February 22nd, 1997
SOMETHING IS MISSING
By Jackie Giuliano
"Find a place that feels special to you and simply be there, still and waiting.
Let another life-form occur to you, one for whom you will speak at this afternoon's
Council of All Beings. No need to try to make it happen. Just relax and let yourself be
chosen by the life-form that wishes to speak through you. . . Often the first that occurs
to you is what is right for you at this gathering." -- Pat Fleming and Joanna
Macy, Thinking Like A Mountain, New Society Publishers, 1988.
There is a powerful longing in us, a longing that creates an emptiness that we constantly
try to fill. We try to fill that emptiness with food, substances, and consumer goods. We
eat and we eat and we buy and we buy, but it never seems to be enough. Bombarded as we are
with constant reminders of what we don't have and can't live without - the Mercedes
billboard proclaims "Fire Your Therapist", - how can we not leave the warehouse
store with all those items we didn't know we needed until we saw them? Something is
missing.
Today I took my environmental science class on a field trip to the IKEA department store
in Carson, California. This huge, three story warehouse is home to every conceivable, and
many inconceivable, home furnishing, kitchen implement, odd-shaped, dust-gathering object
ever created by humans.
The top floor contains fully furnished rooms with all the merchandise in their native
habitats. The middle level contains all the separate pieces set up for closer examination.
Finally the bottom level, the level closest to your car, contains all the merchandise,
most of it requiring assembly, laid out for you to buy. My class challenged themselves to
resist the urge to go buy all the great stuff. Instead they examined some important
questions such as: how many types of chairs do we really need in the world, and how many
garlic presses are enough? I asked them to imagine all the goods being produced to service
the never-ending demand for just this one store, and to multiply it by many, many times.
One of my students rather self-righteously said, in response to my, "How many types
of chairs to we really need," question, "Well, there are all kinds of homes and
tastes." She really hit the nail on the head. Those of us in the privileged class
have grown used to having everything we want whenever we want it. We have not been
challenged to really assess our needs.
We then looked at the leather sofas. "What about this stuff," I asked. "Oh,
these are made from by-products" replied one very conscientious student. I said that
was true, but I asked the students to consider how many leather sofas were in just that
room, and to imagine how many are in the warehouse waiting to be ordered, and then to
imagine how many are in all the furniture stores and warehouses just in Los Angeles.
How many cows would that be? And it takes a number of cows to make one sofa. Each cow is
not covered with perfect, desirable smooth grain leather, you know. They have elbows and
feet and wrinkles and scars. It takes quite a few cows to get one perfect sofa. Thousands
and thousands of animals are required to produce the sofas in just L.A. alone. Is a
leather sofa really a "by-product" or is it actually a primary product in
disguise - tagged with the label "by-product" to relieve the guilt, to relieve
the pressure, to eliminate the need to think about the necessity of killing an animal to
provide us with a place to sit and watch TV?
What if all the world stopped eating meat tomorrow, I asked. What would happen to the
leather sofa industry and all of its support businesses? One student got it. She said,
"The sofa factories would start raising cattle." Sadly, I think she might be
right.
As we sat in IKEA's restaurant (Yes, that's right. They specialize in Swedish meatballs
and tubes with fish and meat in them.) pondering these things, I told the class that this
afternoon I learned while searching the Internet that the Simon Weisenthal Center had
discovered that the owner of IKEA was a Swedish Nazi. The Center had asked for a boycott
of the store earlier this year. We looked around at all the happy faces shopping or
eating, oblivious to the connections all around them.
Tomorrow I spend the day at a campground by the beach with 25 adult students. We will be
attempting to create a clear INTENTION to help each other heal our separation from nature.
We will be acknowledging our concern and pain for the world and we will be noticing the
trees and rejoicing in the awesome beauty of this planet.
In the evening, after a solitary meditation in the woods, we will hold a Council of All
Beings by a raging camp fire. Each of us will speak from behind a mask made of found
objects as a being who we connected with during the meditation. The being will speak of
its concern for the world and anger at human behavior. We as humans will then ask the
beings for help, ask them to share with us their gifts and strengths. We will then thank
the beings and cast off our masks. We will be meeting again as humans to speak of the
changes we will make in our lives and the plans we have for taking action, for loving the
Earth, and for loving each other.
We live in transformative, challenging times with much conflict and contrast. But we can
be amazing, resourceful, compassionate, loving beings capable of much diversity and
growth. We can go from the warehouse filled with consumer goods, without buying anything,
to the forest where we can notice the wind, notice each other. All we have to do is want
it. All we have to do is to do it. Now.
RESOURCES
- For amazing examples of how to conduct group exercises that acknowledge our pain for the
world and how to turn that pain into a sense of personal power and connectedness, please
get Despair and Personal Power in the Nuclear Age by Joanna Macy, New Society Publishers,
1983.
- To learn about the Council of All Beings, even how to conduct one, get Thinking Like A
Mountain, by John Seed, Joanna Macy, Pat Fleming, and Arne Naess, New Society Publishers,
1988.
- Read a wonderful interview with Joanna Macy from In Context magazine http://www.context.org:80/ICLIB/IC28/Macy.htm
- These books can be purchased through Creabooks http://members.aol.com/creabooks/creatura.html
{Jackie Giuliano is a Professor of Environmental Studies at Antioch University, Los
Angeles and the University of Phoenix. He is the Educational Outreach Manager for the Ice
and Fire Preprojects at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory.} |
