How Vietnam got under America’s callused cowboy skin

 

A convoy of cargo boats on the Mekong River in Vietnam
CC Jean Stimmell: June 1966

As a result of America’s war in Vietnam, Thich Nhat Hanh was exiled from his country and ended up a renowned spiritual teacher and peacemaker, instrumental in mellowing our macho culture.  

It was even more of a turnaround for Ocean Vuong, the acclaimed writer and poet: He tells us he literally wouldn’t exist without the Vietnam War. That’s because his grandfather, an American soldier fighting in Vietnam, met his grandmother, “a girl from the rice paddies”^⁠1 and married her. 

And then, there was me: a  hapless 19-year-old who stumbled into Vietnam after dropping out of college. I enlisted before the big Vietnam protests but with major reservations about the war. Yet I had bigger qualms about disappointing my father, a combat veteran of WW II, and my Pittsfield peers, if I did not emulate that manly icon of my generation, John Wayne.

In different ways, all our lives were forged by war – and still are.

Sometimes it takes cultural outsiders to expose our societal blindspots – to show us how things really are. As Vuong reminds us in a podcast with the Native American writer, Tommy Orange,^⁠ “America is literally a product of war, starting with the stolen land we are now standing on.”^⁠2 

This became more evident to Vuong after he started writing: he couldn’t help noticing that even the building blocks of his craft, the words he was using, reflected a war mentality: “I owned that workshop. I killed it, right? I smashed him. I went into that novel guns blazing.” He tells Tommy Orange, "Here we are, our one moment to create something on our own terms, and the only tools we have–we are so deprived as a culture–that the only tools we have is the tools of death.”^⁠⁠3

It seems extreme to say that the instruments of death are all we’ve got. Yet, all we have to do is look around.

We’ve lost, to date, one million of our fellow Americans to Covid, yet congress refuses to approve the money to prepare for the next pandemic – which is sure to come. Climate Catastrophe is descending on us, the ultimate grim reaper, but no one seems to be worried, and Congress seems oblivious. Conversely, our tools of death are ever-ready, always on hair-trigger alert. 

We are witnessing a perfect example right now: when Russia invaded Ukraine, our government was able to rush billions of dollars in military equipment immediately, no questions asked. All of us support Ukraine but shouldn’t equal attention be spent on the tools of life, like massive diplomatic efforts to end the killing.

Sadly, though, war is all we know. 

George Lakoff tells us why in his now classic book, "Metaphors We Live By." He explains that metaphors are fundamental to how we think: we use metaphors to structure what we perceive, how we think, and what we do. In the case of America, he convincingly shows how "war" has become the dominant metaphor of our times.

“It is important to see that we don’t just talk about arguments in terms of war. We can actually win or lose arguments. We see the person we are arguing with as an opponent. We attack his positions and we defend our own. We gain and lose ground…It is in this sense that the ARGUMENT IS WAR metaphor is one that we live by in this culture.”⁠^⁠4

When we look into it, as Ocean Vuong has done, it is frightening how much of our language is based on the war metaphor and its evil twin: our free-market economy with its "survival of the fittest" mentality. 

Carol Pearson, in “Hero Within,” points out the tragic nature of living in an over-ripe warrior society, as we do today: extreme polarization, massive inequality, citizens armed to the teeth, and bodies of mass shootings piling up higher each day. She suggests a more humane approach:

“But what if we simply shift our expectations a bit? What if the goal of life is not to prevail, but simply to learn? Then the end of the story can seem very different; and so can what happens in between birth and death. Heroism is redefined as not only moving mountains but knowing mountains: being fully oneself and seeing without denial, what is, and being open to learning the lessons life offers us.”^⁠5

That’s the life-giving lesson that refugees like Thich Nhat Hanh and Ocean Vuong have brought with them to our shores, and it’s a way of life that I have tried to live up to after my own baptism in war. 

xxx

¹ https://onbeing.org/programs/ocean-vuong-a-life-worthy-of-our-breath-2022/#transcript

² https://www.cityarts.net/event/ocean-vuong/

³ Ibid.

⁴ Lakoff, George & Johnson Mark,Metaphors We Live By. The University  of Chicago Press: Chicago, 1980. P. 4

⁵ The Hero Within by Carol Pearson, pp. 9-10

What If We Get It Right?

