was through high school, and all of that time I would sleep out. When the weather was right, I would pull my cot out and sleep right under this beautiful maple tree. It was there, as well as the sky and the stars above. In reflecting on that this morning, I thought about that tree first, and it came to me that was a very real level of communication that I had with that tree. Looking at the veins, looking at the branches and relating to them, climbing that tree, what I needed to work out something is probably hundreds of times over the years that I climbed that tree, and I came to see that kind of communication isn't inwards, and it isn't in intellect, there's something, some deeper connection that works there. What the stars, I remembered, laying under those stars, and first kind of a logical mind thinking, certainly there's light out there with, if there's light around the star, the sun that we live on, there's got to be more light out somewhere in the universe, and when I was thinking about this morning, I've come now to know that there's light out there. To myself, I know there's light out there, there's been that communication at some level that is just something within me that knows, and so that's a couple of examples of how I feel just this week, and what led up to that, along with getting ready for sharing here, those are some of the things that came to me. What's your perspective, Mary? I'd like to elaborate a little more on what Mary Jo said, the theme of suffering being, how to work with suffering, because one of the questions facing Quaker Earth Care Witnesses, the realization that people don't really don't want to hear the depths of the ecological crisis and the seriousness of global warming, yet at the same time, it is essential to enter into that reality and enter into the suffering that that knowing involves, so the question was, how do we handle that question of how much to talk about the crisis or not simply but more offering the positive healing aspects of the Earth? I think one thing we came to is that when there's real suffering, there's no choice but to enter into it, which is, I think, along the lines of what you're saying, and that the process of entering deeply into suffering does depend, the capacity to do that depends on the deeper wisdom. It depends on the spirit to be able to do that, to know that the suffering is not the final word and that there's, and as you mentioned, the historical examples of people facing enormous suffering and enormous threat, but through guidance by spirit, I guess we would call it leading, finding the strength to enter into that, to not avoid it and enter into it. I had my own experience. I think it was in 1996 or maybe '97. The evening before a group of us had been at a house, and there were lots of frogs outside, and we were on a porch outside, and they were making a tremendous din in the following morning when I was in silent, quake, or worship. All of the sudden, I had this onset of this pain for the genocide of frogs, for the massive die-offs of frogs that were and have been happening worldwide, I think, certainly across the U.S. and how what we think of as the Holocaust of World War II, that the same thing was happening to frogs, and just brought me to tears. All of a sudden, I was in that pain, and I think that for most people, a frog, well, they can take or leave it, it doesn't move them, but what happened to me in that moment was it wasn't them, it was us. That's what I experienced. So that was a pivotal moment for me when I went from thinking about environmental problems as happening out there to what's happening with my people, the frogs, the plants, the other species, they're my people. I'd like it if each of you, and I think I've got a good start from Eric, who's climbing up trees and looking up at the stars, but could you marry and marry Joe? Could you talk about where your first sense of connection to the rest of the species on this planet came from, when and where did that start for you, marry? Well, I did grow up on a farm which had a very important, ongoing, assumed connection, but then I studied a lot of science. I was a biology major, I studied quite a bit of chemistry, and I learned carefully learned, I was a studious person, I carefully learned of quite objectified world view. If you knew all the laws of nature that the future could be predicted, I learned when you studied frogs, we learned to piff them so that I thought that was a good thing to do. If you couldn't do that, you weren't a good scientist. We were taught to sever our relationship, to be objective. Then what brought me to this direction, one thing that brought me in this direction of concern for the Earth was the new story, the Brian Swims work, where I somehow, that larger story of showing the depth of my participation, but actually being a form of the Earth, and the creativity of the Earth, the connectedness, I thought, "Oh my goodness, this is a different story than what I learned as a biology science student." It's a different world, and that was very, very exciting, and that kind of renewed my relationship, or beginning relationship, to a new relationship to the Earth. What about for you, Mary Jo? A couple things come to mind, and as I was going back, the first thing I came up with was a picture of chipmunks, because when I was little, we would vacation in Michigan, and both of my sister and my two brothers would learn to sit very, very still with a peanut in our hands. And if we could be still enough, maybe a chipmunk would come close and get the peanut. It was so exciting, so exciting, and then what came up was a