The Yin-Yang of Life

The elm tree has a stalwart elegance, even in its leafless state, and tilting from the visible force of the wind. Behind and above the tree we can see the slate blue grey of the stormy sky. The tree is distinctive, standing tall in an open field that gloriously displays the autumn beauty of golden wheat almost flattened by the gale, the field bounded by the muted greens of roadside grass and red-leafed nannyberry bushes.

The image’s creator intended the painting to be an ode to the threatened elm. For me, however, the image always has symbolized the inner strengths of grace and courage of all living beings who withstand destructive external forces.

In recently reading Silent Spring, in its 50th anniversary of first publication, I am reminded of the extraordinary grace and courage of Rachel Carson (1907-1964), deservedly heralded as kick-starting the post-World War II environmental movement. The reason is, Carson took science out of the control of industrial laboratories and government offices, and made available important knowledge to the larger public for the first time, to awaken us to the fact that environmental and human health are interwoven.

In doing so, she is a heroine in all respects, professionally and personally. When I now look upon the painted image of the lone elm in the field, vulnerable to the stormy elements, I see Carson’s apparition within the elm tree’s body. Her gaze is directed, clear-eyed, at the viewer, as in this photo of her leaning against a tree trunk, in Nature where she experienced inner peace.

This woman does not suffer fools gladly. The woman we see here has been toughened by both private and professional battles. The cause of the latter was her discovery, then exposure of, the sordid truth behind the life-threatening actions of the chemical industry and, worse, such actions rubber stamped by government. She finds the scientific and medical studies that prove, empirically, why DDT and several other chemicals, are deadly poisons.

Meticulously, for example, in Silent Spring, Carson describes how the DDT spraying to stop the spread of Dutch elm disease, killed not just the predatory bark beetle. But, moreover, the spraying poisoned the trees’ leaves, all insects who ate the leaves, the earthworms who fed on leaf litter, the soil and the robins who fed on the earthworms – in other words, DDT destroyed an entire food chain.

Similarly, Carson described how several other chemicals were just as lethal to all forms of life, from all species in Nature as well as the soil, water and air, to human life, most especially children. Indeed, children were dying and many people were being afflicted with chronic, if not terminal, illnesses. Silent Spring includes 55 pages listing her principle sources.

Carson’s diligent research to reveal these facts must not be underestimated, for she was a scientist in her own right. How she presents information demonstrates her gift to translate complex knowledge into layman’s language, in order to be accessible to the larger public.

Furthermore, the depth and breadth of Silent Spring indicates a special capability to interweave multidisciplinary investigations as well as an implicit understanding of the principles of systems thinking. Carson understood – both experientially from her own inquisitive explorations in the world of Nature since early childhood, and also empirically from her post-secondary studies in aquatic biology and zoology – that all life is interconnected.

Her understanding, however, was exceptional in Western culture, then and now – a culture that systemically is slow to shift its collective consciousness to holistic insight.

Carson had to terminate doctoral studies for two reasons, The Great Depression and her father’s death from a heart attack in 1935, to support several family members. Few jobs in science available to women, she found a job writing radio scripts about the ocean for an agency that later became the United States Fish and Wildlife Service.

At this point in her story, one wonders whether destiny was at play in the direction Carson’s life took – the path of the writer and storyteller rather than a full-time job as a scientist, where her days thereafter could have been imprisoned within laboratory walls.

That first job gave Carson access to primary science sources while, importantly, developing her gift of writing. On top of a full-time job, she also produced freelance articles for magazines up to, and following, the publication of her first book Under the Sea Wind (1941). The next book was The Sea Around Us (1951), completed a year after her first breast tumour was removed.

Her first book received several awards, and persuaded her to leave government service, regardless of being given several promotions, so that she could write full-time. The Edge of the Sea (1955) became her third book – again, each book published to acclaim.

But, life was getting more complicated. Upon her sister’s death, Carson adopted nephew Roger, while also increasingly assaulted by her very private battle against terminal cancer that cut her life short in 1964. In 1960, she had a radical mastectomy. The entire Silent Spring (1962) book project, and beyond, was beset by a number of physical setbacks.

Her heroism, therefore, is two-fold. For in pursuing her research on Silent Spring, the societal battlefield ahead became increasingly clear, although not the extent of the future guns directed to the attempted destruction of her professional integrity and personal dignity.

The guns included: shameful sexism, slandering and soulless arrogance; denial of factual scientific truth; and, of course, the ubiquitous reality of the economic power and pressure of the chemical industries. The ugly wrath that would pour down upon her after the book’s publication came from individuals in the scientific establishment hired by the chemical industry, and also economically compromised politicians.

Former Audubon biologist Roland Clement, in a 2012 interview, told journalist Eliza Griswold: “the chemical companies were willing to stop domestic use of DDT,” but only if they could strike a bargain with politicians to continue export of it to foreign countries. As for the National Audubon Society, it would not even endorse Carson’s book.

Thank goodness there always have existed more intelligent souls through history, who usually tend to be those in dissent of the status quo. They do not submit to threats from the power holders. The dissenters this time included certain esteemed scientists, such as E.O.Wilson, The New Yorker magazine which serialized Carson’s manuscript, and her book publisher Houghton Mifflin.

Furthermore, President John F. Kennedy himself, after reading Silent Spring, called for the creation of a Science Advisory Committee to do independent research and publish a pesticide report. It confirmed Carson’s findings. Since her death, various pieces of environmental legislation have grown from the inspirational, and life-affirming, soil of that courageous book.