 

Ayana Elizabeth Johnson      

I’ve written before about how I’ve been trying to focus on positive alternatives to counteract today’s dominant “the sky is falling” commentary. Today I want to highlight one such encouraging voice: Ayana Elizabeth Johnson. 

She is a marine biologist, policy expert, and author. In a podcast on Krista Tippet’s “On Being”, she points out how we have become demoralized  by doomsday tales about  our future, almost to the  point of surrender. To combat such defeatism, Johnson makes a creative and pragmatic inquiry: What if “we let ourselves be led by what we already know how to do, and by what we have it in us to save?”

In fact, that idea is going to be the title of her next book:“What if we get this right?”^⁠1

Johnson believes our pervasive apprehension has prevented us “from rising to our highest human capacities, in every sphere of our life together.” She says each of us “feels the disarray of the natural world at a cellular level in our bodies.” It’s impossible to divorce ourselves from what is happening. “It’s not even so much that we are in it — we are of it.”

The solution is to stop running from the world we’ve created and turn to face it. Rather than getting emotional, Johnson prefers to put her head down and take concrete action. She reminds us about what we too often forget: we already know how to resolve our climate challenges. It’s just a matter of “figuring out how we can welcome more people into this work, get people excited, [and] help them find where they fit.”

We are already making more progress than we realize.

Just last week, David Brooks desribed in the Monitor the significant gains New England has made: we already have 4,000 MW of solar panels sitting on the region’s rooftops and back yards…more than three times the output of the Seabrook Station nuclear plant. That’s despite major foot-dragging by our retrograde governor and old fogey legislature who, at every turn, have refused to expand renewable energy options.

Wired Magazine has chimed in on the same theme: “The US Can Halve Its Emissions by 2030 – If It Wants To” by Matt Simon.^⁠2 He quotes a new study in the journal Science stating we can eliminate half of the US’s greenhouse gas emissions in the next eight years by fast-tracking solar and wind energy while rolling out more electric vehicles. Success will be less costly because the cost of renewables is plummeting: The price of solar technology has dropped 99% in the past 40 years.

Another advantage will be massive health benefits. The fossil fuel lifecycle, from extraction to processing to burning, is highly harmful to the human body. The study has shown that transitioning to clean energy will avoid over 200,000 premature deaths and over $800 billion to a trillion dollars in health  [costs].^⁠3 

Last, according to energy economist and coauthor Nikit Abhyankar, the cost will not be steep. “In fact, some studies found it might result in significant consumer savings.” For example, while putting solar panels on your roof may be costly, it will save you lots in the long run.

When it comes to combating climate change, Johnson says that we, as individuals, too often give up, overwhelmed by the immensity of the problem combined with guilt at not doing enough.  The answer is to think more collectively. Her favorite quote outlines how an exciting regenerative future is possible, “not when thousands of people do climate justice activism perfectly, but when millions of people do the best they can.”^⁠4

The major stumble block is not inadequate technology or individual failure but foot-dragging by our government. Consequently, at the national level, Republicans have blocked Biden’s Build Back Better program, which would have ramped up the manufacture of renewables, among other climate benefits. 

At the state level, our NH legislature and governor have consistently been the neanderthals of New England, rejecting clean energy bills and regional efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Sadly, we are the conspicuous outlier among New England states, otherwise quite proactive on climate change goals.

We need to be more like sports fans. When it dawned on Celtic fans that they had a chance to win the world championship this year, they became energized, rallying behind their team and passionately rooting them on. But in the case of climate change, where we have a clear path to victory, few people seem to give a damn.

Instead, we pay $5/gallon for gasoline instead of driving electric cars; we fight catastrophic forest fires when we shouldn’t have to; and it’s the same story with our unprecedented droughts, floods, and rising oceans. We all know the definition of doing the same old things over again, expecting a different result.

It’s called insanity.

xxx

¹ https://onbeing.org/programs/ayana-elizabeth-johnson-what-if-we-get-this-right/

² https://www.wired.com/story/the-us-can-halve-its-emissions-by-2030-if-it-wants-to/

³ Ibid.

