FROM THE PERSONAL TO THE COSMIC
I was given a practice or a practice came to me, either way you want to think about it during my vision fast in 5747 or 2017. I bargained to do the practice for one year, and it’s been more than seven and I’ve missed maybe a handful of days since then. It’s truly an everyday practice.
But if the practice hasn’t changed, my understanding of it absolutely has. For the first seven years of the practice, it seemed to me that I was given this practice in order to break through the denial that I would die. I prayed everyday from the position of me praying over my corpse. It’s an effective way of learning that our deaths are a question of when, not if. The practice has been hugely important to me because there’s no way to “dance with the rhythms of the earth” and exclude death. There’s a line that came to me in the past five years that I recite every day. “There is no life without death and there is no death without life.” We are all angels of death, our very being depending upon the millions or billions of small beings who die in order that we may live—and that’s not any kind of condemnation of who we are as humans, it is just what’s so. Even strict vegans fully participate in the cycle of birth and death.
Something has shifted in the past three months or so. Whereas I used to recite these prayers about myself, at some point I realized that these are prayers for the maintenance of the cosmic order. Now by cosmic order I don’t mean anything airy fairy—that’s completely not me. I mean that we are blessed with a gorgeous world which is maintained in an exquisite balance. If there are too many deer, eventually the wolves will come to the neighborhood. If there are too many squirrels, the oaks and hickorys will cast off less mast. The more than human world, left to its own devices, will maintain a brilliant and beautiful dynamic balance.
We humans have the ability to upset this balance by the rapidity with which we force change. I wrote a few months ago about the death of the Ash trees here because of the introduction of the ash borer from China, a bug that is basically harmless in its native habitat and it committing genocide here because the trees and the ecosystem simply don’t have enough time to figure out how to maintain balance—the pace of change is too fast.
So what I have been praying for these last months is that somehow all this change causes as little harm as possible and that the system as a whole is strong enough to survive without doing something catastrophic to humans. It’s really not about me anymore, but more about my tribe of humans. In the long run, I think the most likely outcome is a massive crashing of human population and influence and the restoration of a dynamic balance. But just as the polar bears are suffering horribly, and just as countless species have gone extinct, killed by human activity, I would wish for a different fate for my species. So I pray.