picture of when I sailed in the Bahamas and would snorkel, and I would get a kick out of myself because I'd forget I had a snorkel in my mouth, and I'd start saying, "This is so beautiful, you know, gargling all the time," but it was magical. It was an incredible eye-opening, heart-stopping beauty to dive in the Bahamas and see the coral reefs and see the fish, and I wasn't that fond of the one hammerhead I saw, but otherwise it was just like it did something to my heart. And the other part of the story for me is I'm a social worker by profession, and I was very attracted to QEW and an organization of people who would work for the healing of the earth and kept saying, "Well, gosh, what possible use could they have for a social worker?" So I didn't go for a very long time until a friend of ours encouraged me. And have found that, in fact, healing the earth means healing ourselves and working on the inner work that blocks us as activists, and so I've been able to share some of how my work might be helpful because I believe that I'm speaking correctly for all three of us in saying that we are in this for the long run. This is our lives, and so we need to be the cleanest possible, most effective instruments that we can be, and that means keeping ourselves to use Eric's word of the day in balance. Let's explore a little of what that means, to be an instrument, as you were saying, Mary Jo. One of the things that is portrayed in our general U.S. society is that if you're concerned about the earth, if you're concerned about frogs, as I was talking about, or trees, or snail-darters, or whatever, then you get labeled as a tree-hugger, or a nature-lover, or some other label, but that has no role with relationship to the kind of science that Mary was talking about. That, instead, we have to calculate is how many jobs will be created, and so on. How do you deal with your work, your care for the earth, in the face of a culture that includes so little of the general welfare of the earth in the bottom line? Well, just one example that I've become interested in is the divestment from fossil fuels. That's a way of putting pressure on an enormous economic power that we're all part of, but it's gone beyond its legitimate uses for transportation and heating to become such an ongoing building, or even promoting increase in demand, preventing legislation that would decrease demand for fossil fuels. This divestment is one manner of addressing the powers that keep the status quo of use of fossil fuels that are so contributed into the global warming. So it's particularly in colleges that the divestment's happening, but we hope that friends will also be part of that in other religious groups. It's a way to take away some of the legitimacy of the fossil fuel industry that has control of much of Congress. Part of my question is, Mary, you want to support a movement for, and perhaps law enforcing, divestment on oil, gas, coal, whatever, but I'm sure that there's a lot of people in Congress who simply respond, let the market do its work. We don't have to get in the way of it. We'll look at the financial bottom line, and that's all we have to be concerned about. Obviously, your care for the earth, you're weighing something in your calculations that carries no weight for them. Have you found a way to be compelling to those whose bottom line is so different than yours? Well, Bill McKibbitt's work was very compelling to me. He wrote an article on Do the Math in Rolling Stones magazine that went viral, as they say, and then he did a whole tour around the country describing what Do the Math is about, and that information was credibly compelling to me. One of the pieces of the math is the amount of fossil fuels identified by the coal, gas, and oil companies. They've identified it in the earth. They put it on their books as part of their assets. But that quantity is such that where it all to be burned would push its way beyond any possible viable future, so that only one-fifth of that identified fossil fuel resources can be burned. So that, to me, is incredibly compelling. That is, it can be burned in terms of climate change effects. Yes, adding the carbon dioxide. Yes. Speaking for me, as Mary Jo, I don't know that I can be compelling to them. But there is a continuum of concern. And I think of the statistics that I don't have at hand on how many more children have asthma. And my sister and I in our conversations speak about her four grandchildren, one of whom does have asthma right now, and I'll be darned. She's a suburban mommy from Cincinnati, and grandma from Cincinnati. And she went out and bought a composter. So I have to put my faith in the incremental ounce-by-ounce moment-by-moment, second-by-second changes of people as they are waking up. And I believe many more people are waking up than the American media reports to us. I also feel like if I can't change and look toward changing those people that you're speaking of, I still have a responsibility to do this work as faithfully as I can without falling into the Western trap of saying it's only good work if I can achieve this end. Whatever end I achieve, you know, I still am responsible in this minute to do what I know how to do. And we were saying that this morning, being living the one human life that I am given to live. Eric, what do you think? To respond to this question, I need to take a little bit of time and relate some of my experience and where some of the background comes for what I have to say. After growing up in the Episcopal Church, after high school, I went through stages of the agnostic, some atheism, and so on, and came to do some