The Environmental Crisis: What We Can Do

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Some of the reasons I am willing to suffer knowledge of my participation in climate change.

The Environmental Crisis: What We Can Do

When I think of the best approach to the issues we have created in our environment, I think of the old Buddhist adage: Show up. Pay attention. Tell the truth. Detach from outcome. The problem lies in being so overwhelmed that we cannot show up to pay attention. Then we deny the truth, effectively participating in a horrible outcome! It is critical that we are not paralyzed into denial by our fear.
In the recently published Sacred Agriculture: The Alchemy of Biodynamics (Lindisfarne Books, 2013), Dennis Klocek emphasizes the importance of this “showing up.” It is important that we acknowledge our vulnerability to the earth, he says, versus feeling in control and above it. “The only way I can turn my soul from existential guilt into the willingness to imagine my role in the Earth’s destiny is through active imagination (110).”

On February 22, 2014, the C. G. Jung Institute of San Francisco will offer the first of a series of eco-psychology seminars and workshops on the environment crisis. These workshops will be from differing perspectives but of one piece: the necessary crisis of consciousness in earth changes and what we can/must do. In this first workshop, Indwelling: Our Human Participation in the Dream of the Earth, analysts Carol McRae and Barbara Holifield will lead participants into active imagination states through drumming and authentic movement. “We will allow what emerges to build on Thomas Berry’s idea that hope for our future lies in our human participation in the dream of the earth.”

This workshop will be followed by on October 18, 2014, by The Spiritualized Earth and the Birth of the New Consciousness: Jung’s Analytical Psychology and Steiner’s Biodynamic Agriculture: What Might Save Us. I will present the common root of both and what Biodynamic agriculture offers.
This will be followed by a workshop on November 15, 2014, with a writing workshop, Wounded Earth, Wounded Psyche: On Solastagia and Nature Deficit Disorder,  in which participants will be encouraged to find language for what is unbearable and unfathomable.  This will be lead by four of us, poets Naomi Lowinsky, Leah Shelleda, Francis Hatfield, and by me, Patricia. Again, more about this later.
These seminars are very reasonably priced ($35 for the first, $25 for graduate students) and are a really good way to gather with others in aligning to address what we can do.