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TAMI SIMON: Hello, friends. My name’s Tami Simon, and I’m the founder of Sounds True. And I want to welcome you to the Sounds True podcast, Insights at the Edge.
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In this episode of Insights at the Edge my guest is John Seed. This is a reunion of sorts for John and I. We haven’t spoken for many years, and I’m so pleased to have this opportunity.
John is a 78-year-old world-renowned Australian environmental educator, author, activist, artist, and filmmaker, a recipient of the Australian government’s Order of Australia medal. John Seed is the founder and director of the Rainforest Information Centre, and since 1979 has been involved in hundreds of campaigns and education initiatives that have protected remaining rainforests and helped humanity rethink our relationship with nature.
Nearly four decades ago, John began collaborating with deep ecologist and systems thinker, the legendary Joanna Macy, and together they developed the Council of All Beings, which is a series of re-earthing rituals. We’ll learn more about the Council of All Beings. It’s a process now that thousands of people have gone through. John and Joanna are both coauthors, along with Pat Fleming and Professor Arne Naess, of the book Think[ing] Like a Mountain that also shares the essence of the Council of All Beings practice. John, welcome.
JOHN SEED: Thanks so much, Tami.
TS: Here it’s been five decades that you have been a leader in direct action working in the environmental movement, and I’m curious for a moment here as we begin, if you’re to reflect on the current landscape, where we are now compared to where things were five decades ago, what your reflections are?
JS: Well, when I started in all of this, I started as an activist. I just became involved through a blockade to protect the forest near my home, a rainforest near my home. And as I learned more about what was going on, especially what was happening to the rainforests, I realized that there was this tremendous ignorance in the world, and I thought that what we needed to do was to raise awareness. And so I spent many years where that was my primary goal, whether it was in the actions themselves or in the road shows that I did and other things. But after a while I just realized that everyone was aware and nothing had changed or nothing had changed for the better or maybe some things had changed for the better, but on the whole things were getting worse. And so then that’s really what led me to the philosophy of deep ecology and the idea that something much deeper than awareness, that consciousness itself, had to change.
And so today I find myself continuing to be involved in direct actions and environmental campaigning and working on protecting specific places. But I think that the most important part of my work is the experiential deep ecology like the Council of All Beings because I feel that the change that needs to take place is much more fundamental. And I’m noticing that the people that are coming to these workshops have changed that it used to be mostly hippies and pagans and witches who were wildly enthusiastic about this work. But after a long illness, when I returned to this work, I found suddenly that it was IT professionals, university professors, and even the odd senator or two who are coming along. And so I feel that a sense of people having lost confidence in the traditional ways that we were trying to deal with the situation and beginning to look outside the box.
TS: Well, there’s clearly I think a sense of urgency now that many more people are feeling. What I want to understand, John, when you point to the deeper shift—you called it a deep shift in our consciousness, your interest in deep ecology—what that means to you and how you see that turning into action that’s going to make a difference? How do you see that link? First of all, the recognition and then what’s the link that’s going to make the type of wholesale change we need?
JS: Well, the man who coined the term “deep ecology,” the late Arne Naess, as you mentioned, one of the authors of the Thinking Like a Mountain book, he claimed that underlying all of the symptoms of the environmental crisis was the illusion of separation between human beings and the rest of the natural world. And that this illusion of separation was the result of anthropocentrism or human-centeredness, the idea that human beings are the center of everything. This idea he said has been corrupting our thinking and every institution of our society for so long, this idea of human exceptionalism, that he said we’re not going to be able to think our way out of the mess. And so that was the same thing as me saying that raising awareness was not going to be enough. He said that ecological ideas won’t save us. What we need is ecological identity, ecological self.
So a change in identity is—it means that we need to be a different person then. It’s not enough for the same person to be having some new ideas. We need to be a different person. And Arne Naess said that in order to accomplish this change in identity, he called for community therapies to heal that illusion of separation. And that’s what Joanna and I started working on in the late eighties and that what’s now called the Work That Reconnects or experiential ecology. And so these processes, these ceremonies and rituals that we practice in these workshops I’ve realized are synchronous with the kinds of ceremonies that all Indigenous societies have practiced since time immemorial and continue to practice in many parts of the world where without exception they will stop day-to-day life business as usual. And the whole community will gather to remember all our relations, to remember our interconnectedness with the living earth, to remember that we are just a tiny part of this vast tapestry. And so I think that I am not sure that it’s a change in consciousness such that you become a different person all of the time, but somehow we need to stop on a regular basis. And I think it means that we have to stop daily to remember who we really are underneath this kind of social story that we tell each other.