reading on Native American spirituality, that I identified with. In later life, when we were a young family, had a daughter that was getting V3 and V4 and had to start thinking about schooling, we knew we wanted to do it closer to home and realized the places that we were living didn't really know how to do that and came to feel if we could contact the Native American elders on this continent. We might be able to learn from their real experience of how to do education without the institution of schools. And that led us, eventually, in this long story in between these things. That eventually led us to Hopi and contact with the Hopi other elder, Grandfather David. And with that then came inside, real inside, more than book inside of being with a culture, an ancient culture of peace, a culture that lives in a different way. Things like, and this also relates very closely for me now with friends, with Quakers, where we talk about the light within the light, within up to the last couple of decades, the implication has been within the human form. After being with the Hopi, they use the term the great spirit. And it's the great spirit that pervades everything. And I believe I've been watching a process of continuing revelation, what friends call, Quakers call, continuing revelation, that now, often we hear and use consistently, imply consistently when I say the light within, it's the light within all creation. For friends, the light within right from the beginning was the spiritual basis for many things, equality between men and women. The basis of the peace testimony, if there's that of the light or God within you and within me, it doesn't make sense as fighting. It's the basis for equality and the work that friends did with slaves, and there's more examples. So as we recognize the light within all creation, then we can no longer lift the human form above it. And starting with the question on a political and economic level, things like that, I've come to see that we hear political crisis, economic crisis, social crisis. Underlying all of these crisis, I have come to believe that there's a spiritual crisis. And if we can deal with things at that deeper spiritual level, which includes one of the very first things that we need to be dealing with, and I think the foundation for a lot of the negativity we see going on is fear. And if we can deal with these things at a very deeper level and transform ourself at that deeper level, then it is reflected in all of the physical level work that we do. And if we look only at the physical level things, we're not going to get to those deeper levels of change that need to be happening. Well, talk about the change that's happening. In the publicity you put out for the process that you're involved in this week, some of the words that were included are that you're meeting daily to, quote, "strengthen and deepen our sense of continuing revelation, spiritual unity, peace, and effective deep action that values the integrity, diversity, and continuity of life on our planet." That's a mouthful, but let me focus on just one of the clauses. What is deep action, effective deep action? What are you talking about there? Is that the change that goes on within you, changing you, but aren't you all ready? Environmental saints? What is the deep action that you're talking about pursuing? I can have a first go at that. After recognizing the light within all creation, the next thing that I see that's a special gift that friends have to offer is our process. And that deep action will come out of the process. That process involves meeting as equals in circles in quiet, much quiet between people contributing. And with that quiet, we get to that deeper place to be sharing from. People have the opportunity and the time between speakers once again to be listening without having to be thinking about immediately responding, having a time to really process what's been said. And then when they offer something, it again comes from that deeper place, which may include some of what has previously been said, until eventually as everybody is contributing their part, we come to see what friends call a sense of the meeting emerging or a sense of unity emerging. And that level of decision-making usually brings out a deeper level to apply to the physical problems before us. I think that comes to mind about an occasion for me of deep action is trying to teach this new worldview, this so-called new story, which is coming out of science. I would call it deep because in a way it is still somewhat foreign to this culture of the worldview or the way of seeing that's coming out of actually out of science. So the idea of not being afraid to say, for example, our new story group has been reading a book by Steve McIntosh called "Evolution's Purpose" and knowing that from my science background to speak of any kind of purpose or directionality in the world from the perspective of science is something you just do not do. It's a random objectified world. So to me the depth comes from having confidence that there's an emerging integration between what science is known and what the spiritual tradition has known. So that for example spiritual tradition has known that beauty draws us forward. And likewise now somehow some scientists are saying there's in what's called form generation, there's an intrinsic movement towards beauty and truth. And that to me is deep action to work with that material. A message to our listeners, this is Spirit in Action, and I'm Mark Helpsmeet, your host for this Northern Spirit radio production on the web for listening and download at northernspiritradio.org, also