Earth Guardian for Future Generations?

"What do you owe someone else’s great-grandchildren?

"How do we apportion responsibility across time for dealing with multigenerational impacts, like the human contribution to climate change, and multigenerational tasks, like transforming how we harvest and use energy?"

As I've mentioned in an earlier post, I tend to read the online edition of The New York Times a fair deal. This evening, outlined on the paper's excellent eco-blog - dot earth, I came across the following inspired proposal for the next US president to appoint a “legal guardian of future generations” to consider the impact of policy choices on citizens yet unborn.

You can read the post here:

http://dotearth.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/12/29/does-the-future-need-a-legal-guardian/index.html?hp

Of Myths and Babies

As a child, when the advent of video tape and watching films in the comfort of one's own home was still relatively new, I remember being fascinated by the fairytale world of George Cukor's The Blue Bird (1976) starring Elizabeth Taylor and Jane Fonda. It was a sort of a fantasy precursor to Jim Henson's wildly popular cult hit Labyrinth (1986) starring David Bowie and a young Jennifer Connelly.

In both movies, young people must travel through magical, often dangerous kingdoms where none of the ordinary rules of life they have learned, apply. Time bends, places shift, ultimate fears are confronted and, at the end of the quest, the treasure 'found' is home, family and our deepest identity.

The plot structure of each is, in other words, a good example of the Hero's Journey - or Myth - that is such a well-learned template for budding screenwriters.

Not a bad astrological analogy that: we journey through the Twelve Houses throughout our lives, but life symbolically begins (and ends) in the Fourth House of roots, identity, home, family and clan.

In Hollywood screenwriting guru John Truby's breakdown of the myth genre, the 'opponents' that the hero or protagonist encounters are often made up of cameo characters - people met along the way who do not necessarily make a reappearance, with or without an ultimate antagonist.

Such a model is, thus, particularly resonant because it has such a powerful correlation with everyone's everyday, real life. It is no wonder that lead characters we are supposed to identify with in films are called the tale's 'heroes'. We are all heroes, living out the journey to home - to our true self, to our destiny. In the myth template, once you've gone through death and been resurrected, you get to return home with an 'elixir' or some special knowledge - and often you recognise 'home' was with you or within you, wherever you went.

Most of us know what such 'deaths' and resurrections mean. In astro-speak they're known as Pluto transits.

Two more movies that followed this myth structure to cinematic (and Box Office) gold are The Wizard of Oz (1939), directed by Victor Fleming and starring Judy Garland and The Neverending Story (1984), directed by Wolfgang Petersen, starring Noah Hathaway.

Personally, myths have always resonated very powerfully with me. When I was a child, I devoured any book on mythology I could get my hands on. The worlds of gods, monsters, dragons, demons, spirits, wise men and women and heroes of every colour were so real - and the liminal, numinous world was even real-er.

And it was so creative.

But I began this post talking about The Blue Bird, mostly because I've been thinking of young people a lot lately. Specifically toddlers and babies. Everyone around me seems to be having kids, and I find myself wondering what it would be like to have little ones to care for, guide and love of my own.

I'm not romanticising parenthood, but I think in our present age we have demonised the thought of having children - as if it were a fate worse than death. The end of one's individuality, time, leisure and freedom to pursue more ambitious, career-oriented ends.

We've also demonised children. They're meant to be out of control, disrespectful, attention-deficient, materially-obsessed, prone to every manner of distraction, temptation and addiction, and even, at times, down-right criminal.

Let me be honest: I have, in the past, entertained such thoughts myself.

But life has brought me to the point where I feel that, in a world described by every media outlet and information source as sick, dysfunctional, depraved and lost, how could we not look to children as a source of love and hope for a better future?

More to the point: who better than children to motivate us to join together across barriers of wealth, culture, religion and geography to unite to heal the Earth, end wars, curb out-of-control economic growth and live in harmony with nature and each other?

I should say, here, that, despite my intense sensitivity to the despair experienced by the human collective, I know in my heart of hearts that the world is not lost. It is still beautiful, and we can all help to heal it.

Children are not born the monsters we seem to have made them. They may come with different health problems, sure, but their characters - as full of their own individual promise as they are - are shaped, nurtured and supported by us who are parents. So, if we don't like what we see, we bear a lot of the responsibility.

Which isn't to say I can speak from experience yet. But I love the idea of one day being a 'loving gardener' to the fresh new 'garden' that is a child. That's not my original thought by the way - it's taken from a course in "Positive Parenting", now in its fourth year of being led in Cyprus by, among others, my former teacher who is a Baha'i.

The course formerly kicks off on January 16th, and I have every intention of attending.