⁴ https://www.vogue.com/article/ayana-elizabeth-johnson-new-climate-podcast

Kindling Extravagant Hope

“In times of change, learners inherit the earth,

 while the learned find themselves 

beautifully equipped to deal with

 a world that no longer exists.” 

– Eric Hoffer

I became a fan of Eric Hoffer after reading his best-selling book "The True Believer." At the time, I was a young man recently back from Vietnam working union construction and going to college when I could afford it. I had a special attraction to Hoffer, a longshoreman from San Francisco because he was a union man like me. I relished how he destroyed the stereotype of an intellectual as some frail creature cloistered in an ivy tower. 

He was the exact opposite: Self-educated and down-to-earth: a blue-collar man of the people. College does an excellent job of training a person on how to color inside the lines, sometimes at the expense of being blind to exciting new worlds that dwell outside those lines. Look at those famous artists who were known for breaking new ground, maybe because they never went to art school: Jean-Michel Basquiat, Frida Kahlo, Vincent Van Gogh come to mind.

Another point of commonality: I do my research in the same unorthodox way as Hoffer did, although I now do it online and in Kindle. From notes I took last century, here's his take on the subject: "I go to the library, I pick up the things that interest me, I use whatever comes my way. And I believe that if you have a good theory, the things you need will come your way. You'll be lucky.”^⁠1 

I'm revisiting "The True Believer" now, a book written over 70 years ago, because his analysis of mass movements is so spot-on: It's uncanny how precisely his thoughts about the nature of fascism, Nazism, and communism after WW II foretell the resurgence of authoritarianism today. To my way of thinking, the power of Hoffer's analysis comes from being a working man, understanding in his gut that at their roots, such movements are not ideological or political but personal and psychological.

Hoffer's book shows why folks are attracted to mass movements, whether it be Nazism or Trumpism: It is when their self-advancement is blocked and they feel devalued by society. For these true believers, Hoffer writes: "Their innermost craving is for a new life—a rebirth—or, failing this, a chance to acquire new elements of pride, confidence, hope, a sense of purpose and worth by an identification with a holy cause. An active mass movement offers them opportunities for both."^⁠2 

Trump supporters complain that white Americans are being replaced by minorities and prevented from moving up in society by an educated elite who look down on them as “deplorables.” Hoffer shows how such grievances breed a “passionate hatred,” which, in a psychological sense, gives meaning to their lives.

“Passionate hatred can give meaning and purpose to an empty life. Thus people haunted by the purposelessness of their lives try to find a new content not only by dedicating themselves to a holy cause but also by nursing a fanatical grievance. A mass movement offers them unlimited opportunities for both.”^⁠3

Hoffer makes a crucial point about how to move forward, whether we are on the right or the left. “Those who would transform a nation or the world cannot do so by breeding and captaining discontent or by demonstrating the reasonableness and desirability of the intended changes or by coercing people into a new way of life. They must know how to kindle and fan an extravagant hope.”^⁠4

Trump, the ultimate reality show host, promised extravagant hope with his galvanizing rhetoric about Making America Great Again, promising to restore folks – in particular, white men – to a state of maximum potency in a fantasy world that never really existed. Perhaps it was no accident he reportedly kept a copy of Adolf Hitler's speeches by his bedside. Meanwhile, democrats drone on about brain-numbing policy proposals which put people to sleep or drive them to drink.

Liberals need to wake up: We need to proclaim our extravagant hopes for building a better world for us all because, as Hoffer understood “the differences between the conservative and the radical seem to spring mainly from their attitude toward the future. Fear of the future causes us to lean against and cling to the present, while faith in the future renders us receptive to change.”^⁠5

Let’s listen to Eric Hoffer! It’s time to kindle and fan our extravagant hopes to create positive change– before it is too late!

xxx

¹ “The Independent Scholar’s Handbook” by Ronald Gross. Addison Wesley: 1982

² Hoffer, Eric. The True Believer (Perennial Classics) (pp. 12-13). HarperCollins. Kindle Edition.

³ Ibid. p. 98

⁴ Ibid. p. 9

⁵ Ibid. p.9

Searching for the Meaning of Life

South Moat Mountain in Conway NH
CC Jean Stimmell: 10/13/16

Plato believed humans were like captives in a cave only able to see a reflection of the real world flickering on the cavern walls. Carl Jung believed that the accumulated wisdom of human history is stored in our collective unconscious, accessible to us only through dreams and myths.