on iTunes and Pacificus audio port, etc. Also on our site you'll find links to our guests and place to post comments on shows and please do visit and post your comments making our communication two-way. While you're there consider making a donation of vital aid to our work and please please please remember to support your local community radio station and invaluable alternative to commercially limited news and music. You can support Northern Spirit radio and likely your local community radio station by underwriting. Support for today's Spirit in Action broadcast comes from Friends Journal, a monthly magazine whose mission is to communicate Quaker experience in order to connect and deepen spiritual lives online at friendsjournal.org. Contact us at northernspiritradio.org if you'd like to consider underwriting our program. Today for Spirit in Action we are at the annual Friends Journal conference gathering and I'm with a panel of three participants of a five-day, fifteen-hour workshop or maybe more accurately called an open spirit environment for attention to world healing and holding. And they say that they are looking for a deep sense of what's best for all the creatures on this planet and the planet as a whole. The panel consists of members of QEW, that's Quaker Earth Care Witness, Eric Maya Joy, Mary Jo Klingel, and Mary Conroe Quelow. And they should feel free to correct or improve my description of what they're doing this week. But Mary just mentioned the book, Evolution's Purpose by Steve McIntosh. And I'll note that I interviewed Steve a year, perhaps a year and a half ago, and you can listen to that interview on northernspiritradio.org. But back to our discussion. One thing that I'm wondering about, that I'm concerned about, is that when you leave this conference, when you go back home, does this mean that you just leave with a warm, fuzzy, affirmed feeling, which I'm not disparaging, and I really do think is important, but does this change you and the world outside? Are there concrete steps in this deep insight that you're gathering? I would say, and this is something we've been dealing with both at the QEW level, Quaker Earth Care Witness level and my home meeting in Olympia. When we talk about deep action or activism, the implication is on the physical level, and yes, that needs to be done. That's important work to be done. I believe there's also activism and working on those deeper levels and doing transformation there and helping each other with that, where once again, when we move in that area, a little bit, it changes everything on the physical level, and what we're discovering is it takes balance between both of these. It takes the time to be doing the inner work, the inner discovery, the inner exploration, then applying that physical level of things as we work on hand. Let me see if I can add another facet to that, Eric, thanks. Part of our struggle as Earth Care activists was articulated as well as it could have been by Albert Einstein when he said, "I'm not going to get this right," but something about it is not possible to solve a problem at the level of consciousness at which it was created. So we are very much about examining consciousness to see what paradigms need to go, what paradigms have been foundational in our destruction of the Earth. And one of them, for me, is the separation of separating the world into good and bad. And it is so deep and so pervasive in our culture. It's amazing once you start to listen to this. How many friends do we have as women who say, "Oh, I was a bad girl." And what that means is they chuck a cake for dinner, please. But to separate out the good and the bad paradigm is really essential. So we are slightly, maybe more than slightly, our eyes go toward what are we going to do. Like, doing is good. And I think we're seeing the same thing from different perspectives, but I work much more with the Quaker concept of a leading. What is it that sets me on fire and calls me forth into my work? And there are days when I sit and say, you know, my one ounce of leading compared to everything in the world is nothing. And yet my ounce of leading is perhaps the deepest action I can do. So, for example, that might take the form, and it did, in fact, take the form of a trifle that Mary Quello and I co-authored on the spiritual basis of care for the earth. You know, maybe not huge drama. And yes, there are copies up in the Quaker-esque or witness rooms upstairs. But it's not always a doing. You know, sometimes the most faithful thing is to sit and hold my community in the light. Sometimes that's all I can do in one day. I could follow a little thread here when I said earlier, one of the things at a deeper level is fear. I personally believe that fear stems from insecurity, being insecure. That leads to a need for control and for power. And eventually that leads to greed. And these are elements of, as I see it, patriarchy. If we can change things at the fear level, and through that, cure greed get beyond the need for greed and all of the things that we need, all of a sudden the power and control issues that we see so prominent in the world today. And I would say very much prominent in our country here, the United States, that we'd be moving toward a society that was more sharing and cooperative and working together than the power structures that we see in play today. And here we are again as friends, saying how do we cure all of these? And I'm reminded of the phrase from the Gospel of Thomas when the disciples say to Jesus, "Who should we say that we are?" And the response is tell them that you are children of the light. And