Parenthood is such a great - and joyous! - responsibility that I want to make every effort to know how to do it right. And in my opinion, there's noone better than my ex-teacher to learn from in the area of raising children - he and his wife have raised six of their own.

The Sound of One Heart Cracking

Once upon a time, before his mother gave birth to him and he drew his first breath, the fates decreed an ordinary boy would come into the world with a defective heart. A weakness so grave, he would spend his whole life trying to find healing or, at the very least, relief.

So, the boy was born and, in time, grew to realise that he was not like others around him. Whereas they could walk abroad, untouched by stories of wars and ruin, by savagery, injustice, and pain, he, on hearing such things, would feel as if someone had cut his heart to shreds.

Whenever he heard about abandoned, lonely, traumatised children, who wanted parents to love and nurture them, but found only the brutality of strangers - even when they were supposed to be familiar,

Whenever he read of families leaving behind everything they possessed because of bombs and fighting and indiscriminate aggression - the pots and pans and kitchenware, the loved and mended furniture and the small, well-tended garden with the prize lemon tree,

Whenever it came to him that greed and religious zeal had polluted and befouled natural places, maimed and swelled the ranks of lost young people, jailed and tortured protestors and ostracised, rejected and mistreated immigrants - or anyone who was 'different',

And most of all, when it occured to him that many around him felt nothing on knowing about any of these things,

He felt some cruel God had designed him for a lifetime of torment.

Particularly as his own life seemed so blessed and full of good things in comparison to those who stared at him from the photographs, their eyes full of the weary brokenness that comes of knowing they were utterly alone.

He wondered, sometimes, whether life was merely a dream he was trapped in - or that he did not have the wits or will to leave. He wondered whether those whose lives condemned and haunted him were truly just figments of his imagination.

He wondered, in other words, whether the problem lay with him.

Certainly, most were eager to convince him that it did. That he took things too personally. That that was just how the world was and always had been and always would be. That it wasn't normal to let every little thing affect him, to fill his rather defective heart - and soul, too, as it turned out - with that awful feeling of disbelief and nausea and grief. Beyond anything else, grief so deep, so profound, he felt he could plunge into it and never know its limits.

But by and by, he began to think that, perhaps, others' hearts might be defective, too. Unlike his own that felt too much, theirs seemed incapable of feeling at all. Somehow, theirs had been hardened - and their souls, too. They were not haunted by images of suffering. They were not bothered or moved by them. The best of them were content to live as honestly, as decently, as industriously as they could, and to pour efforts (and emotions) only into those areas in which they felt they could make a difference.

This seemed perfectly rational to him. But he could not square the reasoning with his heart's distress - even at those things - and there were many - that he could not change or ease or ameliorate or heal.

To his chagrin, his inability to reconcile his head and heart, to be content in channeling his outrage and empathy into something useful and letting the rest be, began to make him angry with his seemingly stony-hearted co-inhabitants of Earth. Even those close to him, he felt betrayed by.

Why would noone mourn with him the state of the world, he wondered. How was it possible? How could he be so alone in his anguish? How? How?

HOW?

And then he realised that, the more he dwelt on the pain the world caused him, the more his own pain amplified the pain that was not his originally.

The more he raged inside against injustice, and the more anger filled his belly at the corruption and cruelty and cynicism, the more he added to it.

He, himself, was pouring salt on the wounds of a battered Earth, by his very act of identifying with its torment and letting it consume him.

The Earth did not need his anguish, She needed his commitment to work to heal it. She did not need him to judge others and the degree to which they felt as he did or not. She needed him to make peace with his own vulnerability and limitations and move beyond them.

Most of all, She needed him to be happy. And grateful. To step out gently and see, in wonder and humility, how magnificent the natural world was.

To acknowledge that, even in the midst of the darkest, bitterest, most nightmarish sorrow, the Earth was still there - and always would be. Still wise, still patiently waiting for Her children to pierce the fog of their own immaturity and rebellious adolescence, to stop hurting and killing and maiming themselves - and Her, even though She would always heal Herself, despite their staggering arrogance, greed and ignorance at how dependent on the natural bounty of their Mother they were.

He saw - and knew one day he would accept - that his heart needed only joy and a sense of trust to mend itself, to shield it from the seductive call of pain.

He was not being asked to ignore the many sorrows of humanity, nor the Earth's legitimate grievances, but he was being invited to turn them into something sacred. Inside him.

No longer to fuel what was basest and most negative within him, the hurt and pain he had always felt could be turned into grace. Into generosity and a willingness to help in small ways. Into taking chances to help in greater ways, putting aside his own self-doubt and fear and sloth.

A spiritual alchemy was his, if he only chose to honour it. A process as profound and yet as simple as taking delight in a child's laughter or the perfection of its repose.