Saving the World

Garden news: I’m nearly done digging over the garden and laying paths. The two photos above show how it looked exactly a year ago -- viewed through the back door-- and how it looked as of today. Taking out the privet hedge was quite an experience.

I’m trying to get the digging done before my trip to Southeast Asia in December; when I get back the ground may well be frozen, and I’m basically a fair weather gardener.

Last week I was interviewed by a bright young woman who is doing a Photography degree. As her coursework, she is interviewing and photographing women who have chosen an alternative lifestyle – in my case, she was interested in the fact that I was involved, for fifteen years of my misspent youth, in a religious cult.

Such cults appeal to two kinds of people: those who are in it for what they can gain personally, and those who are in it to ‘save the world’. I fell into the latter category.

It takes a certain amount of strength of character to hold the tension between ‘thinking globally’ and ‘acting locally’. Those who can’t hold that tension either give up and lead cynical or small blinkered lives (thinking locally), or they get inflated ideas about saving the world (acting globally).

I believe that it is a mark of a mature spirituality to know that none of us – individually or even collectively – can ‘save’ the world, but nevertheless to keep on keeping on, staying engaged with our responsibility to humanity and all living things, including the Earth itself. Some of us express that responsibility as activists, some as artists, some as healers (of all persuasions), most as ordinary extraordinary folk doing ordinary work, more or less involved with our (biological or adopted) families, keeping the world going, doing the best we can.