so for me the answer to fear on that deepest level has been to walk into that idea that perhaps I am a child of the light. For me that changes everything. We could set up a straw man argument. Most of the people out there in the world, they're doing much as I'm sure I am causing untold environmental damage. They're well-meaning. They don't mean to be harming other species, and they're not thoughtless people in general. I had a conversation with someone who's head of a large social service agency. I was talking about the importance of environmentalism and specifically the number of endangered species with the number of them facing extinction. He essentially rebutted. He's a good-hearted man, Jim's compassionate and an excellent person. He said that he understood the importance of facing the number of endangered species, but that even more important to him, and in his estimation, was the people that he has to be concerned about. He was dealing with human suffering of all sorts as head of this agency, so he was weighing the needs of the people he worked so hard for against the needs of other species on the planet, and, not surprisingly, felt that the non-human species were of a lower priority. I imagine that the three of you are not exactly on that same page. How do we see human needs in the big picture? For instance, I value my human comfort over the right of a mosquito to take my blood for its procreation needs. I generally look at the mosquito and I say, go to God, and then hurry it off on its way. What are your ideas on that kind of oppositions of needs and priorities of human versus other species? How do we deal with that? I would say that there's a vast difference between mosquitoes and mountaintop removal, and what's happening with tar sands, which are huge things in destroying vast, vast areas of habitat for not only other species, but for the human being. So I think that there's a big difference in scope in some of these things. We did someone in our group this week. Did you use the image of the woven cloth? It's also been used by some authors. You pull out one strand and the cloth's okay for one. You keep pulling out strands. Eventually the cloth is no longer strong. And also Thomas Berry says that we're humans to live on the moon. We would be different people. There would not be the wealth of beauty, relationship. We wouldn't be part of such a creativity. It's a remarkable reality that we're part of and without that human beings just would not exist. We really need to be careful about how arguments are framed. I remember in discussing the peace testimony and having people say, "Well, if Hitler were alive, wouldn't you want to war to stop him?" And I'm like, "We can go all the way out to that end of the continuum and talk about Hitler, or we can talk about the violence and mass incarceration in our communities." And with a smile, I say, "We can talk about mosquitoes." Or, "I would like to try to stay away from those kinds of discussions." And I would rather talk about where that person played when they were little and if they ever went fishing with their grandpa and what the earth meant to them. Because we can get into that kind of oppositional, "Well, you think this, but I think that, and of course I'm right, and I haven't noticed I do that too." But if we can reach to touch people's hearts, you know, like you said in Scrooge, "Bear but a touch of my hand upon your heart." That was the, I guess, the first spirit of Christmas who said, "Bear but a touch of my hand upon your heart." That's where the transformation begins. And where does it go? Where do we go? What do we do with our increased compassion toward other species, greater connection with the whole of creation? Besides the warm, fuzzy feelings we have, what does that actually mean about how we live? Does this mean I have to give up my car or that I have to, I have to give up luxuries like ice cream? You know, I didn't mean to cause any heart attacks in the group here. But I had my own self-questioning and empiphanies when reading Daniel Quinn's books, Ishmael and the Story of B. As I was able to understand the enormity of the crisis, particularly that those of us in North America are so much a part of the problem. And as China and India catch up with us with privileged lifestyles and become as much despoilers of the planet as we are, it'll only get worse. But I realized while reading those books with all of this coming, for me to do my fair share, I'd have to drastically change my life and give up 95% of what I do day to day. And I had to face the question sincerely, honestly. And it was very uncomfortable. It is very uncomfortable. And we tend to avoid the discomfort by taking the easy bits. Yes, I'll recycle or yes, I'll drive a Prius, etc. All good things, but so far short of the immense change that's needed. Am I willing to make the immense change needed to do my fair share for the planet? I feel grateful to the people in transition communities who are really working with how to be resilient and cooperative in future more difficult occasions. I'm not part of one. I keep now thinking of a major change that I believe has to happen. And I'm reminded of when I first really heard this from somebody else. We were developing a peace center in Nevada City, California area. And a man Utah Phillips was working with us. It was the first day of a retreat we were doing, looking at what to do. And people were standing around the donuts and the coffee and drinking and talking about how people just aren't making good decisions. Actually, they were saying how stupid the main populace is. And Utah, unlike it