An outstanding online exhibition now exists that maps the trajectory of the book’s influence that continues today, titled “Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, A Book That Changed the World.” The website’s content spans a timeline from a 1963 CBS Reports television interview in Carson’s home, and the ugly attacks by industrial and agricultural interests, to the ongoing influence in education, popular culture, literature and the arts, and 2007 TV programs revisiting Carson’s legacy, seen on CBS News and Bill Moyers Journal.

The exhibition website author writes: ” Moyers intended his program to counter the libertarian-conservative attack on Carson.” Even five years later, in 2012 – fifty years following Silent Spring‘s publication – the premise of her life’s work still is debated!

The good news is, such debate gives proof that her influence has been powerful indeed. The bad news is, the fact that such a debate continues sadly illustrates that North American society still has a long way to go to appreciate the fundamental message in her writings: Humans are biological beings interconnected with all forms of life on this planet; and what befalls the earth, water, air and all other species also befalls us.

A clue about the root of the problem, as I propose below, resides in the feature article by Eliza Griswold, September 21, 2012 in The New York Times titled “How `Silent Spring’ Ignited the Environmental Movement.” For I totally challenge this statement by Griswold: “But if `Silent Spring’ can be credited with launching a movement, it also sowed the seeds of its own destruction.”

Blaming a book, a person, or a movement, for the growth of political fracturing in the USA and other nation states, and increased partisan reaction to environmentalism, overlooks the root problem that has led to a divisiveness that is not limited to the environmental movement but instead could result in the severing of societal stability.

The root problem, I suggest, is the split in human consciousness through centuries, particularly in the West. This split has led to the consequences of industrial capitalism, globalization and the commodification of life.

A growing number of planetary citizens are saying, enough. We must change how we live on this planet. The divisiveness, therefore, is between people who hold on, and try to perpetuate, an environmentally destructive economic system, and those who want to co-create new ways of interrelating, ecologically and economically, with the planet’s life support system.

Two of my earlier blog posts provide a theory behind this split in consciousness, given by the late Leonard Shlain in his book The Alphabet and the Goddess. Shlain, a heart surgeon who studied the brain, describes the two brain hemispheres, right and left, as representing respectively, the feminine and masculine principles that, together, enable fuller, balanced thinking. He also explains how and why the feminine principle has been diminished in patriarchal cultures, with an emphasis on the West.

Our collective challenge, therefore, as a human family across cultures, is the task to shift our human understanding, step-by-step, to integrate the feminine and the masculine principles and function much more in balance. This is the life journey towards our human potential, to come home to our soul, to awaken those qualities innately within each of us to become whole, and work together to heal ourselves and our imperilled planet. The possibility always is there for us to choose.

In Paul Hawken’s important book Blessed Unrest, my September blog post cites his recognition of Carson’s ground-breaking accomplishment in Silent Spring. Hawken, moreover, speaks to the global grassroots movement happening everywhere, which “sees the feminine as sacred and holy.”

Given the inevitable internal ruptures within an ever-evolving environmental movement, it is refreshing to read Paul Kingsnorth’s August 1, 2012 article in The Guardian, provocatively titled “The new environmentalism: where men must act `as gods’ to save the planet,” which he challenges, astutely. His argument is well worth reading, because it pulls us toward the essence of Carson’s message – for individuals to take responsibility to engage with natural environments as we experience them in lived reality.

Meanwhile, what speaks more about the omission of soul among Carson’s critics than about what they criticize in her is their failure to recognize her inner and outer strengths. Spiritual, emotional and intuitive resources, nurtured by direct experiences in Nature, comprised the feminine principles that carried her through daunting circumstances, including the knowledge of her own imminent death.

Yet, these feminine principles are what her critics labelled as weaknesses, while they were further ignorant of the fact that she aligned the best of the feminine with the best of the masculine, in expressing the latter through intellectual, analytical, pragmatic productivity.

Carson’s spiritual fortitude is brilliantly conveyed by screenwriter/actress Kaiulani Lee in her one-woman stage play A Sense of Wonder, performed around the United States and filmed for PBS-TV. I strongly urge you to watch Bill Moyers’ interview with Lee, and see a few excerpts from the play, on the September 21, 2007 Bill Moyers Journal episode. Carson’s soulful call for environmentalism is powerfully communicated in this play.

One poignant moment shows Lee, as Carson, reflecting on the invitation by the editor of The New Yorker to serialize Silent Spring. She recalls in a softly spoken voice how, upon hearing that news, she had put on a recording of Beethoven’s Violin Concert, and let the tears come. Her work would reach the wider public after all.

Last but not least, another website presentation of Rachel Carson’s life, generously shown by her biographer Linda Lear, at The Life and Legacy of Rachel Carson, can take you to several insightful sections. Clicking here, however, directs you first to a photographic series that begins with my favourite portrait of Rachel Carson, that exquisitely radiates the visage of her gentle soul.

May her heroism and writings continue to teach and inspire.

The sun was shining, for the first time in many days. Outdoor chores were calling, the necessary late autumn clean up before the first major snow. The overgrown mass of vegetation close to my cellar door especially needs clearing, so that the cords of wood soon to be delivered can be tossed down the steps and stacked inside. I still have wood left from last year because of a mild winter. They say the upcoming winter will be tough.

