style="font-size:15px;"> Now looking back at these early choices, I can see that beneath it all there was something more primal. I was scared I’d lose someone that I loved. Not someone specific, but someone I hadn’t even met yet. Someone that I thought I’d need to impress: with status, charisma, confidence, wealth, style and skills. Such things would need to be worked for, within our dominant culture and economy. I was lying to myself and to others because I was scared that I wouldn’t be able to belong on my own terms.
Those insecurities meant I pushed away the implications of knowing that our society is based on a lie of the separation between humans, nature and spirit. For decades I compromised with that greatest of lies, and in so doing I was complicit with the ongoing destruction and oppression of you.
It took the terrifying data on climate change to shake me out of those delusions. Awakening to the likely collapse of society triggered a collapse in my sense of self-worth. My stomach churned and heaved with the horror of realising how much I’d been imprisoned by fear. Falling to my hands and knees, my forehead on the soil, I cried and asked you, ‘Please forgive me.’
Your response was immediate.
I began to sense that because you are one life, you have no issue with death. We may feel guilt about destruction, yet the thousands of species going extinct are not a suffering for you. In that, perhaps I may find redemption from this pain.
‘We are part of the earth and it is part of us,’ wrote Chief Seattle. I am an aspect of you, a potentiality of you. As you produced me and everything that we are, when I experience that unity, I know we are all forgiven.
Thank you. As awareness of our climate emergency grows, you have begun to provide us with a global near-death experience. We can wake up to our mortality and our fear of it. Some of us will come to see the stories built upon that fear over the past millennia. With climate chaos, you invite us to return to you. You offer us an extinction redemption.
I’m sorry. Please forgive me. Thank you. I love you.
Jem Bendell
Конец ознакомительного фрагмента.
Текст предоставлен ООО «ЛитРес».
Прочитайте эту книгу целиком, купив полную легальную версию на ЛитРес.
Безопасно оплатить книгу можно банковской картой Visa, MasterCard, Maestro, со счета мобильного телефона, с платежного терминала, в салоне МТС или Связной, через PayPal, WebMoney, Яндекс.Деньги, QIWI Кошелек, бонусными картами или другим удобным Вам способом.