is for him, was standing in the background for a while. And then he made a statement. He says, "People are not stupid. It's the information they're working with." And when we look at the mainstream media in this country today, we're not getting the clear information. You have to really look for it. It is available. And as you become, I think, more of an activist. You look in places where you can find it. But probably the biggest percentage of the populace is not working with the right information. And so that's a major change. And what sponsors that disinformation is corporate sorts of things. And the things that we're encouraged to buy and consume that we don't really need. The things that are eating up our environment. So there's some major, again, we have to get to those root causes and do work there to ultimately have the change that we need to be living in a good way here. Once again, it sets up an authoritarian or patriarchal separation. If anyone says, "Yes, you must give up your car." And if anyone said that to me, I'd want to go out and buy an SUV or a Volvo or something. It's like, "No, you can't tell me. I'm going out." Not a Hummer, no. You can't do that. But what we can do and what we have as part of our quicker faith and practice, our deeper practice, is to say to you, "And how are you, lead friend?" And the inner grappling. Yes, if I woke up and thought every day about the enormity of the problem, that would be all I would do that day. I would pull the covers over my head and I would be done for the day. But if I think of how many of us are really struggling with all this and really grappling to find our leadings, one of my favorite books is "Blessed Unrest" by Paul Hawken. And I saw a video of him, I think a YouTube video, where he talked about throughout the world, in country after country, there are thousands and hundreds of thousands of people working for peace and eco-justice. And so if each one of us, worries about whether we need to go up our car, that's at one level. But at a deeper level, if each of us works as we are led, I don't know what will happen. I don't know. The prognostication is not good. But if I am working with my leading, I'm as faithful as I can be. Very joke, could I ask you a question? You said you don't want someone to tell you to not buy an SUV, but suppose the Earth is telling you that. The Earth must be bossy. I hear the... What I struggle with is the authoritarian separation. You must buy, you must not buy. You must wear this size high heels, you must not. But I do think the Earth is crying. And I don't know exactly what my medicine is for her. You know, I agonize daily about the car I drive to stick with that example. But I think to frame it as what is the Earth asking us that I can hear? Yeah, that I can hear. I'd like to expand a little bit on something that Mary Jo mentioned, and she mentioned asking questions. One of the things that I really like about the religious society of friends is that it's not based so much on answers as it is on questions or what we call queries. And I think a big part of what can be done is be asking the right questions of ourselves on an individual basis, and then I think more importantly today to be asking those questions collectively and working together toward the answers of those. I think it's out of that that it becomes clear out of that collective seeking that more clarity can come on next effective steps to be done. As the three of you, Eric, Mary, and Mary Jo, have been talking, you referred to the divine, what's often called God, by a variety of names. You've used spirit, light, other things. And in this room right now, we're all Quakers. So we're used to a number of different ways to talk about that. Though I'm not sure what words our listeners do or don't use. But when talking about Earth care, as we are, I think it's pretty typical to refer to Mother Earth or Gaia or the goddess that way. Where, in what image, do you find the special voice of divinity? I mean, Mary, you mentioned, is the earth saying to us? Where do you three find the convincing voice of authority? Well, when I asked about it, what's the earth saying, I meant at the fairly physical level of the carrying capacity of the earth and that meaning. But where I find something, or the spirituality level, is the change in conceptions of what's the nature of matter. That has meant a great deal to me that I used to think of matters, which is partly true, of course, of atoms and molecules that are built together to make complex beings. But it turns out that what we call matter is highly constructed or some form of integration of an energy dimension. And I guess maybe you all know the example from Brian Swim of an atom made the size of a baseball stadium. The nucleus would be like the, I don't know, it's a tennis ball or a ping pong ball on the pitcher's mound and the electrons would be very high up above the stadium. And then within that, what we've called emptiness is apparently not empty. It's the creative reality. And all the work of relating that to traditional theology and what light and what's within is a big work before us. How do we integrate all that? That's all being done. But it's crucial work for our culture to integrate those fields of knowing. The Quaker intuitive knowing and experience of light and leadings and this other discoveries from a different manner of knowing does need to be integrated. Or you need to hear both voices. My experience is a felt sense that I experience physically. I feel it in my body and then I feel a sense of peace. And the example I can give is I started talking in our collective