September 11th

Reflections about September 11th events from the Canyons of Utah and New Mexico (From an e-mail sent to my friends back home)

We all need to find effective ways to deal with the anxiety and grief that has been stirred up by the recent events in New York. I too felt the collective emotion; it crept into my dreams and moods even in the wilderness. Many wise people have interesting perspectives to offer about our current situation, as all the messages I found on my e-mail demonstrated. We live in a world where violence is pervasive, down to the most intimate levels such as domestic violence and child-battering. Not to mention the violence against Mother Nature and the planet! I just don't know how or if we can turn this monster around--so many of us wounded by the patriarchy and now more grief and suffering. Perhaps the suffering is a challenge from Spirit to find "that which abides." It does seem to be the case that suffering catalyzes deep spiritual transformation. Each of us has a responsibility to step into forgiveness and compassion and open-heartedness in the face of it. Tolle and all my zen teachings say the only salvation is saying no to identifying with the delusion of non-stop thinking and YES to the HERE and NOW, embodied and centered. May you each breathe deep and touch the quiet still center within, that which abides. And feel the love that connects us all with eachother and all life forms on this wondrous mother earth that we are privileged to walk upon.

The Stone People tell me they have seen many civilizations rise and fall and this one will fall too. We will be witness to this collapse just as we were all witness to the collapse of the buildings in NYC. It will happen within a hundred years, perhaps sooner because the magnitude of population explosion and the drain on resources by the USA and other rich countries will speed the process. There is no way to protect myself from this; surely it is good to have the skills to live simply and move more and more into the wilderness as things fall apart more and more in the cities and social instiuttions. This will just have to unfold, but I honestly believe this event marks the begninning of the end for the USA’s global rich bully status and things will continue to unravel.

In New Mexico I visited Chaco Canyon where a highly developed civilization, the Chaco-culture branch of the Anazazi, built roads across vast distances, stairways up the cliffs to the mesas, extensive irrigation systems, "great houses," high-quality stone-mason dwellings that included numerous "kivas" for spiritual work and social gatherings --over a thousand years ago. After 250 or so years, they were vacated; archeologists suspect a drought, but of course nobody knows for sure. Their structures still stand; they were built for permanence and still stand, reasonably intact, 1000 years later! Pondering the ruins and our current political situation, not to mention the passage of time that the multi-layered canyon walls in Utah demonstrated, leads me to pondering the eventual collapse (perhaps sooner rather than later) of this so-called civilization we are currently a part of. It seems all forms on this planet have a cycle of being a certain way, and then things change. Certainly my own life is making this evident right now! But HUGE changes, like an entire civilization that was clearly quite advanced in its architecture, spirituality, infrastructure, social systems---it just vanished after a relatively short time. As did the Twin Towers in NYC. Life continues to remind us how transient and ephemeral all things are.

Certainly all this is gives me "cause to pause" and puts the little changes in my own life right now, indeed my whole life, into a certain greater perspective.