TS: It’s interesting, John, that you use this word “ceremony”—and we’re going to talk more about that and what the Council of All Beings is as a ceremony. But before we get there, let’s track back. Let’s track back now five-plus decades. You’re part of an intentional Buddhist community. Something draws you out of that community to participate in a direct action event that changes you and changes the course of your life. Put that, if you will, under a magnifying glass for us. What happened and how did it change you?
JS: So in August of 1979, I was living on Bodhi Farm. Twenty of us had got together first. We’d built a meditation center in northern New South Wales near Byron Bay, south of Brisbane. We built a meditation center in the forest and organize meditation retreats for a teacher who some of your listeners may know: Christopher Titmuss. And he had come and given four or five meditation retreats. And out of those retreats we gathered 20 people who became shareholders in Bodhi Farm. We set up about a kilometer away from the meditation center, and our intention was to be caretakers of the meditation center, organize meditation retreats, grow our own food, deliver our own babies, build our own houses, the back-to-the-land dream of that era. And I thought I was going to spend the rest of my life doing that. When in August of 1979, a neighbor appealed for help saying that the Forestry Commission of New South Wales was coming into the end of Terania Creek Road to log the rainforest.
So I didn’t know that there was a rainforest at the end of Terania Creek Road, which was just a few kilometers from where I was living. I didn’t know what a rainforest was, but I was very interested in being part of the fabric of the neighborhood. And so somehow I showed up on Monday morning to see what was going on, and something happened to me there, which as you say, I still haven’t recovered from. Because all of a sudden I felt that I could hear the trees calling out to me for help, and I didn’t believe in such things. I was a little disturbed, I must say, for a while because I wondered if I was having some kind of a psychological problem, but it was so authentic and it was so compelling that I just surrendered and ran away with the circus. And that was the very beginning of the ecological movement in Australia.
Many years later, we realized that this was actually the first time, not only in Australia, but perhaps anywhere in the world that there had been a direct action in defense of rainforests. So I didn’t know anything about rainforest. It was only in the course of that campaign that I learned that the rainforests are the very womb of life and home to more than half of the species of plants and animals in the world. And that they were disappearing at a horrendous rate—less than a single human lifetime remained at that time—at those rates of destruction before the rainforest will be annihilated. So we were clearly in the middle of an extinction event unparalleled for hundreds of millions of years perhaps. But at the time it was a purely emotional reaction, and I totally lost interest in everything I’d been doing and thinking about. I stopped meditating; I was much too busy. And as you say, a new life began for me.
TS: I think that often we have experiences—I really do—I think most people, they have experiences in some way in their own life story like you’re describing, and then when they try to describe it to other people, it’s like no one’s ever going to believe me or did that even really happen or am I just making it up now after so many years, you wonder. And I wonder, when you look back now at this experience, what do you make of it?
JS: Well, I mean I just assume that you see from all of this grew my interest in deep ecology where I realized that I am part of the living earth, that I am like one cell in this larger body, that my intelligence is part of this much greater intelligence that holds not only human beings, but 10 million other species in eternal, evolving synchrony. And that it becomes less surprising then that this intelligence where the rainforest itself was somewhere that my ancestry and my genes probably spent 95% of the last a hundred million years. And so it perhaps shouldn’t be surprising understanding that, that it was able to call out to me, because later we realized that Terania Creek was not only a gorgeous virgin subtropical rainforest, but was a refuger, that the rainforest itself has expanded and contracted over the millennia and over geological time. And whenever it was forced to re-tree, there were certain areas where it stayed alive and was able to expand out again. And it was one such area. So something that was very, very important about that particular forest. And it must have looked at me and seen someone who’d been meditating for some years and was ripe enough to be plucked in service. And my experience was not unique. Quite a number of the people who were there at that campaign became lifelong activists and remain activists and friends. So I just feel like something very powerful—that nature is very, very powerful and that sometimes we’re privileged to experience that.
