This blogspot has been set up to honor Kathy!

Friday, August 20, 2010

Something Kathy would have liked

Kathy was always moving us in so many ways. Telling about this meeting, this movement. Could we attend? Letting us know what she was up to but never making us feel bad about not doing it... just offering us the opportunity to do it.

The fact that she is gone from our lives has amplified the sound of her in my head. I feel more strongly compelled to examine the problems and disasters of our environment. I feel more connected and a little more frantic about what is going on. The Gulf oil spill, the floods in Pakistan- it is so overwhelming. If I can keep Kathy's voice I am hoping to find a way move forward with hope and not despair.

I stumbled across this poem on the internet today. It reflects some of what Kathy was all about. I think she would have really liked it.

A Prayer to Awaken

By Terry Tempest Williams in the August 2010 issue of The Progressive.

How much suffering around the world will have to take place, how many wars must we start, before we begin to see this chain of addictive behavior for what it is—madness?

How many people killed, how many communities destroyed, how many ecosystems ravaged, how many species lost, before we will begin to see this dark open wound gushing from the depths of the sea as our own?

How well do we remember past petroleum accidents from the Persian Gulf to the Exxon Valdez, from Shell’s fouling the Nigerian Delta (which led to the hanging of activist Ken Saro-Wiwa) to the Ecuadoran spill in 2009 that decimated forty-seven indigenous communities?

At this moment, can we find an action worthy of the suffering felt by the communities along the Gulf Coast, both human and wild?. . .

I keep coming back to the simple act of bearing witness.

To bear witness is not a passive act but an act of conscience and consequence.

We can face this economic and ecological crisis straight ahead and not avert our gaze.

We can begin to face this crisis of our collective addiction to oil by agreeing to look the suffering we are creating in the eye.

We can become a witnessing community of purposeful expression and agree to be present, to listen, to engage first-hand. In these moments of direct experience, our consciousness shifts. We can choose to live differently.

We are most often transformed not by the facts of the situation, but by the emotion of the situation, what we see and feel when truth is revealed.

We hear of sea turtles being burned alive as surface oil is set on fire in BP’s cleanup efforts.

And we learn that a sea captain, who recently enrolled in BP’s “vessel of opportunity” program and offered his boat to aid in oil recovery activities, grew increasingly despondent over the spill and died of a gunshot to his head. Shall we call it suicide or murder?

The spell that has kept us complacent and numb shatters. We wake up to the horror of our own oiled hands.

We are brought to our knees as we face our own spiritual imperative to change.

We can mark this moment not with our despair but with our creativity, not by our sense of helplessness, but by our engagement.

May we stand in the center of our humanity and power as a species and say as the poet Kenneth Patchen has:

I hear the beating of a heart.
It drowns out every other sound.

And in so doing, may we prevent the next oil spill from happening.

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