In a world of uncertainty, weather is the least certain of all, particularly as weather patterns are changing radically because of climate change. The widespread resistance to accepting the latter reality has dumbfounded me through many years, since the initial signs and warnings first were made known, yet mostly denied and ignored.

Denial and ignorance no longer are options, given the latest `perfect storm,’ “perfect” in its uncontrollable wrath and infliction on the most stubborn and willful species on the planet – humans. More storms similar to Hurricane Sandy will happen, as day follows night. How coastal cities and island nations will cope is an open question.

Among the recent beacons of hope, to address the fact of climate change squarely, was a bluntly titled cover story, November 1st, in Bloomberg Businessweek, “It’s Global Warming, Stupid.” Paul M.Barrett’s feature article represents, by its very publication, a solid awakening in the business community, beyond boardroom debates.

The Businessweek article includes intelligent research that covers various bases that one would think state the obvious. We no longer can blame just corporations or government policies. Barrett cites author/journalist David Owen that “as long as the West places high and unquestioning value on economic growth and consumer gratification – with China and the rest of the developing world right behind – we will continue to burn fossil fuels whose emissions trap heat in the atmosphere.”

Barrett’s article exists, because the most elementary facts seem to continue to get struck out of the playing field of visibility. Continuing the baseball metaphor, we are holding the ball in our mitt, collectively, as individuals alive at a historic moment in which developed countries are consumed by consumerism, while developing countries aspire to that type of future (according to news media owned by multinational corporations which depend on the present economic system).

Among those of us who are in the developed world, we have the ethical responsibility to change our extravagant way of life instead of looking like the type of `promised land’ which the developing world is being misled to follow. Each and every one of us needs to ensure the continuation of freedoms that we take for granted, by acting now less selfishly for the larger good in daily choices about how we interpret `quality of life.’

Otherwise, freedoms such as breathing clean air, free accessibility to uncontaminated water (or any water at all), and sustainable food and shelter will be seriously diminished in the so-called `developed world,’ as they already are elsewhere. Such freedoms do not exist in the `developing world’ for reasons that reside in corporate greed and willful denial of moral responsibility not just by corporations. For all of us are complicit by not examining the global costs of our own comforts and conveniences that we demand.

My goodness, once again, here I am on a podium. I initially intended this blog post to be a lighthearted interlude, taking a break from the serious issues of our time. What I love about blogging, however, is to speak my truth as a person who genuinely cares about humanity and this beautiful planet, upon which I have enjoyed travels to different places in the world.

I take the gift of being alive very seriously, perhaps because I have come too close to losing it more than once. My first blog post, “The Gift of Being Alive,” in fact, focused on the aftermath of what could have been a fatal car accident a few years ago.

Travel can be the best education of all, when the traveller makes the effort to walk among the people who are `native’ to each land. It boggles the mind to know that a certain breed of `tourist’ chooses only those hotels anywhere they travel that offer all the comforts of home, and may not even step outside the hotel property (except from and to the airport) to broaden their mind nor deepen their soul. They experience nothing of the authentic culture, but instead witness merely stereotyped constructions of non-Western cultures, for entertainment.

Aside from my own more adventurous trips abroad, I have been blessed most of all to visit among the `native’ or Aboriginal people of my own land, Canada – First Nations, Metis and Inuit. I have stayed in their homes and communities, being trusted as they shared knowledge from their respective authentic cultures – not as entertainment. Instead, their generosity helped me to learn and respect the depth and breadth of a land-based way of life enriched by experientially lived ecological awareness, an awareness, moreover, honoured in spiritual traditions. Such travels changed my life forever.

Indeed, they were instrumental in reinforcing my childhood dream to live immersed in Nature later in life, and get far away from the city, while still strong enough to chop wood and experience a simple way of life close to the earth, before I die. The joy and inner peace that I have found in countryside living is the most precious gift of all, to me far more valuable than what was, for me, a soulfully impoverished urban lifestyle.

How can I write about reverence for the earth and all species, unless I am `walking the talk’ through lived experience? How can I speak to the need for human beings to seek teachings and practices to bring more balance into their lives, unless I can demonstrate my own efforts? Some people, bless you, can create a soulful balance within the city. My soul journey took me elsewhere.

For anyone who assumes I have run away from a major city to escape the world’s problems, nothing could be further from the reality. Instead, I mustered the courage to run towards a deeper reality, to discover who I can be, and grapple with new and unfamiliar challenges that would sorely test me. They have done so.

Rural living is not easy, and definitely has its own environmental issues to address. Yet living here also has its own rewards through the pursuit to understand what actually makes being alive joyful.

Here I come full circle to the initial theme of this blog post – roughing it at the farmhouse. The paradoxical yin-yang of it is that the rough, pioneer-style labour required to attain (not readily accessible) bodily comforts, such as keeping warm, is precisely where the joy and inner peace awaken, serendipitously.

Sometimes confronted by awesome, if not bizarre, situations, also is where the comedy of life can surface. Comedy transports me to a realm away from the mundane stresses of life such as finding work to pay the bills and other similar realities to negotiate.

The latest comedy of errors yesterday was trying to eliminate the chaotic vegetation close to my cellar steps, totally covering over the flagstones. First, I assembled a new electric trimmer, after trying to interpret the instructions. I next needed to access an outdoor plug. But, before doing so, I had to traverse an incredible tangle of vines that blocked my way up the porch steps to the plug. Hacking away with large clippers, I found myself in stitches, in wonder at the vine’s resilient, and numerous, intertwining offshoots.

