The Greatest Danger

[GliderGuider]

If you’re really paying attention, it’s hard to escape a sense of outrage, fear, despair. Author, deep-ecologist, and Buddhist scholar Joanna Macy says: Don’t even try.

The Greatest Danger

How do we live with the fact that we are destroying our world? What do we make of the loss of glaciers, the melting Arctic, island nations swamped by the sea, widening deserts, and drying farmlands?

Because of social taboos, despair at the state of our world and fear for our future are rarely acknowledged. The suppression of despair, like that of any deep recurring response, contributes to the numbing of the psyche. Expressions of anguish or outrage are muted, deadened as if a nerve had been cut. This refusal to feel impoverishes our emotional and sensory life. Flowers are dimmer and less fragrant, our loves less ecstatic. We create diversions for ourselves as individuals and as nations, in the fights we pick, the aims we pursue, and the stuff we buy.

Of all the dangers we face, from climate chaos to permanent war, none is so great as this deadening of our response. For psychic numbing impedes our capacity to process and respond to information. The energy expended in pushing down despair is diverted from more crucial uses, depleting the resilience and imagination needed for fresh visions and strategies.

How do we confront what we scarcely dare to think? How do we face our grief, fear, and rage without “going to pieces?”

It is good to realize that falling apart is not such a bad thing. Indeed, it is as essential to transformation as the cracking of outgrown shells. Anxieties and doubts can be healthy and creative, not only for the person, but for the society, because they permit new and original approaches to reality.

Many of us fear that confrontation with despair will bring loneliness and isolation. On the contrary, in letting go of old defenses, we find truer community. And in community, we learn to trust our inner responses to our world—and find our power.

You are not alone! We are part of a vast, global movement: the epochal transition from empire to Earth community. This is the Great Turning. And the excitement, the alarm, even the overwhelm we feel, are all part of our waking up to this collective adventure.

Much more at the link.

[4dsc]

1. I believe you are describing "denial" here..

For most American's, the sense of outrage, fear, despair you refer to is nothing more than good ole denial. American's are a funny lot because they have been programmed over the past 30 years to believe cheap oil is their right and consumerism will live forever..

[End Of The Road]

2. I don't understand how it's denial

Denial is not accepting the best evidence for global warming, energy crises, overpopulation. Despair results from acknowledging the likely truth of that evidence and being overwhelmed by it.