Earth Day and the Hope of Renewal

Quiet on the street

Quiet in my heart-of-hearts

Waiting for the sun



Photo provided by Unsplash, Photographer: Jasper Boer.

There is something lovely and peaceful about the street where you live during a pandemic. The eerie quiet permeates and seems to extend to beyond the horizon. What is suddenly apparent is that this is natural. This is the way the world usually is. It is only in the heart of civilization that we become accustomed to the noise.

Matsuoka Roshi would often say, “Civilization conquers us.” In the midst of the most malaise-inducing riot of leaf-blowers, with their raucous celebration of sound and air pollution, emissions-testing-free and heedless of the lowly rake, we pay the price of unnecessary disruption of a calm spring, summer, autumn — or in the south, winter — day. In producing ever more luxurious and fantasy-pandering personal transportation vehicles we populate the cityscape and countryside not with living beings but with space-and-time-consuming machines. The presentation of the packaged freedom promised by these automobiles is increasingly absurd on our large-screen color TVs.

We buy Coca-Cola blended and bottled in Mexico from ingredients imported from the USA and then exported back in bottles of a few ounces of refreshment, i.e. sugar water, found in convenience stores partially to meet the demand and slake the thirst of those in the leaf-blower brigades,  tossing the empty glass into waste bins that the city hopefully recycles, as they claim to do.

We drive in carriages purchased for tens of thousands of dollars each to join the long lines of the pandemic dole, picking up bags of groceries otherwise difficult to impossible to attain, thanks to our dependence upon the dysfunctional international food supply chain.

We celebrate small, pyrrhic victories, that at least we can buy gasoline cheap now that the purveyors of that black liquid gold atmospheric effluent are facing a glut on the market, observing that the once-hubristic fracking industry ironically faces collapse of the financial kind, after a decade or more of the physical kind of collapse, depleting the earth’s crust. The futility and folly of massive oil pipelines, once only a glint in their profiteers’ eyes, becomes glaringly obvious in the face of the relentless progress of a tiny virus.

We look back on what we thought were simpler times, but historians mercilessly remind us that it was ever thus. I once composed a doggerel couplet remarking on this rear-view-mirror approach to rationalizing the irrational:  

It seemed so simple at the time

We even tried to make it rhyme

There has never been a time when the venality of humanity did not cavalierly and carelessly ignore the impact of the species upon the environment, to its chagrin. From the call to sensitivity embedded in the Loving Kindness Sutra in its plaintive refrain, “May all beings be happy,” to the grudging acceptance of the current meme “We’re all in this together” — no, we aren’t, as the divide between the haves and have-nots is becoming a gaping abyss; and the euphemistic “We will all get through this together” — no, we won’t, as the upward trajectory of deaths mounting daily starkly illustrates. As the power of human kind to impact the environment has increased throughout history, from fire to the nuclear bomb, the power of the few — misguided leaders — to impact the many — their hapless followers — has also increased exponentially. We all share the karma of our society.

It is natural that in this situation we would all hope for, and hope to believe in, the resurrection. But when we look for this soul in our meditation, Buddha lets us down easily, assuring us that even though we will not find it, as he did not, we will not miss it. It was never there from the beginning, so we need not worry about protecting it. Matsuoka Roshi admonished us in our meditation not to look for a “lightning-bolt from the sky,” but assured us that the process of awakening to our original Buddha-nature is more like “clouds parting to reveal the sun.” We are all waiting, and looking for, that eternal, internal sun. So to speak.

Zenkai Taiun Michael Elliston