The day closed with me still unable to see the flagstones. Alas, today it is raining. In this season, prone to wetness, will I ever clear up the cellar entrance and areas of the porch where various plants have grown through the boards? Truth be told, part of me is tempted to let them be.

This domestic adventure has reminded me about something vitally important to my well-being. In fact, I will be so bold as to suggest that it speaks to what provides well-being and wholeness to human life, and needs to be rediscovered by individuals of any generation allowing themselves to have every waking moment consumed by technological gadgets.

Ever since my childhood days of running freely in woods and wide-open fields – that are my happiest memories – I am reminded that what makes being alive joyful for me is the wildness of Nature. For it speaks to that wild, untamed aspect of the human soul.

The vitality of the soul is the life force that I believe exists within each of us, and essential to carry us across the valleys, forging of rivers, and mountains, that our life journey confronts. I speak here to our inner landscape there to discover and traverse, and not solely the inevitable outer world challenges.

The pursuit of that journey of self-discovery is where we awaken the joy and find the inner peace. Our purpose in being alive is not based superficially on the pursuit of happiness, but instead coming to the recognition, as my late friend Everett Soop once said: “tragedy and comedy actually hold hands,” and developing the grace to accept that reality.

My prayers are with those people in New York City and the State of New Jersey, whose lives have been changed forever after Hurricane Sandy. What I pray for is the compassion and generosity of more fortunate people to open not just their wallets, yet also their homes wherever possible at this moment of oncoming winter. May you come together as communities, to help in this overwhelming period of transition for many folks looking at a different, and uncertain, future. For you, do not lose heart.

New York City is one of the world’s great cities, and may it continue to be so. Great cities are based not only on grand monuments, celebrated institutions and other markers of status created with money. More importantly, great cities have people endowed with a largesse of heart, who envision greatness in human possibility, and exercise it through actions that transform and enhance the human family.

What came to mind so powerfully this past week have been reminiscent moments of three visits to New York City, each visit more than a decade apart from the others. Even so, particular moments remain indelibly written on my memory as if they had happened yesterday.

That is the magical power of a great city, and it does not mean that such a city is perfect. In New York City everything is larger than life, such as the extraordinary evidence of achievements through generations, by all social classes. Indeed, truth be told, some accomplishments happen, heroically, despite continuing social and economic inequities.

It was early spring 1970 when my fourth-year class from the Ontario College of Art, in the Department of Drawing and Painting, unpacked our bags at the Times Square Motel. We spent a glorious week stomping around the SoHo art district during the day, and scouting the entertainment district of Times Square and Broadway, evenings – nothing upscale or trendy. In those days, artists and performers could afford modest digs in these districts while honing their diverse talents.

One evening I really had the `mickey taken out’ of me, as an aspiring stage designer and part-time student as well at a Toronto theatre academy. Seeking a book on one of George Bernard Shaw’s plays, I stopped outside one bookstore and decided to enter, looking for Mrs. Warren’s Profession. My assigned theatre student task was to design a set. Chirpy and innocent, I walked into what turned out to be a bookstore for pornography. Minutes later, resurfacing with no book, my classmates almost were rolling on the sidewalk with laughter.

Art Nouveau and Impressionism have remained among my favourite styles of art. On another evening I was dumbstruck, gazing in the doorway of an eatery, to see the vision of a figure that seemed to have stepped out of a Toulouse-Lautrec painting. An African American man was standing in a pose exactly like “Chocolat dansant dans un bar.”

Did you know that the multiple talented Gene Kelly struck the identical pose for a scene in An American in Paris? Director Vincente Minnelli integrated a lot of Impressionistic imagery. The 1951 MGM musical film was inspired by the 1928 orchestral composition by New Yorker George Gershwin, with lyrics by his brother Ira. Both Gershwin brothers, and also Gene Kelly, contributed to a lasting artistic legacy that continues to speak to the human heart.

More seriously, as a Canadian, I recall sitting bug-eyed one lunch hour while a New York police officer pulled off his jacket to expose a pistol for all the world to see. Then, there was the issue of just walking along the streets with my classmate David, who happened to be a Black Canadian. Both of us were given dark looks and subjected to rude and vulgar names. Such was the racism of the time, blatantly overt in the USA. In contrast, back home in Toronto, in our art college identities, we all were stigmatized equally, as `hippies,’ simply in our desire to become professional artists (and, more so, as participants in `sit-ins).’

The final big surprise was taking a short walk with another classmate, a block down the street from the Times Square Motel, to buy some snacks. The shop keeper cautioned that we should not be out that time of night. For heaven’s sake, it was only six o’clock; but he already was closing up. Sure enough, we two girls actually did sense being followed on our return trip, and never walked outside the motel again unless accompanied by our male classmates.

That memory brings me to the year 1987, when I was doing a series of interviews with a Native American photographer, who was a real tough cookie, and had to be. I do not mention her name, to protect her privacy. She lived in a neighbourhood run by the Porto Rican mafia, who did not mess with her as long as she kept quiet about any suspicious-looking activities on the street. In other areas of the city she had been mugged, twice, and repeatedly instructed me not to look like a tourist.

Doing so was not a stretch since I was living on a subsistence income as a writer. I walked miles just to save bus fare, to and fro from where I stayed with one of her friends, sleeping on a sofa. The reason was, her own flat looked more like a large closet than a small apartment. She reassured me that the mafia would not lay a hand on me where she lived, because I knew her.

