December 2003 January 2004
Our
Democracy is in Danger of Being Paralyzed
Bill Moyers
Reclaiming
Local Media
Paul Cienfuegos
What
You Need to Know About Electronic Voting
William Rivers Pitt
Will
the 2004 Election by Stolen With Electronic Voting Machines?
William Rivers Pitt
Myths
of the Hermit Kingdom
Eric Sirotkin
Heresies
in Pursuit of Peace
Eric Sirotkin
The
Empire Strikes Out
Kenny Ausubel
Relationships
and Culture
Nita Simons
The
Movie Mystic
Stephen Simon
Tai
Chi and Qigong
Bill Douglas
A
Relationship Practice
Kayla M. Starr, MPH
Cosmic
Calendar
Salina Rain
Relationship & Culture
By Nina Simons
I keep wondering: what is the single area of our lives we could best commit our time and attention to, that might most rapidly alter this violent course of greed and environmental destruction we’re on?
I think it involves looking at what we love most uncompromisingly—what sparks us so deeply that we’re willing to go out on a limb, take risks and make a stand for it. To change the direction the world’s heading in, we are creating a new culture. And our culture is shaped by the nature of its relationships, by what we most love and value.
There’s also another, more personal reason to delve into the stew of relatedness, to see how seasoning it may improve the flavor and nourishment of our lives.
There is a vast loneliness among us—author Annie Lamott calls it a “life-threatening loneliness”—and responding to that deeply human need may lead us to redefine and restore our culture in a way that reweaves the fabric of our individual lives into community, reorienting us collectively toward an Earth-honoring future and social healing.
Since culture can be roughly defined as “what we value, cultivate and care about,” doesn’t it make sense that, to shift our culture we need to re-examine the quality of our relationships?
For what is culture comprised of, really, but an intimately interconnected series of stories, relationships and social networks—beginning with the core relationship of each of us to ourselves, and then emanating outward to embrace our “environment” of friends, partners, communities, nations and the whole web of life.
What would it mean to explore the convergence of cultural change with the nature and quality of our relationships?
Dan Dagget, ecologist and author of the Pulitzer-nominated book, Beyond the Rangeland Conflict, asked that question, and concluded: “When scientists set out to discover the smallest most basic form of matter, and discovered particles that were smaller and smaller and smaller, they finally came to a point where there were no particles, no ‘things.’ There were only relationships.”
What that means is, in the most basic and fundamental of senses, we don’t live in a world of things—we live in a world of relationships. I realized, he said, that if we live in a world of relationships rather than a world of things then, quite likely, we can learn more about being an effective environmentalist by reading books about relationships than we can learn from books on ecology and plants. Certainly more than we can learn by reading books about activism.
Dan said that to resolve environmental conflicts, he began paying more attention to what had kept him and his wife together for more than 26 years. He recognized that we’re all enrolled in a continuing education learning experience about living in a world of relationships.
Communications, both verbal and non-verbal, are at the very heart of cultivating relationship. They create the tendrils of connection—the invisible webs that carry information between and among us. Ultimately, those networks shape our culture, guiding the formation of our institutions and social structures.
Our corporate-consumer culture has played a key part in severing our relationship with the Earth, as we’ve bought into a system of intermediaries—for our food, our power, our transportation, our information, and especially our waste—which disconnects us from the real consequences of our choices.
Wendell Berry writes “In this state of total consumerism—which is to say a state of helpless dependence on things and services and ideas and motives that we have forgotten how to provide ourselves—all meaningful contact between ourselves and the Earth is broken. We do not understand the Earth in terms either of what it offers us or of what it requires of us, and I think it is the rule that people inevitably destroy what they do not understand.”
One of the more powerful ideas that can spark a reconnection with our selves, each other and the Earth is the concept of immanence, which suggests that everything that’s alive in the world, including each one of us, is filled with magic and imbued with spirit.
In 18th century England, ideas of immanence were called enthusiasms, which means, from the Greek, Full of God, and these enthusiasms were often associated with activism and rebellion. Back then, the notion of the world’s being inherently alive, full of spirit, and continually changing helped to develop people’s self-confidence, and encouraged them to step forward, to act, to transform the world—rather than remaining passive in the face of the great transformations that were then sweeping England.
The possibility of changing our world-view—and through it, our behavior—is perhaps our species’ greatest gift, and also one of our greatest challenges. It involves rewiring our internal systems, and learning how to re-orient ourselves toward a life that is relationally alive, alert and constantly changing.
Master healer and educator Jan Sultan has named this capacity Behavioral Plasticity,and what he means is our conscious ability to alter our behavior patterns, to revise our inner belief systems, to fundamentally approach our lives with a new perspective.
To make this shift calls for a change of ethics.
In the Cherokee language, there is no word for love of an inanimate object—anyone who loves a thing is considered insane.
In this time that’s been called a “Baroque epoch of greed,” we are plagued by the belief that value is based almost solely on material gain. We need to rediscover that the only real security lies in being connected to our own inner spark, those we love, our communities, and the whole web of life.
The bottom line is that we’re being called upon to make the shift from a worldview that’s essentially self-centered to a consciousness that recognizes our relatedness as central to our survival.
This shift will expand our sense of time, and we will come to evaluate the merit of strategies, innovations and policies not merely in relation to what immediate benefits they might bring, but also in light of their extended impact on future generations.
This change will involve redefining our senses of meaning, fulfillment and success based upon the quality of relational connection we have in our lives.
It will invite us to more fully experience the richness of community, of belonging, of deepening, and of being loved. It’ll mean recognizing that dynamic, caring relationships may be the only thing that endures.
Relationships are the connective tissue that holds the biological world together, and our empathic illiteracy is what’s been allowing our human society to come apart at the seams, tearing a hole, as David Suzuki says, large enough for our future to fall through.
It is our deep love for the health and wholeness of a living Earth—including all of life’s myriad expressions—that we must make a stand for, choosing to come together with respect and commitment to protect, cultivate and honor that essential relationship.
Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King said “Love is humankind’s most potent weapon for personal and social transformation … We are all caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly affects all indirectly … In the struggle for human dignity … we must not succumb to the temptation of becoming bitter or indulging in hate campaigns. Along the way of life, someone must have sense enough and morality enough to cut off the chain of hate. This can only be done by projecting the ethic of love to the center of our lives.”
Nina Simons, who gave this speech at Bioneers 2003, is executive director of Bioneers/CHI and co-producer of the Bioneers Conference. An environmental and social entrepreneur and activist, she was formerly marketing director and later president of Seeds of Change, and then regional marketing director for Odwalla. Named an Utne Reader “Visionary” in 1996 for her innovative work in values-driven communications and community building, Nina co-founded a network in 2002 called UnReasonable Women for the Earth, which in turn helped to launch Codepink 4 Peace. She speaks widely on Women’s Leadership, Environmental Entrepreneurship, and Organizations as Living Systems.
