There is nothing to be found in a steady diet of news, online petitions, or endless orbiting around the problems of the world to sustain us in the work of cultivating life in the wasteland.
Our task is not to climb the highest mountain peaks or travel to the Amazonian rain forest in search of enlightenment. We awaken to Oneness from a dream of brokenness by learning to focus on the unassuming presence of Spirit—supportive, quiet, and common—as close and real as the ground beneath our feet.
Shutting one’s eyes to the reality of a world in ecological crisis is an expression of feeling unequal to the moment. Denial is a consequence of spiritual malnutrition.
There is nothing more practical than spirituality, the practice of cultivating attention and intentional action, in the face of a war on life. You build the capacity for presence in a culture of absence with a steady diet of life in all its specificity and poetry.
Like sleepwalkers in a dream, our emphasis on “the word” has cost us the ability to read the symbolic landscape of the world in which we are immersed. In our preoccupation with screen and text, we neglect the greater context of our lives. Our spirits starve in the midst of plenty, for you have to be present and awake to feed on the soulful aspects of the world.