TS: You mentioned that before that experience, you were meditating regularly, daily for long periods of time as well, and that you haven’t really looked back and thought like, God, maybe I should be meditating again. And I wonder, do you have a sense that your spiritual practice, your devotional nature, if you will, has all gone into your activism? Would you say it’s a form of spiritual practice or would you not even say that?
JS: Well, I mean, I might not say that, but I’ll just tell you a story. Someone that you probably know, Wes Nisker was the editor of the vipassana newsletter in America, which its name I’ve forgotten for the moment—
TS: Inquiring Mind.
JS: Yeah, that’s right. And I got a call from him in the 1990s saying, “We’d like to interview you.” And I said, “Look, I’m sorry to tell you that I haven’t meditated for years, and I’m not sure that I’m a Buddhist anymore.” And he said, “Of course you’re a Buddhist.” And so there’s something about what’s now called “engaged Buddhism” which welcomes me, that isn’t going to eject me merely because my spiritual practice has changed. And so I think that Buddhism has grown to include such phenomena.
TS: Tell me about your meeting with Joanna Macy and the work that you started to do together.
JS: Well, in 1986, Joanna came to Australia and she was working with a group called Interhelp and was facilitating workshops that she then called despair/empowerment. And I went to one of those workshops that was being held not far from my home and had this another life-changing experience. Because I’d had the idea of deep ecology for some years by then, and I was grabbing people by the lapels and shaking them with this idea. But as Arne Naess said, “Ecological ideas are no use. We need ecological identity.” And I had no idea how to make that transition. And suddenly Joanna Macy introduced me to a whole new way of seeing that her despair and empowerment work starts with understanding that we live in a culture of denial, a profound denial of a huge part of our humanity, which is a whole sway of our feeling life, the so-called bad feelings of anguish and rage and terror and despair.
And we’re frightened of these feelings. We’ve been taught to fear these feelings. We are never invited to share these feelings, and we’re afraid to feel them ourselves. If I were to fully feel the depth of anguish and terror that must be there given what I know is happening to my world, surely I would be crushed. I would be destroyed. Maybe I’d commit suicide, something terrible would happen. So Joanna said, no, all you need to do is to create a safe container and I’ll show you how to do that—a safe container—and invite these feelings. And far from injuring you, you’ll receive a tremendous empowerment as a result. These feelings are an important part of our intelligence that when we look back on our evolutionary history, every single one of my ancestors for 4,000 million years has been intelligent enough to reach the age of reproducing itself before it was consumed. An amazing pedigree.
And 99.9999% of this was done before we grew this bulge over our nose and develop cognition. So what we call feelings is what remains in us of this ancient intelligence which unerringly helped our ancestors survive. Challenge after challenge, crisis after crisis, mass extinction after mass extinction. And so these feelings are pushing up with the power of natural selection behind them with tremendous force and an equal and opposite force of social conditioning is needed to push them down against. So when we invite those feelings, when we do a despair and empowerment ceremony, I would have to call it, all of that energy is released, the energy of the feelings and the energy that was keeping the lid on the feelings. And so the experience that follows is empowerment. And all of a sudden I felt that here was the psychic technology that would allow, that if it was combined with the ideas of deep ecology, we would have a way this would become the community therapy that Arne Naess had been calling for. And so when I explained this to Joanna, she was somehow just as excited as I was. And in the few days following that workshop, we walked together through Terania Creek, the forest, which had changed me, and we developed the Council of All Beings. The following weekend, Joanna was scheduled to do a facilitator’s training in Sydney, and she invited me to come down, and we facilitated the first Council of All Beings together, and we’ve been working together to this day.
TS: Now I want to ask you a question about despair into empowerment, because you listed these feelings that many people have—anguish, rage, sadness, grief—but what I didn’t hear you say was “numbness.” And I think a lot of people, they’re not even at this point feeling despair. Instead they’ve gone cold numb because it’s just too much, sort of some version of overwhelm, checkout or numbness, checkout. And I’m curious what your thoughts are about that and how that can become empowerment.
JS: Well, I think what Joanna taught was that that numbness or paralysis or a sense of it’s all too late, what can one person do anyway, all of those feelings and ideas are what’s left. So much of our psychic energy is tied up in the futile struggle between instinctual feelings pushing up and social pressure or conditioning. Since our early childhood, we’ve been taught to suppress these feelings that we are completely unconscious of the whole process. And what’s left is this dispirited sense of numbness. And so often—well, for people to come to a workshop called despair and empowerment in the first place implies that they’ve at least got some inkling of the problem. But many of the people in the despair circle, that’s their sharing is that they’re feeling numb. But we’re sitting in a circle and what we’ve agreed to, it’s not that everybody in the circle has to step forward into the center and share the healing.