These two soothsayers came to mind as I attempted to make sense of a strange dream I had, so vivid it felt more real than cold morning dew on bare feet.

In the dream, I am having a blissful lunch on top of a mountain, feeling alive and at one with this sparse landscape wrapped in an ethereal blue mist. At first, I think I am all alone, but then I spot three figures in the distance, sitting at a table made out of old, weathered boards. 

As I move closer, I note they are fixated on a stone with writing on it that I can’t quite read – yet suddenly desire with all my being. There is no talk. It feels like a scene out of an Ingmar Bergman movie, replete with taciturn, inscrutable characters. Moving yet closer, I notice an empty chair at the table. After things are rearranged to make room, they allow me to sit down.

A tall, gaunt, eagle-eyed man with wisps of white hair falling onto his face – like something out of the Old Testament – stares daggers at me like a hawk sizing up its prey. Perched in front of him is the sacred tome containing the inscrutable writing – the words that will reveal the secret of life. As I lean forward, straining to make out the words, he abruptly snatches the totem away. I wake up crushed, robbed of the big answers to life.

What is this dream trying to tell me? Is this a myth like that of Sisyphus, who was sentenced by Zeus to labor for eternity pushing a boulder up a mountain every day but, at the last moment, before reaching the top, slipping, and the builder falls back to where he started. Is this what my dream means: whatever we want is always just out of our grasp?

Luckily, the next day David Whyte, provided the answers I sought. He is, of course, the well-known poet and mystic whose way with words often puts me in a trance. The power of poetry, according to Whyte, is its ability to create an experience, not just talk about one. In his view, great poets give birth to immortal poems that speak to every generation^⁠1; Jung would say they tap into our collective unconscious.

Listening to Whyte talk on an “On Being” podcast, I felt like he spoke directly to me: We humans are “the only part of creation that can actually refuse to be ourselves…The cloud is the cloud. The mountain is the mountain. The tree is the tree. The hawk is the hawk. And the kingfisher doesn’t wake up one day and say, you know, God; I’m absolutely fed up to the back teeth of this whole kingfisher trip. Can I have a day as a crow? No. The kingfisher is just the kingfisher.” That’s one of the healing gifts we can learn from the natural world that it is always just itself.^⁠2 

We don’t have to pursue higher forms of life because we are already whole and sacred, just the way we are. It's clear to me now I began on the right path: feeling alive and vibrantly in the present, enjoying lunch in a beautiful setting; that is until I got distracted by uncompromising true believers, jealously guarding an absolute truth that only amounted to some scribbling on a rock.

John Welwood, a luminary in transpersonal psychology, gives us the proper perspective in this excerpt from his poem “Forget about Enlightenment:”

Sit down wherever you are

Open your heart to who you are, right now,

Not who you would like to be.

All of you is holy.

You’re already more and less

Than whatever you can know.

xxx

¹ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vlz3mf7jxkc&t=301s

² https://onbeing.org/programs/david-whyte-seeking-language-large-enough/

 

JUST SAY NO!

"March for Our Lives" on March 24, 2018, in Washington, D.C. [Alex Brandon / AP]

It only happens in America: Our kids blown away in their classrooms and the rest of us gunned down shopping, worshipping, or going to a nightclub. One hundred Americans are killed each day with guns. Since Sandy Hook in 2012, there have been 950 school shootings, including 27 so far this year.

Sadly, none of us are innocent bystanders, as Roxane Gay points out in the NYT. We are complicit by being too civil.“When politicians talk about civility and public discourse, what they’re really saying is that they would prefer for people to remain silent in the face of injustice. They want marginalized people to accept that the conditions of oppression are unalterable facts of life.”^⁠1

The root cause is a tyrannical minority that has seized control of our government, according to Heather Cox Richardson, a history professor at Boston College. Look at the facts: Republicans have won two of the last five elections with a minority of the votes. The Senate is elected by a skewed, white cross-section of America, much more conservative than the average voter. And the Supreme Court is dismantling the Democrat’s political-economic base while helping to strengthen the Republican’s anti-majoritarian hold on  power.^⁠2

Worse yet, since 2016, the Republican party has morphed into a one-man Trump show:  Until now,“I can tell you that at no point in America's history has one of the two main parties literally rejected the rules of the game,”^⁠3 Richardson says. We are rapidly sliding into authoritarianism.

