Janet McNeill

<June 18/10>

On my very lovely walk this morning (beautiful day!) along the boardwalk (in the Beaches area of Toronto, Ontario, Canada), I articulated the key tenets of what I guess you might call my “religion.”

They are:

• Gratitude
• Walking
• Community
• Service
• Solitude / silence
• Music [added later; see P.S.]

I could elaborate on each of these, of course. Walking also takes in Nature, love of the Earth, & maybe canoeing, kayaking, swimming & snowshoeing… Community takes in love, family, conversation, smiling, friendliness & friendship. Gratitude takes in joy & leads to a happy spirit. Service takes in activism & caring & doing (which also lead to a happy spirit!). Solitude & silence are things I cannot exist without & sometimes wonder whether others might benefit from a wee bit more of…

& music!! Well – music sometimes catapults me right from practically comatose, down at the bottom of a Very Deep Pit (or even a Not-all-that-deep-but-still-definitely-in-a-pit-Pit) into outright exhilaration!!

Janet

P.S. on July 1^st: I’ve been doing this odd nomadic gig lately. Some of the time I’m living out in the boonies, sometimes I’m in the small city of Pembroke, Ontario (up river from Canada’s capital city, Ottawa, & down river from leaking “legacy” pollution at the Chalk River nuclear facility; Gee – sure makes me feel better to know the pollution there is “legacy” as opposed to new…or, hmm…..does it??, & home to (notice I am not saying proud home: many of us here are not merely not proud but frankly appalled about) SRB Technologies, a tritium-emitting local business that has just outrageously been issued a 5-year license by the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission (boy are they un-aptly named!?!?!? Ought to be more like the Canadian Nuclear Danger Commission); check out the Tritium Awareness Project Web site to learn “the truth about tritium”…)

And some of the time I hang out in Toronto, Canada’s largest city & kind of an all-around pretty fun place…

Well.

On my long walk in Pembroke this morning, I observed, as I have on other occasions, how church-y this town is. It has a quite extraordinary number of churches. Off the charts, really!

Not sure what that’s all about, but the limitations of “organized” religion seem more & more apparent to me as the years go by.

I’ve written elsewhere about what I see as the problem with religion.

What sprang to mind this morning as I noticed Pembroke’s considerable churchy-ness is the sort of somewhere-else-ness of most religious teachings. “Heaven” is somewhere else. “Divinity” is somewhere/someone else. “Salvation” is some other time. “Holy” is other places or people.

Me, I’m convinced all these things are right here, right now, always.

Hmmm. In ‘Pulling Down the Pedestals’ & ‘I’m not OK – YOU’re OK’ I’ve written about our tendency as individuals to see others as…better – more whole…than one is oneself. I don’t think this attitude & the dominance of religion & its “God/holiness/sacredness is somewhere else” message is a coincidence, exactly…

Certainly Eckhart Tolle’s thoughts about presence, & about the pain body (& everything else he talks about!) resonate hugely for me. (I’ve written about ET in a few blog postings – ‘Ducks Unlimited’, ‘Pain Bodies on Parade or Oh, To be a duck’ & ‘Flap your wings’, among others…)

Dear friend Lynn has just given me a copy of the book This is It – The Nature of Oneness – Interviews with Teachers of Non-Duality, including Eckhart Tolle, author of The Power of Now, by Jan Kersschot.

That phrase “This is it!” resonated for me right away.

All is here – right here, right now, in this moment – & it is plenty!

The heck, I say, with the fear & poverty mentality we’ve been so immersed & drenched in for so long.

This is it!

P.P.S. on July 24^th: It became necessary to add that 6^th item – music – to the list the other evening when, under the great spirits & energy-enhancing influence of some lovely, sing-y, dance-y, cheerful tunes, I got hours & hours of useful work done, instead of succumbing to the temptation to veg out in front of a movie. Music sure can be magical!! (Pat Conroy said, “Without music, life is a journey through a desert,” and isn’t it true??)

The David & Goliath analogy keeps coming up.

Along with other activists, I’m currently involved in a D & G-type tussle with a very polluting company in Pembroke, Ontario (Canada), & its regulator, the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission (CNSC). Have a look at the Tritium Awareness Project Web site if you’d like to know more about this.

Now, I was raised in a (nominally if not really) Christian family, & as a child did faithfully attend Sunday school. But my familiarity with the Bible is very out of date.

The very bare bones of the story are that David was kind of a puny little guy who took on big, monstrous Goliath & defeated him in battle.

Along with tons of others, I’ve been engaged in David & Goliath battles for 20 years now. Victories seem few & far between, but there have been some. The enactment of a provincial pesticide by-law in Ontario (Quebec did it first & set the example) has been one memorable & happy achievement, for sure! Hundreds of activists devoted thousands of hours over many, many years, & eventually the work all came together (with outstanding contributions along the way by not just the many individuals who worked so tirelessly for so many years, but also the Toronto Board of Health & the Canadian Association of Physicians for the Environment) & voilà – no more lawn spraying. Yay!!