Joanna explained belongs to the entire circle merely by agreeing to create the container and to witness what was going on. That’s all that you needed to agree to. And if you found yourself called, by all means, step in and shared. And by the end of the circle, nobody is feeling numb. Everybody, because of what we’ve heard, even if we haven’t shared anything except our own numbness or paralysis, that’s all that we had to share the experience of just being willing to listen to the deepest sharing of things that we’ve always known but nobody has ever spoken of before.
TS: Now, I want to underscore because we’ve pointed to it a couple of times, but we haven’t spoken to it directly, the use of the word “ceremony.” And when you use that word, what you mean by it evokes for me something sacred, something outside of the normal way we interact. I’m not just going to a workshop of some kind; I’m participating in a ceremony. Tell me what you mean by that.
JS: Well, I guess I mean that it’s a word that I have only used in recent decades, shall I say. And it was only after—what happened was that not long after Joanna and I created the Council of All Beings, I was in America doing a rainforest road show working for South American rainforest, starting rainforest action groups, and somehow found myself in the southwest of the United States on a mesa with a community of Indigenous people, of Hopi people. And they were doing what they call the ceremony. And there was just a handful of us outsiders witnessing it. Everybody else, the whole community, including children were participating. And to my shock, I saw that they were doing the Council of All Beings, which I thought Joanna and I had invented a couple of years before, but which they assured me they’d been doing without pause for 10,000 years. And so that was first of all, when I realized that this wasn’t something new and further study led me to realize that every Indigenous society has such ceremonies whereby the human community maintains, deliberately maintains, that sense of connection and sacredness. But it made me realize, well, maybe I could call what we were doing a ceremony, that it felt sacred, but all of a sudden I felt like it was being given a stamp of approval of sacredness by people who really taught me a lot about what sacredness means.
TS: Describe the Council of All Beings practice. How it works, how it goes.
JS: Well, first of all, there’s no particular correct answer to this, that if you look at the book Thinking Like a Mountain, which is subtitled Towards a Council of All Beings, which we wrote in 1988, you’ll see one version of the Council of All Beings. But if you do a Council of All Beings today, either in the United States with the Work That Reconnects community who offer these regularly all over the country or in Australia or anywhere in the world, people will be doing it differently. Some people may do exactly the same, but I’ve changed it in many ways, not because there’s anything wrong with it, but because what we’ve realized is that the heavy lifting gets done by the intention that anytime a circle of people gets together with the shared intention to heal the illusion of separation between human beings and the more-than-human world, it hardly matters what you do after that.
It’s like, it’s that intention that creates the experience. And anything that’s congruent with that intention will be totally as good as anything else in terms of creating the experience that everyone always has in that context. And Joanna said to me that it’s like it’s not that the earth ever pushed us away, but if there is a sense of separation, it’s all coming from our side. And the moment that we make a gesture of reconciliation and we agree to explore letting go of that separation, the earth comes rushing back in. And it’s that experience that lifts us up and that changes us.
And so now I’ll tell you about how my Council of All Beings is these days, and it’s very similar to the way it’s always been. That we—there’s a bit of an explanation. We do some warming up, ice breaking and so on.
I use Joanna’s spiral of the Work That Reconnects, which starts with gratitude. We start and end the whole weekend workshop with gratitude, and then we move to honoring our pain for the world, the despair and empowerment. And it’s only after that that we move to seeing with new eyes, and the Council of All Beings is part of seeing with new eyes. And so then each of us does some kind of process, which is like a vision quest, shorter or longer, to find an ally in the non-human world: plant, animal, feature of the landscape, anything in the universe, in fact, except the human being. So here’s the first big change with the version that we were doing back in 1988, because at that time, humans were welcome in the Council of All Beings. And I won’t go into the reasons, but the facilitator gets to make the rules.