The time has come, as Gay says, to become uncivil. But uncivil doesn’t have to be rude and violent: It can be respectful and peaceful – yet still staunchly unbending. The image that comes to mind is our Plott Hound, Coco, now sadly departed. She loved going hiking with us, with one glaring exception: she hated hot weather.

On hot summer days, Coco would hike until she was hot and then stage a sit-down strike. We could neither budge her by leash or doggie treat. We tried walking ahead, hoping she would follow, but she never came. Forced to turn back, we would find her sitting right where we left her. Only then did she stand up to happily escort us home, wagging her tail at our capitulation.

What worked for Coco can work for the rest of us. Nonviolent resistance has an illustrious history: Gandhi's nonviolent campaign liberated India from English colonialism, and Martin Luther King's civil rights campaign empowered blacks. Today, high school students like Maddie Ahmadi from Vermont are showing us how: After the recent Texas shooting, she organized the first of a series of student walkouts that took place around the country: "Our lives are more important than schoolwork," she said.^⁠4

We need firm resistance, leavened with theater and humor, like that displayed by the 1960’s generation protesting the Vietnam War. I'm thinking of the 100,000 protestors who marched on Washington to levitate the Pentagon. That's when the iconic photograph was taken of young folks disarming a line of threatening soldiers by putting flowers in their rifle barrels. 

Once again, the next generation is leading the way, fueled by Ahmadi's sense of urgency: "This didn't feel like a time to ask for permission.". After the horrific school shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in 2018, David Hogg, a survivor of the Sandy Hook shooting, organized one of the biggest protests in U.S. history, involving millions from all around the country.

His organization, March of our Lives, was not a flash-in-the-pan. They have continued to sponsor events like the “Road to Change,” inspired by the Freedom Riders of the 1960s to register young voters. They spurred a historic youth turnout in the 2018 midterm elections, with a 47% increase over the last midterm election.

We need to get behind such movements – and start our own – to counter gun-toting lone rangers who detest not just regulations but our government itself. It's a cruel joke to think we can survive as a nation of antisocial cowboys armed to the teeth – like reliving a Clint Eastwood movie with dead bodies strewn all over the street. 

Instead, we are most vital – and fulfilled – when we participate in a democracy composed of a close-knit community of mutual support. That's what will last! As Lincoln  proclaimed, such a “government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth."

David Hoggs says, "Right now we are … stronger than ever.”^⁠5 On June 11th, March of our Lives is planning a massive march in Washington D.C. and around the country, with 100 local protests (and counting). 

Let us all be uncivil and join in!

xxx

¹ https://www.nytimes.com/2022/05/25/opinion/roxane-gay-uvalde-school-shooting.html

² https://www.vox.com/2018/9/12/17850980/democracy-tyranny-minority-mob-rule-james-madison

³ https://www.ft.com/content/08f3728c-bbff-493f-aa66-a1aa35dd3924

⁴ https://apple.news/A0jX9ayzgSA6Yz52JZljQMg

⁵ https://www.msnbc.com/all-in/watch/david-hogg-the-movement-to-end-gun-violence-is-stronger-than-ever-140840005517

Hearing Voices

 

Finally, the powers-to-be are acknowledging what lowly counselors and social workers have long understood. The World Health Organization(WHO) recently unleashed a scathing report, castigating psychiatry for how it treats severe psychiatric disorders. For these conditions, the report dismisses the effectiveness of most psychotropic drugs, the mainstay of the profession; it also calls for an end to all involuntary or coercive inpatient care. All of this was recently detailed in  NYT Magazine.^⁠1

The article follows the life of Caroline Mazel-Carlton who has heard voices since childhood. She was prescribed every conceivable medication, but the voices persisted; she lived a troubled life into her twenties, including being arrested and institutionalized on multiple occasions. Finally, after being locked up again  in her twenties, it became clear to her the toll the meds were taking on her, “the futility and harm.” She stopped taking all of them cold turkey. Rather than falling apart, her voices became more subdued, and the hair she had been pulling out grew back.

