Choosing Love
From a talk by Wytske Visser at a Care of the Environment workshop in England in 2009
DESPAIR IS WIDESPREAD BUT NOT JUSTIFIED
This is a challenging time for care-of–the-environment work. The messages in the media make us all scared. I hear this inside and outside sessions. Since Al Gore’s movie,[1] more people want to change how we use planetary resources. Many people are scared about whether the planet itself will survive. I’m not scared about that. Many more of us are scared about the future for humans.
At a recent gathering it was clear that when people had the time to feel and to discharge, they were all scared. They felt guilty that they were not doing enough. When people talked, they showed how lost they felt. Everyone was surprised that everyone else felt the same way.
When I was an activist for Greenpeace,[2] I felt that most people outside the organization didn’t care and just wanted a comfortable life. Not so. Everyone is longing to have a space to be listened to and to share their thoughts, however confused.
Recently I was talking about this workshop to a man I met by chance. He immediately opened up to say some foolish, desperate things. I am glad I had learned in RC that it was good that he could say such things with my attention. This has happened to me. When I have said things that were not right, later I have thought, “That wasn’t right at all!” and then my ideas would begin to change. As an activist, I used to be desperate and hopeless. Now I understand that we all care. I was listening to the despair of this man, rather than myself being in that end of the pattern.
When I returned from the 1995 Beijing Women’s Conference, I realized that each of these thousands of women represented a bigger group—that many women were working to make things better for women. This is true about care of the environment today. But we tend to be invisible to the wide world. Many groups are working invisibly, as we are. This is hopeful. Sometimes we go to a wide-world conference, where groups come together to make a stand,[3] and then we go back to our own invisible groups. This is good in some ways. If we were always visible, governments would interfere and try to control us.
When a human being has cancer, the immune system does everything it can to heal. If you see the planet as ill, the activists and others are the immune system of the planet. Though your contribution may seem unimportant, it is part of this larger whole. You can stop questioning whether it will be enough and be proud and happy with what you do. With this understanding, you will probably do more. Those old feelings of insignificance come from an early place in our lives.
As the Western world successfully accumulates material wealth and the communist countries change to capitalism and pollute faster than we did, it is not helpful to blame ourselves or them. But we have to become smart about how to deal with these situations. There is a concept called “cradle to cradle” that ensures that everything that is manufactured eventually goes back to nature without causing harm. Many hopeful things like this are going on.
FROM FEAR TO LOVE
I want to talk about the difference between fear and love. If we were more connected with each other and with ourselves, we could more easily feel the love that is present. Our intelligence would function better. As young children, we saw the fear in our parents and the people around us. Whatever our background, we saw people trying to survive the best ways they knew, but with a lot of old fears, such as “Will we have enough food for the winter?” and “Will we have enough water?”
I was raised poor, and my father was raised very, very poor. In his family there was only one warm meal a week. That was different from my life now, but I inherited the fear. Even today I take food with me wherever I go, because “you never know.”
We of the generation who have grown up since World War II need to discharge and discuss the effects that that war left on us. It strangled our parents and worried us, their children. We carry on, but we have many confusions.
We make choices out of fear without being aware of doing so. If I could make the same choice out of love, it would be different, although in the system we live in, this is hard. It’s hard for us to feel connected with everything in nature. With kittens or puppies, we can easily open up. It is beautiful to watch how people can open up and show their love with young animals or young people. One of the worst things that has happened to us is having been taught that it is dangerous to show our love, that disconnection gives us a higher chance of survival. These are old patterns, some of them from old wars.
It is important to use our sessions to choose love. Fear can feel rational to someone sitting in the victim end of a pattern. When we are in a place of criticizing someone, or even when we are in the position of helping or rescuing someone, love is not always that clear to us. If we discharge more about all this, things will become clearer. Loving each other is the natural way of being.
STRONG RELATIONSHIPS—IN RC AND IN THE WORLD
A strength we have is that we never totally gave up. We are here. We still have places where we fight for ourselves. At the same time, we often feel bad about ourselves, isolated, bitter, and lonely. That we have to eliminate from our lives.
In the most recent letter I have written as International Commonality Reference Person for COE, I have written about the importance of building many deep relationships. We are used to—and more comfortable—doing things on our own. However, I know that being deeply connected with a number of people has changed my life and the lives of other COE leaders. In my first years in RC, I had a few counseling relationships, lost interest, and moved on to different Co-Counsellors. These last five years I have decided to stay and fight things through, which has been helpful. There are more people now who know me inside out. When I get lost or fall back into the old patterns, they can easily pick me up.[4] There was a time when I thought, “I can never cross a line in my Co-Counselling relationships, never go far.” Because I have stuck with these close relationships, this has changed. I encourage you to go deep with each other, to be brave as counsellor and client.
Tim Jackins reminds us how we were made to give up as young children and how important it is to go after that young child and have the fights you need to have. Deep relationships make it possible to have the fights now that you couldn’t have then.
We are more effective in our wide-world work if we can really feel the bond that we have with nature and with each other. When you are aware of the love inside you, you cannot accept things that are not right. In those moments, it is easier to stand up for others and easier to fight for yourself. When we are connected, we are effective.
Last week, I spent a day with the parents of one of my son’s best friends. For all of us, there were past negative feelings. I could tell that they didn’t want to make contact with me. I decided to express all the love I had through eye contact with them. After we were together for an hour, the ice broke.[5] They opened up, and we had a terrific day. I realized how effective it is if I can feel my love and show it.
CONTRADICTING DISCONNECTION
To work on reconnecting and finding that love, keep eye contact in sessions. We tend to “do it alone,” looking out the window and everywhere except at our Co-Counsellor. We forget that another person is actually thinking with us, is trying to contradict our distress. If we can decide that we need a counsellor and that we are going to use their attention, our struggles will go better.
I would like to invite you as clients to challenge yourself in your sessions to bring up more fear and discharge than usual. I ask you as counsellors to invite your clients to stay with it, and to keep eye contact. Clients, even if you’re sweaty and you would rather back out of the room, stay and go through the fear.
It’s good to work on early memories and on getting excited about the natural world. The natural world is wonderful. When I have asked people what difference it made having that connection in their lives, they have told me it saved their lives. Nature doesn’t judge us; it recharges us. Try this direction: “The earth is alive and wants us.” This is a powerful contradiction to isolation.
Ljouwert, Fryslân, Netherlands
[1] Former U.S. Vice-President Al Gore’s 2006 documentary An Inconvenient Truth, credited with bringing much greater public attention to climate change.
[2] Greenpeace is an international non-governmental organization whose goal is to “ensure the ability of the Earth to nurture life in all its diveristy” and focuses its work on worldwide issues such as global warming, deforestation, overfishing, commercial whaling, and anti-nuclear issues.
[3] Make a stand means take a powerful and public position on a topic.
[4] Pick me up, in this context, means identify the patterns and help me to decide and act outside them.
[5] The ice broke means the cold, distant feeling suddenly ended.