A few weeks ago I sent two videos to a friend who told me that she doesn’t really care about climate change. One video was scientific, one was emotional. “Sorry Linda,” She said. “It just doesn’t touch me.” Having mastered the desire to beat her with a frying pan, I realised she is not alone in this emotional paralysis. We fail to understand that radical change must engage our emotions. What we care for, what we love, is always charged with emotion. Emotions carry massive energy and the word contains “motion”, something that must moves through us. If anger is repressed it erupts in damaging violence. If outrage and anger can be expressed in a healthy way, it can change the world, as powerfully demonstrated by Greta Thunberg. Grief expressed in tears forces us to take up residency in our physical bodies so that we can locate ourselves in this time and place. We can reorientate ourselves. The latest UN climate report states that we have entered “uncharted waters”. We have no way to navigate, we are at the end of our knowledge but we haven’t yet let go of the old way of understanding and we are still operating from a scientific, evidence based consciousness. The report also used the word “transformation”, a word that contains the meaning of travel and transit, the altering of structure, form and appearance. Einstein might have said, “no problem can be solved from the same level of consciousness that created it”. The end has already happened and we can’t go back to that old world, but something is reaching out to us from across the threshold, calling us out of our rigidity, to risk new ways of being, to relax that reductive empirical grip, and to soften into change and engage every part of our beings, not only our intellects. We are closer than were to a new way of life… “Stop the words now. Open the window in the center of your chest,and let the spirit fly in and out.”

“Don’t worry about saving these songs!And if one of our instruments breaks,it doesn’t matter.We have fallen into the place where everything is music.The strumming and the flute note srise into the atmosphere,and even if the whole world’s harp should burn up, there will still be hidden instruments playing. So the candle flickers and goes out.We have a piece of flint, and a spark. This singing art is sea foam. The graceful movements come from a pearl somewhere on the ocean floor.Poems reach up like spindrift and the edge of driftwood along the beach, wanting!They derive from a slow and powerful root that we can’t see. Stop the words now. Open the window in the center of your chest,and let the spirit fly in and out.
Rumi