 

Caroline did work at low-end jobs until landing a position leading support groups for the Hearing Voices Network (HVN). These groups are similar to Alcoholics Anonymous meetings but for folks with auditory and visual hallucinations. There are no clinicians in the room, or if they are, they remain transparent. These groups are voluntary, and self-disclosure is optional. They have been so effective that they are blossoming all around the country, including NH, which I will get back to.

What psychiatry refers to as psychosis, the Hearing Voice Movement calls “non-consensus realities.” The group facilitator’s role is never to dispute the reality of what a group member self-discloses. Instead, their job is to pay close attention to the content of those voices and to show curiosity by asking the member to say more about their experience. Talking about their voices helps defuse the stigma that society has placed on them. Furthermore, exploring what the voices are saying can lead to deeper meanings.  

Non-ordinary states of consciousness can cover a broad spectrum, as I discovered in my psychotherapy practice; they can range from purely spiritual states without any pathological features to clearly biological conditions that require medical treatment. Many are the result of early trauma or abuse.

I am reminded of a client that fit this profile; he was a gentle, awkward man who had been institutionalized on several occasions after being given a medical discharge from the Army after serving in Vietnam. He was symptom-free most of the time, but he would hear voices telling him he was God whenever he encountered specific stressors. He would then hole up in his room, decompensate, sometimes being remanded to a psychiatric hospital.

Because of my eclectic background, I took naturally to what appears to be the HVN position: The most important thing I did was listen to him deeply without judging him or disputing how he saw the world. Being accepted by a fellow vet as an equal, not as a crazy person, broke through his defenses: he was able to relax and, over time, tell his story. Through that process, we were able to unearth underlying conditions, helping him make sense of his voices.

Here’s the story the veteran told: He had always been extremely anxious and, by all accounts, a poor choice to be assigned to a frontline combat unit, but that’s where he found himself. Soon after his arrival, his base camp was battered by an intense mortar attack. The other soldiers immediately took cover, but my client panicked, running frantically this way and that, attempting to avoid the explosions, landing all around him. Finally, he collapsed from exhaustion, fervently praying to God to save him. Like a miracle, at that exact moment, the mortar barrage stopped.

Afterward, he appeared lost, walking around in a daze repeating the voices telling him he was God. He was given a medical discharge and sent home. After returning to civilian life, he coped pretty well. It turned out he only heard voices when triggered by a particular sound or smell that caused him to flashback to the mortar attack. After therapy and with greater self-knowledge, he no longer fell apart when he heard these voices; as a result, he was able to get on with his life without being recommitted.

Now back to the Hearing Voice Network(HVN). I did a little research and found that NH has at least one HVN group at Monadnock Peer Support in Keene: Jude Grophear, a voice hearer herself, has been facilitating this group since 2015. She will also be co-facilitating a 3 day HVN Group Facilitator Training in August.

I’m pleased that NH is on the vanguard of this movement to provide innovative new strategies to de-stigmatize people who hear voices, helping to bring psychiatry into the 21st century.

xxx

 

¹ https://www.nytimes.com/2022/05/17/magazine/antipsychotic-medications-mental-health.html

Are Scientists are new Shamans?

The black hole in the Milky Way has three bright spots along a ring 

tilting face-on toward Earth. (Event Horizon Telescope Collaboration/AP)

“Stories and myths are the connective tissue between culture and nature, between self and other, between life and death^⁠1,” writes Joan Halifax, a prominent Buddhist teacher, anthropologist and ecologist. If she is correct, which I believe she is, how do we come to terms with the two very different stories circulating in America today – only one of which will determine our future.

The first is our dominant myth, based on Christianity, asserting our right to control nature as God decreed in the Bible: “Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth and subdue it; and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the air and over every living thing that moves upon the earth.”^⁠2

Over time, this myth has resulted, aided and abided by Capitalism, in desecrating our natural resources, polluting our planet, and causing the greatest species extinction in history from disruptive climate change. In a word, this myth is leading us directly toward death.

The alternative myth, practiced from time immemorial by indigenous people, is based on the belief that all of creation is alive. As Jack Forbes has described in Daedalus, “the most important aspect of indigenous cosmic visions is the conception of creation as a living process, resulting in a living universe in which a kinship exists between all things.” Mother Earth is a living being in this story, as are the waters and the Sun.

