Tuesday, May 25, 2010

Responding to the Oil Spill


I am reading the reports and my heart is weeping with sadness.

Verbal warfare.  Blame.  Frustration. Impotence...

"Urgent questions about what lay beneath"...

Assessments like "let's make no mistake that what is at threat here is our very way of life"...

Perhaps the most disturbing element, if there can be such a list when the whole situation is beyond comprehension, is contemplating what Tony Hayward, chief executive of BP meant by "a third and fourth and fifth option around both containment and elimination" when the already disastrous present solutions are not working.

I went to one of my heroes, Henry David Thoreau and found words for my swirling thoughts...

Alas! how little does the memory of these human inhabitants enhance the beauty of the landscape! 

A man is rich in proportion to the number of things he can afford to let alone. 


All endeavor calls for the ability to tramp the last mile, shape the last plan, endure the last hours toil.

The fight to the finish spirit is the one characteristic we must posses if we are to face the future as finishers. 


All men are children, and of one family. The same tale sends them all to bed, and wakes them in the morning. 
Henry David Thoreau 

What do you do when the situation is too big - too unwieldy - too far from your own hands to do anything about? What can any of us do?

I can guide you carefully through one option as I march myself through my own bodymind and witness the feelings that reside there.  Our Energetic Anatomy offers us a map to what we can do.

Caring about our world in the way Thoreau so eloquently expressed throughout his life is the territory of the second chakra.  When a feeling of care overwhelms us and becomes too big - too frustrating - too impossible for us to do anything with, we will often go to a couple of options.

One option might be to continue to care, but to do it improperly.  Rage at the world.  Call people names.  Send out redhot anger and more poison and expect that you yourself won't get burned even worse.  Rant.

Another option is don't care.  Go unconscious.  Say "whaaatever" (with a sigh...) or "I knew it all along" and be satisfied with your precognitive rationale.  Apathy is on the other side of proper caring, and it can be a successful place to hide when the feelings of caring have no place else to go - or so it seems.

We have another option, which is rather than moving sideways between caring to uncaring, that we investigate the next chakra and move upward to the third vortex territory of self-esteem.  Here we encounter the emotion of grief and the process of letting go.  Here we take a good look at SELF.  How can I make a difference in my own world right from where I stand? What will I do - today - and move myself into the ease of a shifted energy body that can (and will) function well through crisis.


When "clean-up" is the issue, as it is with our spewing oil wells, you must stay the course for yourself, and do what you can with what you've got, or you will experience the impotent frustration of your apparent inability to  save the world.

What does that mean to you?

Here are some suggestions from my heart to yours that come from the BICS framework of YokiBICS. They invite you to move the lifeforce energy of your own body, mind and spirit intentionally into Belief - Integrity - Choice - Service.

  • Go clean up your own backyard
  • Take a day trip and clean up your own shoreline
  • Join a campaign to clean up the neighborhood - or just go outside for a walk with a plastic bag 
  • Help a neighbor with their clean-up
  • Investigate community action in your area
  • Go use your natural resources, park, preserve, walkway.
  • Donate
Let's get even more personal...
  • Clean up your own thoughts of separation
  • Immerse yourself in your own relatedness to the Natural World
  • Be willing to extend the perimeters of your own backyard 
  • Know that as you hold your own thoughts of caring, you create a more caring world - it begins with the individual and every one counts.
Try these suggestions.  Try more of your own.  And yes you can also write, vote, and act with your significant purchasing power as a consumer.  But do care. We are all in this together.

Let me know how it works out.

Namaste and big hugs to you, my neighbor.

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