And when I facilitate, no humans. And we hear so much from humans, here’s our tiny opportunity to hear all the other voices. We don’t want to hear any excuses; we don’t want to hear any alibis. Let’s just hear from everybody else. And so once people have made a connection with their ally, and I prefer people to at least attempt to do the vision quest in a sense of waiting for someone to call you. So rather than going in search of an ally, wait to see, go out into—we try and do this in nature where possible, go out and be thinking, “Hey, universe. I’m going to be in a Council of All Beings in an hour, and I don’t have an ally yet. Is there anyone who would like a voice? Because I’m available.” And wait and see what happens. And the first voice will say, “Oh, this is all bullshit.” And the second voice will say, “Oh, no one’s going to choose me.” Just drop those and just see what happens. And for some people, this is actually the pinnacle of the weekend, that experience of being chosen. But if nothing chooses you, that’s OK, just choose something.
And then we come back and we make a mask, a very simple, just a white paper plate with cardboard plate. We cut eye holes and a mouth hole and use some textures to draw a picture on the plate, and we make a mask and then we enter a little ceremony, a portal to enter. Up until now, we’ve been a bunch of humans talking about a workshop. But once we go through the portal, we’ll be in the Council of All Beings. And once we’re there in a circle, we just invite this voice that is other than our own voice to speak through us. And the only instruction is really—you’ve probably prepared some things to say, but if you have, just say them as quickly as possible, because this begins when you don’t know what you’re going to say next. And you don’t have to believe anything. You don’t have to believe this is really the voice of mycorrhizae talking through me or the voice of the Milky Way.
Just see what happens. Invariably, we hear things that we’ve never heard before. Invariably, a conversation begins, which is completely outside anything that we’ve experienced before. And it may take an hour or two hours, and then we pass back through the portal, back into the workshop, and share what’s changed for us.
TS: Well, John, it sounds like remarkable experience. And what comes up for me is, I guess, thinking about the blocks that there might be for some people, like, “I’m not sure this is real. This feels like theater. I don’t have anything to say. Couldn’t we please have some kinds of plant substances to help us with this? We’re supposed to do this just in some kind of light trance ourselves?” How do we make this authentic?
JS: Well, first of all, this is—
TS: I’m sure you’ve heard it all. I’m sure you’ve heard it all.
JS: No, no, that’s alright. So first of all, this is already Sunday morning. We’ve been together since Friday night. I wouldn’t try this any earlier, and we’ve all just had a totally shattering experience the day before of the truth mandala, the honoring our pain for the world, hearing people often screaming and wailing and crying about what they feel about the situation that we humans, the predicament that we find ourselves in at this time. And so it’s not just like someone off the street now, but of course there are still people who feel that way. And I just reassure people that you don’t. Wherever you are, it’s totally fine. Don’t speak unless you’ve got something to say and speak in character. So I am koala and dah, dah, dah, whatever it is. And all I can say is that an authenticity creeps in by the end of the ceremony. Well, of course, it’s not everybody that would come to a workshop like this, anybody who was totally just like, oh, mumbo jumbo, woo-woo. Of course. Why would they be paying a facilitator to do something like that? It never happens. No one ever comes in order to destroy the thing, or they never have people come in because they’re curious. And so I think, anyway, it’s not a problem.
TS: OK, let me just see if you can make something explicit for me and our listeners, which is I’ve spent a day sharing the anguish and heartbreak I have about how human beings have separated and in that separation created so much destruction. Specifically, how does that open and prepare me for this Council of All Beings ceremony?
JS: Well, there, I’d have to say, I don’t know. I don’t know how that happens, but what Joanna called despair and empowerment, she now calls honoring our pain for the world to seeing with new eyes and for some reason honoring our pain for the world. The scales fall from our eyes. First to just see people in anguish about things that we never see people on—it’s just like, “How are you?” “Fine, thanks. How are you?” It’s just like we never leave that, most of us. And so I don’t know how that happens, but it never fails to happen. And so that’s seeing with new eyes, well, what we do then, it’s not only the Council of All Beings. There are various processes that are involved there, and all of them are ones that it’s hard to explain why is a ceremony authentic for people for whom it is authentic? I don’t know.
TS: Now, a couple of times you’ve mentioned this phrase “discovering our ecological identity.” And I want to make sure I know what you mean by that. Can you say specifically what that is? Our ecological identity?
