"Crisis" is a word I rarely use. In fact, searching my 600-plus blog posts, I see that I have used it only about a dozen times, and never as a title.
Why not? Good heavens, most people would look at my life as one crisis after another, as I try to navigate with little-to-no income at times, no real home most of the time, and being on such a different wavelength from the culture at large. But somehow, within myself, I have never seen myself in crisis. I have always tried to relax into whatever situation I was in, and not fight it. I've fallen out of dozens of airplanes, but mostly been what I've called the "Queen of the Softish Landing", somehow managing not to hit the ground, splat, game over. A tree's welcoming branches have usually caught me, for which I am grateful.
Right now, the word "crisis" is being used everywhere, and certainly, within the context of a conflict-driven paradigm that is teetering on many edges, it is perhaps appropriate. As usual, however, the crises I see aren't always the ones being presented in the media.
OK, take the crisis of high gas prices.
Clearly these prices have risen substantially. Clearly this is hitting Americans hard in the pocketbook. Clearly, if this goes on for a protracted period of time, it will affect "the American way of life." All of this is the truth.
Putting aside the arguable narcissism of this perspective (is there no crisis in the fact that thousands of people have died in eastern Europe, and millions more have been left homeless and in exile?), for me, the primary crises have been building for years. A crisis was born at whatever point we started to spread out over the landscape, creating sprawling suburbs that could only be navigated by automobile. We created a crisis in our over-reliance on a substance that is probably finite, and definitely tricky to maintain global access to. Another crisis is the excruciating pain inflicted on Mother Earth in the extraction, refinement, and use of this substance. A further crisis is using this substance to make additional products, like plastic, which are toxic to nature and not easily broken down. It is a crisis that all of us are addicted to this substance in its many forms, to one degree or another. As a society, we never respectfully consulted Nature (or people who might reasonably speak for Nature) before going all in. But the overarching crisis, I think, is our bigger decision to separate ourselves with such hubris from our earth home. We have considered ourselves better or more important than our earth home, above it, as it were. We're above it all right, falling fast.
Will we go "splat"? It remains to be seen. The more we make our way of life "about" love, beauty, spiritual growth, and healing -- and less "about" cars and large homes and consumerism -- the more likely it is that pockets of humanity will have a softish landing. We have to do this individually, though, and not wait for institutions. They will be the last to even acknowledge that we have jumped out of the plane.
I hate it when I get preachy. Sorry, folks. But I couldn't erase this post.
