Full Ecology by Mary M. Clare

Author:Mary M. Clare
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Heyday

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By now, you’ve probably noticed that reclaiming balance and building ecological intelligence involve a certain amount of discomfort. There are no free passes, no buttons to push to zap you into eternal bliss. A life is a life: connected, flawed, vulnerable, and brilliant. Going forward takes trust—trust that gets fortified when you open to the natural world.

There’s long been a joke in spiritual circles that the infant—the being with no sense of individuality—is the guru. And, as an unaware teacher, he fits the bill. An infant gaze alone can be irresistible. Unwavering, quiet, peaceful, deep. Simple connected presence in warmth and safety, in natural exploring and curiosity, in being one with everything. If only we could flip a switch and be there again.

Alas, there’s no such switch. Instead, we feel fatigue—fatigue that arises from trying to live as if we’re separate. Use that fatigue. Let it push you toward the belonging you seek. The immediacy of climate breakdown is the mandate: Walk right in. This is your home. Your family. It’s the air you breathe, the air of your ancestors and your descendants alike.

Climate change is a strong reminder that it’s often the unpleasant circumstances of life that lead to healthier ways of knowing and being—ways we wouldn’t likely find otherwise. In that sense, upheaval—and climate change is nothing if not a stupendous upheaval—carries with it a chance to evolve into something better, to step beyond the false structures we’ve been leaning on for so very long.

Renowned Harvard developmental psychologist Robert Kegan has a term for the times in life that shake you awake and demand you change: disruption of the embeddedness environment. Back when you were a baby, fresh into object permanence, you knew the small rubber ball still existed when it rolled out of sight behind the couch. At first, that change was pretty benign; but as a new way of knowing, it set in motion a disruption of colossal proportions. On one hand it gave you new ways of having fun—peekaboo, hide-and-seek. But it also yielded previously unknown anxiety. Suddenly you’d disintegrate into wailing and sobs when your parents left the house, because you now had full awareness that they still existed. The world was really different. You were vulnerable, not at all in charge, and you had to adapt.

Of course, that was just the beginning. As you grew from childhood into adolescence and on into adulthood, you lived through a succession of disruptions to your embeddedness environment. Taking your first steps. Going to your first day of school. Reading your first words. Feeling the first buzz of sexuality. Falling in love. Losing at love. Getting a job. Getting a promotion. Becoming a parent. Getting a divorce. Struggling with a health issue. Losing loved ones to death. Your life has actually been a parade of disruptions—big and small, some welcomed, some not. Each time, though, you moved.

And here you are, by now meeting disruption with the added feature of choice. With each upheaval of your adulthood, you

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