Her words provided minimal comfort, given the several other neighbourhoods to walk through on my daily trips. En route, what broke my heart were the blankets laid along the sidewalks each night, on which were placed various items for sale, so that the owners could get enough bits of money to survive another day.

What truly humbled me, however, were the `pocket gardens’ distributed through these poor neighbourhoods. I refer to small, boarded, 4×8 foot plots of earth, each cared for by one or more individuals. They planted flowers and, sometimes, vegetables, all lovingly tended. My Native American friend tended several plots, and these usually were the places where we would sit for our conversations. She told me that no one ever vandalized them.

The local folks, many homeless, all took great pride in protecting these pocket gardens. For they embodied the beauty, and life force, of Nature – life as it ought to be for all living beings, when respected and nurtured.

Some of the homeless, in fact, slept in vacant buildings considered hazardous, and their repair neglected by the city. As for the many people who slept on the streets, even in areas in Manhattan, I never believed that that reality could happen in Toronto. Well, I was wrong. Shamefully obvious is the fact, as a city grows, with the veneer of greater economic wealth, the divide between the rich and the poor becomes greater as well.

In the year 2000, the Native American Film and Video Festival, organized by the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian, invited my documentary film Soop on Wheels. I instinctively felt safe travelling through Manhattan alone, in daily trips to and from the museum and my hotel room, even late at night. Golly, I thought, New York City sure has changed. Or did it only look that way to a short-term visitor? One question has continued to haunt me: Where do the poor now live???

But, residential accommodation size had not changed. My very modestly-priced hotel room was barely big enough to swing a cat. I had to climb over the bed instead of walk around it, in order to get inside the bathroom once the bathroom door was opened, hitting the bed. In those years, I was no longer living on a subsistence income as a writer, but instead as a documentary filmmaker. Regardless, I loved my life and my storytelling work.

Not much else to relate here about adventures in 2000. Most waking hours at a film festival are dedicated to trying to see as many films as possible until you are pie-eyed, chatting with other filmmakers, schmoozing and promoting your own film, and surviving mostly on popcorn, muffins, free munchies and drinks for filmmakers, and coffee, through several days.

I will spare you the saga of trying to open my locked suitcase after I lost the only key, a tale which could resemble a slapstick short film starring a female Charlie Chaplin in regard to how the frigging thing finally got unlocked.

May the above tales bring a smile to the faces of whoever reads this blog post, as is their intention, especially to bolster the spirits of any folks in NYC, and also New Jersey, who might discover my blog.

Consider how storytelling can be a positive and strengthening activity, whether oral in the moment or following an event, as well as written or video-recorded. Our stories help us make meaning of life’s events, regardless how traumatic.

Gather groups of folks for talking circles, in which everyone receives an opportunity to share a story. Such circles can be very healing, when folks feel that their voices are being heard by others who care.

Never underestimate the power of written words. Certain words on certain documents changed and influenced human perceptions of the world, and beyond, for thousands of years. What also is noteworthy is how the awakening of our own power to read between the lines can be instrumental in understanding documented stories more deeply.

Before I even knew about media literacy, I had a consciousness-shifting experience one evening at a presentation by a maverick archeologist. He identified what was omitted, and what was misrepresented, in The Jesuit Relations. These 73 volumes, documenting the anecdotal life of Jesuit missionaries from Canada’s eastern coastal provinces to central Canada from 1610 to 1791, have been used as resources by historians and fictional writers for five centuries up to, and including, pop culture today.

But, to this day, regrettably, few people are aware what has been misrepresented. In an academic paper, as well as later journalism articles, I wrote at length about what I will identify, briefly, here. The Jesuits, similar to other Christian missionaries, had no concept of the the already-existing spiritual life and practices of Indigenous peoples. Therefore, particular descriptions of, for example, spiritual ceremonies and daily morning prayers of gratitude to Creator, sadly, were ridiculed and distorted. Instead, specific rituals were characterized by various Jesuits as anything from meaningless loud shouting to devil worship, instead of, correctly, as sacred activities.

These Jesuit writings demonstrate the destructive lack of awareness of missionaries so powerfully instrumental in diminishing and demonizing ways of worship other than Christianity. Indigenous spiritual practices, in truth, showed gratitude and respect for Creation that was experientially lived. Meanwhile, the missionary perspective continues as a form of unnamed cultural racism predominant in our systemic Western consciousness. Transforming such misguided consciousness is an ongoing project for cross-cultural and planetary healing.

The essential need of our time for the evolution of consciousness also is why I consider Leonard Shlain’s book THE ALPHABET VERSUS THE GODDESS, The Conflict Between Word and Image, as so important. In my previous blog post, I outlined Shlain’s physiological description of the lateralization of the human brain. I also cited how Shlain clearly identified the functions of the right and left brain hemispheres, respectively, in relation to images and written text.

In this blog post, I want to offer a few sociological insights, citing examples from Shlain’s book, why cultural upheavals happened when human societies marginalized spiritually-symbolic images and replaced them by “The Word,” in Judaism, Christianity and Islam. Indeed, Shlain writes, regarding these three religions: “Each is an exemplar of patriarchy. Each monotheistic religion features an imageless Father deity whose authority shines through his revealed Word, sanctified in its written form” [Shlain, 1999, p. 7]. He elaborates:

“Around 1500 B.C., there were hundreds of goddess-based sects enveloping the Mediterranean basin. By the fifth century A.D., they had been almost completely eradicated, by which time women were also prohibited from conducting a single major Western sacrament” [p. 6].