group this morning, the six of us. I started talking about how part of my journey right now is reclaiming anger. And it's not the anger like somebody just took my parking spot. It's anger like the rage that I feel when I think about what's happening to coral reefs or when I think about what's happening to redwoods. And one of the women in the group was clearly in what I would identify as that very deep spirit led place. And when I was quiet she said, "I am the redwood. My body is the redwood." And the room was so silent and I knew I was in the presence of that energy or light that we call spirit in the way that she spoke. I felt it in my body. I would say that certainly books and written things and people that have been examining some of these areas are very useful. And when it comes to a quiet though, the most exciting part for me is working with others. And working the process I feel most comfortable with is friend's process. When you can work on a topic and have everybody in a room after making their contributions listening and see the sense of the meeting, the sense of unity emerging, you can feel it. It's something special happening. And as far as applying these things or even exploring what they mean, this is the way I feel most comfortable with it is working on it with others to the point of being open enough to both listen and open enough to share your deepest feelings. And out of that, when the sense of unity emerges, for me it's very special and exciting and rings true. When it rings true to everybody that's there, that's the kind of guy that I want to be following. So, as we end our week here at the 2013 Friends General Conference Gathering, this year held at the University of Northern Colorado in Greeley, Colorado, you've got one more day of your special earth care encounter process. As you head home, what do you expect you will do or be differently? What is the fruit that you'll be carrying back with you? Maybe you've got that fruit already, but I'd like to know what's changed for you this week. In my first comments, something has changed in the way I feel connected. It's not that I'm connected to a deeper place, but I'm recognizing it as a deeper place. And with this, I find a need to be sharing it. And this is what I've been doing along with the wisdom that's come from friends, the wisdom that's come from indigenous people who have a much bigger picture. And I think we all know we need to be contributing our part. Recently, I heard a man in what he said. He said, "The awakening is not only happening, it is inevitable. The only thing that can take us off course, if each one of us do not contribute our part as clearly and as deeply as we possibly can." This was an experiment for me to spend 15 hours together with other friends seeking the light in the context of Earth's care concerns. And what I will take with me is that it did happen and that it is real, and that we were able to gather and seek a deeper relationship with Earth. And near the end, after talking about all these very difficult things this morning, about all the pain that we feel from the condition of the Earth, all of a sudden we found ourselves talking about love, arriving back again at a place of such deep connection that the room felt to me full of love. And that's what I will take. I will take a sense of most joy of having been part of a creative process, including what you just said, Mary Jo, kind of a confidence in human possibilities. Can I just say one more thing about what we were talking about about the pain? Someone said something so beautiful, and I'm the Epistle Committee, which means I do the writing about this. And she said, "The pain is there. It's real, and it works in us and through us. And it comes out of us through our addictions, our alcoholism, our violence, our victimization. And it was such a relief to me to sit in a room with people who would talk about that. And then I believe it was you, Mary, who said, and addressing it is part of the affirmation of life. It leads us back to the sacred. It is lovely. And it's been lovely sitting with the three of you for this past hour. Again, we've been speaking with Eric Maya Joy, Mary Jo Klingel, and Mary Conroe Quello. They are three of the six people gathered this past week seeking deeper relationship with wider creation. About Earthcare concerns are a bigger sense of what we're all part of. Thank you, Eric, Mary Jo, and Mary for joining me today for Spirit in Action, and bless you as you go forward in your work. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you for the opportunity to share. Underwriting support for today's program came from Friends Journal, a monthly magazine whose mission is to communicate Quaker experience in order to connect and deepen spiritual lives. Online at FriendsJournal.org. Thanks to them for their support, to you for listening, and we'll see you next week for Spirit in Action. The theme music for this program is Turning of the World, performed by Sarah Thompson. This Spirit in Action program is an effort of Northern Spirit Radio. You can listen to our programs and find links and information about us and our guests on our website, northernspiritradio.org. Thank you for listening. I am your host, Mark Helpsmeet, and I welcome your comments and stories of those leading lives of spiritual fruit. May you find deep roots to support you and grow steadily toward the light. This is Spirit in Action. With every voice, with every song, we will move this world along. With every voice, with every song, we will move this world along, and our lives will feel the echo of our healing. (upbeat music)