I was recently in Washington, D.C. to attend the conference of the Network of Spiritual Progressives (the past few blog posts have also been about this conference) & the David & Goliath analogy was brought up by 2 internationally known & widely (& wildly) outstanding & well-respected women: Sister Joan Chittister & Marianne Williamson.

Both are involved in the NSP. Sister Joan is a co-founder & co-chair (& also co-chairs the Global Peace Initiative of Women), while Marianne Williamson is a personal friend of co-chair Rabbi Michael Lerner as well as being an internationally known spiritual teacher (& co-founder of the Peace Alliance & founder of the American Renaissance Alliance).

(Btw, along with all the other fantastic speakers, all of whom are widely known & hugely respected, neither of these women received speaking fees for their part in this conference. The speakers all paid their own expenses, & were not paid for their participation.)

Sister Joan commented that “Goliath” is “out in the street,” meaning, I think, that it is our fellow human beings – the many millions who are not yet “activists” & perhaps as yet unaware of the depth of the crisis/crises facing our species – or perhaps she was referring to apathy itself as Goliath.

Marianne Williamson also spoke of the David & Goliath story, pointing out that David used his simple slingshot to slay Goliath by hitting him in the forehead – the “third eye,” or seat of the soul.

She also advised that, while the problems we face are huge & hugely daunting, we should “look at the problem, but not stare at it.”

I liked that.

It speaks to me about my own local issue, & it says, “Yes. This is a problem. It is a BIG problem. Work on it, yes, by all means work on it! But don’t be consumed by it.”

Life is about love, & joy & community. We work at slaying Goliath (this is life-long work, after all) – but not at the expense of love & joy.

(Tom Robbins articulated this about “crazy wisdom”: “Crazy wisdom is the wisdom that evolves when one, while refusing to avert one’s gaze from the sorrows and injustices of the world, insists on joy in spite of everything. Ancient Egyptians believed that when a person died, the gods immediately placed his or her heart in one pan of a set of scales. In the other pan was a feather. If there was imbalance, if the heart of the deceased weighed more than the feather, he or she was denied admittance to the afterworld. Only the lighthearted were deemed advanced enough to merit immortality.”)

So. We do what we are called/called on to do.

And we detach from the outcome. The outcome is never guaranteed – nor can it be.

But, since, as I’ve said elsewhere, activism is its own reward, an activist I will continue to be.

As Sister Joan Chittister puts it, “If you are expecting to see the results of your work, you simply haven’t asked a big enough question.”

Janet

P.S. And as I’ve also said elsewhere, there is so much joy in this work because of the company we keep. Fine, fine, fine people. How does life get any better than doing challenging & rewarding work in the company of utterly awesome friends & colleagues??

P.P.S. I suppose my own personal slingshot is my voice??

I went off to a Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission hearing in Ottawa the other day to “speak truth to power” about a very polluting little nuclear company in Pembroke, Ontario.

As I’d said to a number of friends in an e-mail before the hearing, we would be “speaking truth to power,” as the saying goes – knowing all the while that “power” wouldn’t really be listening.

And so it was. “Power” wasn’t really listening to the members of the public who were there to express their legitimate & long-time concerns. Well, that isn’t strictly true. At times they did actually appear to be listening, but you could sort of see their ears closing up again lickety-split.

I still feel grrrrreat about having said my little piece, though. I was in the awesome company of other activists, all of whom have more integrity in their little fingers than a lot of the folks who were in that room have in their whole bodies.

Of course, as Upton Sinclair said who knows how many decades ago, “It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.”

(Is it not so?)

For me, hanging around fellow activists of such intelligence, courage & integrity is very, very energizing. It renders all the work & energy & time one has put into this massive exercise (way over the top, trust me!!) utterly worthwhile.

Some of us had dinner together afterward, and I’ll bet we took our fellow diners in the otherwise quiet restaurant by surprise. We were crazily animated, discovered connections among ourselves we hadn’t realized existed, had lots & lots of laughs – &, quite clearly, were having a ball!

All you folks who “run” the world – the ones with power who are fuelled by greed (& personal insecurity)? I have a message for you:

Being an activist – doing worthwhile work that really matters – with passion & energy & conviction & commitment – is wildly, wildly, wildly enjoyable & rewarding.

Of course, it would be really cool if more often we achieved the kinds of results we were after.

But even when we don’t, hooey! Are we ever in fine company!!

Janet

P.S. Visit the TAP (Tritium Awareness Project) Web site if you’d like to learn the truth about tritium. http://www.tapcanada.org/en/

‘Quote of the day’ w. this post: “It is hard to imagine a more stupid or more dangerous way of making decisions than by putting those decisions in the hands of people who pay no price for being wrong.” – Thomas Sowell

(Yesterday’s was “A voice is a human gift. It should be cherished & used. Powerlessness & silence go together.” – Margaret Atwood)