The initial shift from image to writing, therefore, predated the biblical Old Testament. “Sumerians took the first step in a process that would reconfigure all human relations,” writes Shlain. “In their oldest stratum, the Sumerians venerated a supreme female deity.” But, beginning in 3100 B.C., Sumerian pictographic cuneiform ideograms progressively evolved from visual signs to stylized symbols to represent “an idea, concept, object, or action” [p. 46-7]. Regardless, their creation still integrated the right and left brain hemispheres.

When the Akkadians conquered Sumer, however, “they adapted cuneiform by inventing phonograms, symbols that stand for syllables of speech,” eventually evolving into “phonetic writing” for which they replaced previous patterns into linear arrangement. This transformation, moreover, replaced the status of the Sumerian goddess, Nisaba, perceived as the giver of cuneiform characters, with the Akkadian god of writing, Nabu.

What followed illustrates how the former reverence of the feminine principle by the Sumerians was superseded by a radically different creation myth “recited every spring in Babylon for the next thousand years,” writes Shlain. Indeed, in The Seven Tablets of Creation, the Great Goddess Tiamat is dismembered by the god Marduk. Shlain exclaims, “in the field of comparative religion, there does not exist a more misogynist and macabre story” [p. 50].

In looking up this myth, also known as Enuma Elish, I found a website showing the 1902 translation by L.W. King, where the introduction points out: “The Enuma Elish has long been considered by scholars to be the primary source material for the book of Genesis. It has also been hypothesized that this is a legend about the overthrow of the matriarchy or records of some cosmic catastrophe.”

Shlain points out another event contemporaneous with the mythic dismemberment of the Great Goddess Tiamat – the creation of the first written legal code of law by Babylonian chieftain Hammurabi. In fact, Hammurabi believed that the god Marduk had chosen him to rule over Babylon, and initiated the man-made doctrine of the `divine rule of kings’ in Hammurabi’s Code.

Various scholars have praised the merits of this first extensive written code of law. But, Shlain is not alone in identifying its shadow side. In looking up Hammurabi’s Code, I discovered another source (also used by Shlain), Gerda Lerner’s The Creation of Patriarchy. Lerner apparently used Hammurabi’s Code as supporting evidence for the eventual codification of patriarchal values in extensive, bureaucratic civilizations.

So, folks, think about it. Patriarchy goes back a long, long way, deeply entrenched in institutionalized religion as well as legal codes of law. Herein, as well, are the seeds of bureaucracy that plague us to this day – and questionable, given the emphasis on left brain thinking rather than the fuller, holistic capabilities of the mind. As Shlain points out: “laws press down upon the people and can be initiated and manipulated by a privileged literate elite” [p. 51].

Shlain emphasizes, however, the cognitive outcomes of shifting from image to text could not have been known in those early centuries of developing alphabetic script:

“For sophisticated neurolinguistic reasons the early practitioners could not have known, alphabets reinforced only half of the dual strategy that humans had evolved to survive. As we have seen, this strategy had three components: left brain/right brain, cone/rod, and right hand/left hand. Each tripartite half of this duality perceived and reacted to the world in a different way; a unified response emerged only when both complementary halves were used” [p. 66].

Indeed, how many people even today are aware of this fact, a fact that plays a major role in why stories are so potent in shaping what we think we know about the world?

Chronologically through the centuries, Shlain gives evidence how the treatment of women improved or deteriorated in conjunction with periods of transition that shifted a culture focused on oration and images to the dissemination of literacy throughout the population, most particularly in religious texts. Go to the website for The Alphabet Versus the Goddess to scroll the timeline generously provided.

Another sociological insight, aside from how the manipulation of written words fostered the origins of patriarchy, is the split that resulted between the spiritual and the religious. This split happened when `spiritual’ beliefs and practices became encoded in written dogmas and doctrines. Something significant was lost – namely, the integrity of the original teachings by Jesus, Mohammed, and also Buddha.

In The Alphabet and the Goddess, Shlain illuminates at length how and why the original oral teachings, not written down by the actual spiritual founders of the subsequent religious movements, were either unconsciously misinterpreted or very intentionally reinterpreted, in accordance with the self-serving agendas of power holders at different historic periods.

Shlain explains how the tragic ruptures of entire societies were based not simply on religious wars. But, moreover, he outlines how religious wars repeatedly involved the smashing of images and stripping away of women’s rights once again, while imposing yet another religious document on how to conduct religious worship of God. Forget religious freedom, or any comprehension abut what is authentically spiritual. Therein resides the core of the split in human consciousness.

Some of you may know the story how Siddhartha Gautama became a Buddha, an `Awakened One.’ He founded a religion in which there was no deity to revere. Shlain writes that, like Socrates, the Buddha was contemptuous of the written word, and discouraged his disciples from transcribing his words. Further to Buddha’s views:

“He taught that rituals, priests, prayers, demons, angels, devotions, sacrifices, supplications, and incantations were all worthless. He claimed that religious hierarchies were designed to benefit only priests. He resisted the temptation to promulgate a code of law, believing that all laws imposed by an authority eventually degenerate into tyranny” [p. 172].