JS: Well, I mean identity itself is a bit hard to explain. It’s like a sense of who I am. And so if you’re asked, who are you? Your answer might be around your social identity, which would be something like, well, I’m a teacher or I’m a Jew, or I’m Hungarian, or that kind of a thing. That’s who we usually think of, and we don’t usually think of ourselves as well. I’m the latest link in a chain that stretches back 13.7 billion years to the big bang. And every cell in my body is composed of elements that were created in the furnace of supernova explosions and then miraculously came to life on this planet four and a half billion years ago. And every cell in my body is descended in an unbroken chain from those events. So I’m related to everything else alive around me through that. That’s not usually who we think of as who I am, but it’s possible to experience oneself in that way through these ceremonies.
Not so that we know these things. We’ve read textbooks about cosmology and textbooks about evolution. We know these things to be true, and yet that’s not our identity. And so the ceremony is how to transition from the mere knowledge of these things to—you know, Thomas Berry, who is one of my heroes and mentors, he explained that it’s not just we live in this miraculous universe that stretches back to the great flaring forth 13.7 billion years ago, we are that universe at the moment in which it has in the human become conscious in a certain kind of a way where, for the first time, perhaps for all we know for the first time, the universe itself is able to slowly turn around and look over its shoulder and gasp in awe and astonishment to see the trail that it has trod to get to this point that, a hundred years ago, we didn’t even realize that we lived in a galaxy. All of this is so new, and maybe we could say that a hundred years ago the universe, it didn’t realize that it was composed of galaxies, that our conscious— that this is the universe being conscious of itself. And so that’s like a change of identity. It’s just like we, of course, we are also this social person that sets an alarm clock to get up to go to work in the morning and so on. But we are not restricted to that. We are able to allow our identity to expand in different ways so that now I am a mammal in the 21st human century and a mammal that’s suddenly watching so many of the other mammals that have evolved alongside me in just less than 65 million years, probably since the last extinction spasm has been our era, and suddenly we’re threatened. And that can be my identity.
TS: You take people through an experience called the cosmic walk, and as you’re speaking, it’s reminding me of what some of the insights might be from a cosmic walk. And I wonder, John—you ready? Can you guide us through a version of the cosmic walk? Can we do that together? A version of it?
JS: Yes, I think so. So what I’ll say about the cosmic walk is that it was a process that was designed by one of Thomas Berry’s colleagues. Thomas is now deceased, but he was perhaps the most famous progressive Catholic theologian of the late 20th century. And one of his colleagues, Sister Miriam Therese MacGillis, responded to Thomas’s call. He said that we need a story which unites us, that all of the creation myths of humanity, as beautiful as they are—there are 10,000 creation myths. Every culture has one. And the creation myths that he had spent his life with, which was the Judeo-Christian creation myths, he suddenly saw was just one of thousands of ways in which humans have attempted to understand who we are and where we’ve come from and what this cosmos is. But these myths, these stories, he said are often at war with each other, not just the Christian story against the Muslim story, but Catholic versus Protestant and Sunni versus Shia.
And we need to move beyond that. We need a story that unites us. And he said that the story revealed by empiricism, the story of the universe as revealed by science, he felt was the story that would do this. But he said, “We can’t leave it to the scientists to tell this story. They don’t know how to make a good creation myth. We need something that’s numinous and that exalts us.” And so he called upon the poets and musicians and artists and mystics to tell the story. And Sister Miriam was one of the many responses to Thomas with the cosmic walk.
So in the cosmic walk, we create a spiral in any way. Sometimes we mow a spiral in a field, but I have a 50-meter ball of hemp to represent the 13.7-billion-year story of the universe. So every meter in this ball of hemp represents 274 million years in the story of how we came to be here. And there are 23 beads appropriately placed around this spiral. And sorry. And then I lay the hemp in a spiral, and in the center there’s a bead that represents the flaring forth of the universe in the first place, the big bang, and then other beads representing other stories. Next to each bead, we place a tea light candle. And then usually the youngest person in the group gets to walk the spiral, and she or he has a taper. And we have a song, a chant called “Child of the Universe” that we learned before we start this ceremony, and the walker moves to the center of the circle and starts by lighting the tea light candle in the center of the spiral. And here we tell the story and celebrate the creation of the universe and the fact that anything exists at all, because had any of the cosmological constants of the physical properties of quarks and gluons, if had any of these things been a fraction different, nothing would exist. It’s just like this extraordinary mystery that anything exists at all. And she lights the tea light candle and the universe flares forth, and then she lights the taper in her hand. And as we chant “Child of the Universe” slowly walks to the second candle where we celebrate galactic formation. Perhaps a billion years into the universe, we tell the story of the universe, immensely hot at the beginning, cooling down sufficiently that the subatomic particles suddenly become atoms. And at first there was nothing but hydrogen and helium. Our telescopes can actually show us this now, that as we look out through our telescopes, we’re looking back through time, because the speed of light, it means that the telescopes are able to focus now so that the light that we are receiving comes back from, nearly from the beginning. And as we pass that light through a prism, we see the signature of hydrogen and helium. That’s all there was at the beginning. All of the other elements in the periodic table were created later.