Central to Native American belief is gratitude, a feeling of overwhelming love and thankfulness for the gifts the Creator and the Earth has bestowed upon them, giving rise to deep feelings of indebtedness.^⁠3  Black Elk, the legendary Lakota shaman, expressed these sentiments in eloquent terms: 

“The Great Spirit made the flowers, the streams, the pines, the cedars—takes care of them. . . . He takes care of me, waters me, feeds me, makes me live with plants and animals as one of them. . . . All of nature is in us, all of us is in nature.”^⁠4

The choice is clear: if indigenous myth is based on renewal while our current Western narrative is steering us toward death, we must choose life. Toward that end, I see hopeful signs coming from an unlikely quarter. When science first arose in the 19th century^⁠5, it  was part of the problem, reducing a reverence for nature into quantitative materialism.

But the worm started to turn with the emergence of Albert Einstein, the genius who, concocting revolutionary new theories, ushered in quantum physics. His initial insight didn’t happen in a state-of-the-art laboratory but from riding his bike in the countryside while performing what amounted to a shamanic trance: Imagining his bike was traveling faster than the speed of light. 

In the quantum world, events are unpredictable leading to spooky behavior worthy of a shaman: Examples include counter-intuitive phenomena that defy common sense: like quantum entanglement, which has proven that once two particles interact, they will forever act in unison even if on opposite sides of the universe; and string theory which posits we may be living simultaneously in up to  10 parallel worlds, 9 of which we can’t see.

Like the shamans of old, this new breed of scientist relish exploring spooky worlds. In the process, I'm hoping they can rekindle our sense of awe at the sheer mystery of the universe, including, of course, our own precious Planet Earth. Scientists have already stepping up to the task: Look at the "aliveness" of the following quotes by scientists, celebrating the first image ever taken of the black hole in our galaxy:

“Astronomers announced on Thursday that they had pierced the veil of darkness and dust at the center of our Milky Way galaxy to capture the first picture of “the gentle giant” dwelling there: a supermassive black hole, a trapdoor in space-time through which the equivalent of four million suns have been dispatched to eternity, leaving behind only their gravity and violently bent space-time.”^⁠6…”The black hole is not a static entity: It is “gurgling.”^⁠7

Scientists are so in awe of what they have seen that they are speechless. "It is unknowable," said Vincent Fish, a research scientist at MIT. "They are the most mysterious objects in the universe.”^⁠8

To my way of thinking, these scientists are our new shamans, worshipping a living and breathing world, just as indigenous people always have. What we need now are good storytellers to make this story so compelling that it will morph into a new dominant myth – a narrative capable of filling us with the same gratitude and indebtedness that Black Elk felt.

xxx

¹ Joan Halifax. The Fruitful Darkness: A Journey Through Buddhist Practice and Tribal Wisdom (Kindle Locations 1030-1031). Kindle Edition.

² Genesis 1:26-28

³ Ibid.

⁴ Ibid.

⁵ https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/652691

⁶ https://www.nytimes.com/2022/05/12/science/black-hole-photo.html?campaign_id=2&emc=edit_th_20220512&instance_id=61229&nl=todaysheadlines&regi_id=30753738&segment_id=92116&user_id=273ae8c1ede4fde7d59a2b0627accb9

⁷ https://www.washingtonpost.com/science/2022/05/11/black-hole-milky-way/?utm_campaign=wp_post_most&utm_medium=email&utm_source=newsletter&wpisrc=nl_most&carta-url=https%3A%2F%2Fs2.washingtonpost.com%2Fcar-ln-tr%2F36d23a6%2F627d2edb956121755a7547bb%2F61015b7e9bbc0f0fbeed5be1%2F8%2F72%2F627d2edb956121755a7547bb

⁸ https://www.washingtonpost.com/science/2022/05/11/black-hole-milky-way/?utm_campaign=wp_post_most&utm_medium=email&utm_source=newsletter&wpisrc=nl_most&carta-url=https%3A%2F%2Fs2.washingtonpost.com%2Fcar-ln-tr%2F36d23a6%2F627d2edb956121755a7547bb%2F61015b7e9bbc0f0fbeed5be1%2F8%2F72%2F627d2edb956121755a7547bb