Well, history tells us that Buddha sure got that human probability right. So what happened to Buddhism and why, through later centuries? For the original teachings were grounded in `wisdom’ and `compassion,’ “two concepts traditionally associated with the feminine principle” [p. 174], and many other feminine motifs, such as: nonviolence, equality for all, universal love, and the horizontal layering of society.

Shlain concludes that we never can know for certain how accurate are the later stories about Buddha in a doctrine “based on feminine principles but contains an abhorrence of sexuality, a suspicion of women, and a negative attitude toward birth” [p. 178]. Shlain, compassionately, points out one consistent fact in various sources: the real life Siddhartha Gautama’s mother died giving birth to him, a profoundly traumatizing event for any child.

My three closing comments are the following. First of all, I invite you to read one of my earlier blog posts, partly relating the bravery of Quan Am Thi Kinh, a historic Vietnamese woman who made possible the building of the first temple in Vietnam for women to be ordained and to practice as Buddhist nuns. My source for that little known story is The Novice, a novel written by Thich Nhat Hanh, Vietnamese Buddhist Zen Master, and author, who himself has faced persecution in today’s world. Thich Nhat Hanh, regardless, devotes his life to supporting actions for world peace.

Secondly, I highly recommend reading The Alphabet Versus the Goddess, about which two blog posts cannot do justice to the diligent research gathered by Shlain, and his pioneering theory. His book addresses the human family from our hominid beginnings through history to today, mapping how the shift from images to written words impacted upon every major religion and culture. Yet, ultimately, his message is one of hope for the human family.

Third, and finally, I too am hopeful. Oppression has existed throughout human history. Yet, always, sufficient numbers of human beings have risen up to transform it. Despite the biases embedded in institutionalized religion, always, certain individuals even within these institutions retain their spiritual integrity to speak out against unequal treatment caused by doctrines that benefit the privileged few at the expense of well-being for all.

The possibility to co-create a better world, always, resides within the heart and soul of each of us.

He paced back and forth across the room like a caged animal. He spoke about life behind iron bars in a penitentiary, and other stories about a life in which he spent more years in institutions than with his family. For 14 hours he stayed with me. I sat curled up on a sofa, transported by his honesty about unmentionable human pain, as he guided my passage through the dark night of the soul.

More than once through life, I have discovered that our earthly guardian angels appear in the most unexpected individuals. My closest friends were oblivious to my reaching out in need at a critical moment that could have ended my life in the mid-1980s. I refused to upset my parents with my unbearable pain following yet another blow in life. The previous night, remaining awake, I wrote a series of poems to stay alive.

On the second night, the last phone call I intended to make was to this Cree man, whom I initially met through his girlfriend, a fellow journalist. Frank enjoyed visiting with me for long, intense conversations. He respected me because of my commitment to produce tough, materially unrewarding, journalism that challenged the ongoing injustice inflicted upon Aboriginal people.

Those 14 hours apparently were life-changing for both of us. Frank’s girlfriend later told me that he felt a renewed sense of dignity in not sexually taking advantage of my vulnerability, and experiencing a friendship with a woman in a new way. As for me, I swear to God that Frank saved my life in understanding human pain – non-judgmentally, I must add, unlike most people around me.

Frank brought me a second gift – the first gift residing in his compassionate presence. The wooden board had a poem glued onto it, titled Don’t Give Up, which I still keep in a special place with my other spiritually meaningful items.

Hi oral testimony ascended from his own wounded soul, as a step in his journey to healing and renewal, in which he also expressed a sentiment that remains in my consciousness, powerfully. Do not trust books, he cautioned.

Indeed, in the coming years, as I became immersed in media literacy, I fully realized Frank’s words of caution as I came to understand the incredible damage of so many books through the centuries that had demonized the spiritual belief system of Indigenous peoples – wrongly – and further undermined the integrity of Indigenous cultures because of the blindness and arrogance of Euro-western peoples.

Paradoxically, as a writer through the past 30 years, I have tried to right these wrongs, through images and written language, even sometimes in essays published in books.

Through time, I found my focus shifting to explore what is at the root of the imbalance within Euro-western culture. This quest for understanding has never ended.

In earlier research, I had discovered the parallels in spiritual belief systems among Indigenous cultures and in Western and Eastern cultures prior to monotheism. In these older systems, gods and goddesses held various symbolic roles, to represent life-affirming and destructive powers and energies in relation to planetary life. They were seen as interconnected with the choices made, and the respect given, by the human species.

In a masterfully researched book, the late Leonard Shlain (1937-2009) illuminates how and why a split in human consciousness happened particularly in the West, a split that influenced extremely violent recurrences at specific moments through the centuries.

Shlain, moreover, identifies the ways we can restore balance within ourselves – and already are, through the discerning uses of visually-based communication technologies – to revitalize a fuller understanding of interrelatedness with the human family as well as other planetary life.

His book’s title THE ALPHABET VERSUS THE GODDESS, The Conflict Between Word and Image identifies starkly what Shlain argues to be a formerly unrecognized root cause of the sorry history of the treatment of women – predominantly told to us through “his story,” since the earliest days of written history.

Leonard Shlain worked as a professor of surgery at a medical school and also as a vascular surgeon operating on carotid arteries that supply blood to the brain. He observed firsthand the profoundly different functions performed by each of the brain’s hemispheres, and felt inspired to “propose a neuroanatomical hypothesis to explain why goddesses and priestesses disappeared from Western religions” [Shlain, 1999, p. viii, ix].