And so anyway, we walk around the spiral chanting, “I am as old as the universe. I’ve been here before and I’ll be here again. I am a child of the universe, a part of all women and a part of all men,” and lighting candle after candle. And we do this after dark, and this spiral of light begins to emerge and all of a sudden we’re less than a meter from the end, and it’s still dinosaurs. There’s no sign of anything familiar at all, and you just get a visceral sense of the vastness that precedes any of the stories of what we usually identify with. But we have the sense that this is me that is walking through all of this.
So one of the ceremonies that we do, and the reason that I emphasize it, because almost everything that we do is a community therapy that it’s done in a circle, but this is something that I do daily and that people can practice and that is just to look out into the green world. It could be a jungle or it could be a potted plant on your table up in an apartment in a skyscraper, and deliberately exchange gases with that green thing and allowing the memory of that identity that I’m descended from both of these beings who through these miracles were able to create this relationship and that this relationship has been ongoing for thousand million years. And it is my determination for this relationship to continue, that I’m not going to allow the crisis that’s taking place at the moment to destroy it. There’s no candle small enough to represent what we call history, that the candle to represent the human story is invisibly thin.
TS: OK. One final question for you, John. And this is something that I’ve contemplated a lot because I feel like there are people who do have a deep sense of their ecological identity in the way that you describe, a connection with all of life and a desire even to care and protect all of life, but it doesn’t turn into action and activism of any kind. It’s a type of recognition, and then it’s kind of like, go back to my comfort life. What do you make of that?
JS: Well, I mean, all I know is that I wasn’t ready until I was ready. I spent half my life involved with other things before I became involved with what I’m involved with now. And I noticed that for the first time ever, my workshop in October is full three months before the event. I’m training two or three new facilitators in every workshop that I do, that there are more and more people that are moving from having these ideas to exploring what we can do about them. And when I look at what’s happening the last two or three years in my own life experience, if it were to turn out, it would be compatible with being part of what I would call like a virtuous J curve. All of the J curves that we see of climate and so on, far from virtuous, but there’s no guarantee that it’s going to continue to accelerate the way that it’s accelerating.
But I have to say that I’m kind of nonplussed to be entering my 79th year and all of a sudden be faced with the fact that my work is coming to a kind of fruition that I’ve been dreaming about for a long time, and I just pray that I’m physically and cognitively able to meet what’s coming. And so I’m not predicting that this will happen, but what’s been happening the last two or three years would be compatible with a very, very fast change in the number of people who move from merely knowing about what’s going on to people who start to think about doing something about it.
TS: I’ve been speaking with John Seed, one of the authors of Thinking Like a Mountain, and we’ve talked some about his collaboration with Joanna Macy. And I want to let the listeners of Insights at the Edge know that Joanna Macy, in dialogue with a young climate activist, Jess Serrante, sponsored by the Sounds True Foundation, created a 10-part series. It’s a free podcast series called We Are the Great Turning, and you can learn more about We Are the Great Turning at SoundsTrue.com. John, great to be with you. Thank you.
JS: Thanks so much, Tami. And I have to say thank you so much for that series, and it’s highly recommended. I love it.
TS: It’s great to see you so on purpose and so lit up and well. Thank you.
JS: Likewise, Tami.
TS: And if you’d like to watch Insights at the Edge on video and participate in the aftershow Q&A session with our guests, come join us on Sounds True One, a new membership community featuring award-winning original shows, live classes, community learning guided meditations, and more with the leading wisdom teachers of our time. Use promo code PODCAST to get your first month free. You can learn more at join.soundstrue.com. Sounds True: waking up the world.
