Today marks a spring into new life. I have already marked many false starts of warm days, and felt the effects of warming in our atmosphere beginning to show. In the reality of change, I am aware of a subtle melting that doesn’t appear in my immediate perception. Thanks to National Geographic photographer James Balog and his work documenting glaciers in Alaska, Greenland, Iceland, and Montana, I have a better vision for the effects of global warming. Balog’s curiosity about the interaction between humans and nature led him on a quest of listening to the story of glaciers and to create a documentary film called Chasing Ice. These glacial features regulate our access to fresh flowing water that pours from the mountaintops into our rivers and lakes in the spring, and then gather precipitation during the winter. Like the oceans, the glaciers move in a dance with the sun that determines the cycles we live by. Over the course of several years, Balog’s time-lapsed photo collections show the disappearance of these colossal features in just a short time. Instead of growing in the winter, the glaciers continue to shrink. Beyond the stats and projections of eco-science, he shares his intimate interactions with ice crystals, showing their majestic and wild magical nature, their “enduring and fragile strength and vulnerability.”
My heart melts for these glaciers, but I consider the sentiment to be a healthy one. I wonder whether future generations will ever marvel at the magic of snow. I wonder what happens when we stop dancing and stray from the rhythm of ebb and flow into only one unknown direction. I wonder what happens when we enter into a world that we don’t know.
I don’t weep for the world, but I do feel for it. In the face of so much hurt and pain and fear, the only answer to which I can relate is not to freeze up and shut out the world. My response is to soften, to give freely what is needed, and to learn to receive my connection with the earth. If the world is changing, my heart breaks in order to change along.
Freud compared the inner self to an iceberg, in which the conscious mind sits above the water, and the unconscious lies largely beneath the surface. The ego is the boundary that separates our feeling of being whole; it divides us between our distinct parts. Pores of preserved air live within like bubbles of ancient air captured in the ice. If our outer icebergs are melting, perhaps we will see our ancient patters remembered in the structure release back into our external and internal atmospheres, and ancient shadow of fossil fuels burned into carbon dioxide with them. This may account for the greater frequency of returning to tradition, homesteading, mustaches, mutton chops, yoga, paganism and mysticism. I certainly have felt a quickening of personal stories rising to the surface of my subconscious and back into my present, readily asking to be healed. Our shadows are likewise resurfacing as hurricanes, typhoons, toxic radiation and war. In reality we are releasing these environmental terrors unto ourselves. We are reminded of our total dependence on nature. The question is, how do we come back into balance?
The good news is that difficulty is the doorway to opportunity. “What might have been the greatest air pollution disaster to affect our planet, which took place two aeons ago, was the emergence of oxygen as an atmospheric gas” (James Lovelock). I am not interested in employing fear to inspire action. I personally have no time nor drive to work in preserving habits of hatred and anger. We cannot solve any problem with the same mind that created it. Perhaps the blessing of this uncertain, tumultuous, frightful time is that we are a global system far from balance that is ripe for change. We can choose to ignore it, choose to despair, or choose to serve life as best we can. Not just life on a global scale but the daily life that makes us live the fullest.
My heart breaks for the world in order to fall back together. As the heart melts so does the ego, that subtle boundary that distinguishes us from the world, helping us remember our intricate relationship with nature and every living being. I am inspired to act out of love for the world. When shadows come up, it is our inner work and loving attention that processes them. The times we take to sit with ourselves and be as we are the keyholes to receiving collective truths and shadows, to dissolving barriers to being fully open to love. Our connection with nature is the key to healing.