I consider his hypothesis so important that, in this blog post, I want to provide a few highlights from his medical and scientific knowledge about the brain’s physiology, and introduce his use of terms such as the feminine principle and the masculine principle. In the next blog post I will select examples of how the shift between visual/oral cultures to alphabetic cultures wreaked havoc in human life and upon the earth’s environment.

I believe that if more people could understand how human consciousness functions, we could take more responsibility in our choices and actions, by learning how to integrate our brain hemispheres more holistically. Our willingness to expand our awareness can help us evolve more peaceably as human beings. Doing so is possible and no longer can be dismissed as sentimental bafflegab.

Perhaps a million years ago, writes Shlain, the human brain began to differentiate its mirror-image hemispheric lobes from other vertebrates. Human brain lobes became functionally different, a specialization called `hemispheric lateralization.’ Today we refer to the `right brain’ and the `left brain,’ two cortical lobes connected by a bridge of neuronal fibres called the corpus callosum [p. 17]. The split in brain function happened in order to rewire one lobe, the left brain, and thus accommodate the evolutionary onset of speech.

Regardless, even today in a human fetus, the right lobe matures more quickly than the left, and the initial ways of engaging the world by a newborn, in turn, privilege characteristics of the right brain.

“The right hemisphere integrates feelings, recognizes images, and appreciates music. It contributes a field-awareness to consciousness, synthesizing multiple converging determinants so that the mind can grasp the senses’ input all-at-once… The right brain is nonverbal…” [p. 17].

“The left brain’s primary functions are opposite and complementary to the right [lobe]. The right side is concerned with being, the left with doing. The left lobe controls the vital act of willing… and knows the world through its unique form of symbolization – speech…

“All the innovative features of the left hemisphere – doing, speech, abstraction, and numbers – are linear… An appreciation of linear time was the crucial precondition for linear speech [p. 22]… [for example] the comprehension of written words emerges in a one-at-a-time fashion” [p. 5]. “Words are tools… We use them to abstract, discriminate, analyze, and dissect the world into pieces, objects, and categories” [p. 21].

To clarify how we `see’ the world, Shlain describes how the human eye operates like the brain. Within the retina of each eye are two functionally different types of cells – rods and cones – that are opposite yet complementary. “[R]ods and cones correspond to the division of tasks between the right and the left brain” [p. 24].

“Rods share with the right brain the ability to perceive reality all-at-once… Because rods supply the big picture, they are the key component of a visual, physical, and mental state known as contemplation… This receptivity affects the whole body… and a person slides into the integrated mental state of being.”

“Cones, in contrast, congregate densely in a small spot in the central part of the retina, called the macula… Concentrating on one aspect of reality at a time, cones view the visual field as if through a tunnel… Cones allow an animal to scrutinize. Scrutiny corresponds to the mental state of concentration… Cone vision [Shlain suggests] created the necessary parameters for the left brain to invent the all-important idea of next, which led, inexorably, to foresight (or next-sight) – a sense of the future” [p. 24-5].

You may be asking, so what does the above have to do with treatment of women through the centuries? I will explain the connection more fully in my next blog post. Here, I can sum up Shlain’s physiological descriptions as his introduction to prove, scientifically, how and why the human animal’s response to “images” calls upon the right brain, while the response to “linear text” calls more upon the left.

In his diligently researched book, Shlain shows that every time a culture (whether Western or Eastern) shifted its religious focus from images to written text, not only were entire societies ruptured by violent upheaval. But, moreover, women lost power, were brutally treated, and their feminine spiritual representations – in images – were marginalized or destroyed.

That fact, for which Shlain provides historic evidence chronologically, brings us to address the meaning of the `feminine principle’ and the `masculine principle.’ Shlain is not the first, or the only, thinker and practitioner to use these terms. His focus on how and why the brain evolved, however, helps to further legitimize their use as identifiers:

“Because of their different roles, evolution, in time, equipped men and women emotionally to respond differently to the same stimuli. This resulted in men and women having different perceptions of the world, survival strategies, styles of commitment, and, ultimately, different ways of knowing: the way of the hunter/killer and the way of the gatherer/nurturer. In accommodating these differences, nature redesigned the human nervous system, radically breaking with all that had gone before” [p. 16].

The redesign, of course, was the aforementioned hemispheric lateralization of the human brain. Shlain emphasizes how both modes of survival – gather/nurture and hunt/kill – are combined in each human being, man and woman. “The lateralization of brain, eye and hand affects how each person perceives, manipulates, symbolizes, and, ultimately thinks about the world… Every individual has encased in his or her skull both a feminine brain and a masculine one [right brain and left brain, respectively]” [p. 27].

Therein resides the innate, naturally-endowed, hope for the future of the human family, as well as the healing and well-being of the planet. Each and every one of us has the biological capacity to draw upon, and develop more fully, our inner, invisible resources to live more harmoniously on this beautiful home we call Earth.

My next blog post will outline the sad history of what has happened because so many people, regardless of technological advances, through many centuries, unconsciously marginalized our more holistic human potential, not recognizing our innate power. Instead, it was intentionally repressed by self-serving religious, political and economic power holders who prefer that we remain unaware of how to access and, then, act upon our full innate intelligence to co-create a better world that supports dignity for all.

To watch a seven-minute segment of an interview with Leonard Shlain, which focuses on the content of this blog post, click onto THINKING ALLOWED. This website has a series of insightful and inspiring interviews with highly esteemed thinkers and practitioners, whose wisdom remains through their good works and these interviews.