The Yin-Yang of Life

Never before in my life have I been in such close proximity to the workings of Canada’s governing institutions. This witnessing recently took place at a month-long public hearing held by the Canadian Environmental Assessment Agency (CEAA), in Bruce County, Ontario. The focus is a proposed deep geologic repository (DGR) for low and intermediate radioactive waste, to be located a bit more than a kilometre from the (current) shoreline of Lake Huron. This lake is within the Great Lakes/St. Lawrence River Basin, one of the last large basins of fresh water on the planet, and source to drinking water for an estimated 40 million people in Canada and the United States.

Every day from mid-September to Thanksgiving I attended this hearing. Following my own 30-minute presentation in the first week, most of my waking hours not spent at the hearing were devoted to further research and preparation to ask questions, when suitable, after other presentations.

More than a hundred interveners gave oral presentations of either 10 or 30 minutes in length. The three-person Joint Review Panel (JRP) then would interrogate the presenters, to gather evidence from all parties speaking in favour of, or against, the proposed DGR. All parties included Ontario Power Generation, Inc. (OPG), the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission (CNSC), and registered members of the public.

Following each JRP interrogation, further questions were allowed from registered public participants. Written submissions by other citizens, Canadian and American, who could not attend, also were read into the public record.

My own presentation made the case that the environmental guidelines themselves were flawed. I also critiqued methods of scientific inquiry, such as computer modelling, as inadequate to understand fully how living organisms function, let alone properly measure the impacts of radioactive contamination.

In other words, the science is not there – if it ever could be – for human beings to assume that we know sufficiently how to bury materials, that contain ionizing radiation, and be able to ensure reasonable safety to human and environmental life. The uncertainties are too many.

Other presenters later criticized the ways that Ontario Power Generation, Inc. (OPG) did not even meet the guidelines, in its proposal to construct a DGR, using a shaft design that only is in a conceptual stage. The OPG’s report also fell short on several aspects of its environmental research, because of major gaps of information, on top of the uncertainties.

The facts exposed during this public hearing were unbelievable, resembling a `theatre of the absurd.’ The very idea of burying radioactive waste so close to a major lake system boggles the mind. Where do I begin?

The `proponent” here refers to Ontario Power Generation, Inc. (OPG), which owns the land occupied by Bruce Power and the site where the DGR is proposed. The OPG also owns other Ontario nuclear generating station sites, from which low and intermediate radioactive waste would be delivered, as well, to this proposed DGR beside Lake Huron.

The OPG works in liaison with the Nuclear Waste Management Organization (NWMO). But that fact repeatedly has been put aside by the JRP, to the chagrin of those of us who are local citizens. For we know too well the current political manoeuvrings by the NWMO in our municipalities to promote a second DGR, for high level radioactive waste.

JRP’s insistence to stick with their original `Terms of Reference,’ whether reluctantly or not, indicates one of the fundamental flaws in the regulatory process. It obligates the panel to focus only on the proposal to bury low and intermediate waste, as the terms originally described it.

What is worrisome, meanwhile, is how the proposed DGR project, for which the panel members signed on to adjudicate a public hearing, has shape-shifted more recently into a different project.

OPG now wants to add `decommissioning’ radioactive waste to this proposed DGR, which could increase its size two-fold or more, with interrelated consequences on the engineering design (i.e. size) and all aspects of the environment – terrestrial, aquatic and underground pathways. Aside from volume, the proportions between low and intermediate waste would be altered, hence, as well the eventual `cumulative effects,’ the latter which OPG has sorely underestimated.

Indeed, even as the panel circumscribes the public hearing to its original mandate and the initially proposed DGR, the unknown factors are many. They range from still unknown effects of various radionuclides on entire ecosystems, potential of water seepage, questionable robustness of shaft seals and more, to the inevitable upcoming extreme weather events and climate change that will disrupt the geology.

Meaningful predictions are humanly impossible, yet OPG and NWMO stubbornly – and arrogantly – persist in making them. Despite repeated criticisms about their research, they kept to their original script that there will be “no significant adverse effects.”

The panel members are not fools. Even though they are constrained by the original DGR proposal, to their credit they have been relentlessly questioning the obvious lack of rigour in the research delivered by the OPG/NWMO to the regulator, which is the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission (CNSC). The panel, moreover, has questioned the CNSC about why it gave certain approvals.

The OPG’s report to justify its proposed DGR, produced as an Environmental Impact Statement (EIS), must meet the approval of the CNSC, which is a federal government agency. This EIS also must meet the regulations of several other government ministries. These are the players, together with municipal politicians in Bruce County, who provide the back story in a democratic process that has been a sham up to this current public hearing process.

For the wider public – not just local citizens in Bruce County – but as well folks farther afield all the way south to include our American “cousins” – most particularly in Michigan – were not decently consulted about this proposed DGR. A number of local, and American, interveners provided that evidence.

Two among several of the American interveners, in fact, included Senator Hoon-Yung Hopgood and Michigan State Representative Sarah Roberts, who verified the lack of inclusion in public consultations, and lack of awareness among their citizens, until recent months.

Throughout the public hearing I had a heavy heart in looking at too many empty chairs. For a while, I thought, must we always wait for major disasters before people wake up to stop further violation to the earth? But then, compassionately, I recognized the fuller truth of apparent disinterest is a lot more complicated.

Living in Bruce County for seven years, I recognize that it is too easy to accuse folks of indifference. Instead, the empty seats symbolize the dark, hidden side of a rural region, in a struggling global economy, in which a visible portion of the population have grown to perceive a dependence on a single industry. Doing so, I would argue, is more a convenient mental construct than the actual reality.

In this case, the major single employer is the nuclear industry, signified by Bruce Power, said to be the largest nuclear generating station in the world. Through the several decades that it has entrenched its foothold in this region, the more inclusive economic vision – that encompasses a significant agricultural community as well as a strong tourism legacy – appears to be getting side-lined by the political and corporate power-holders whose vision is more one-dimensional and self-serving.

The result is, many citizens feel muzzled, by fear of losing jobs or losing the business of highly-paid workers at the power plant and its related facility, the Western Waste Management Facility (WWMF), where the low and intermediate level waste has been stored safely for 40 years or more.

Another big question that is surfacing is, how much do Bruce Power workers feel silenced if and when they and, in turn, family members, contract life-threatening illnesses from undetected radiation poisoning. Local health studies are shamefully lacking.

Also largely silenced is the farming community, collectively feeling the government pays no heed to their voices. Yet, perhaps more than any other moment on this planet, we need to retain, and protect, sustainable agricultural land, and clean water, in a world that is heading towards a water and food crisis.

The Municipality of Kincardine is the primary community that would benefit the most, economically, because close to half, maybe more, of its residents are employed at Bruce Power, and the DGR is proposed to be built next to it. The selfishness of certain Town of Kincardine residents that spoke, in their presentations, to how wonderful the economic benefits are – for them – must be challenged.

I remind myself that what I am witnessing is a microcosm of the human condition, in which there are the self-serving `haves’ willfully oblivious to the ripple effects upon the `have-nots.’ The former make troubling choices to enhance their own economic gain, with no consideration for the larger human and environmental costs now and in the future.

Humans can continue to create and develop diverse forms of energy production. But once the water and the soil get contaminated, the sources that sustain life are gone, forever.

Three farming families presented well-informed views at the public hearing. They spoke out about the risks and dangers which the OPG/NWMO consistently minimized in their thousands of pages of research.

Very important to acknowledge – even emphasize – are the outstanding presentations by concerned citizens. The above farmers, among other intrepid individuals from many walks of life, chose to educate themselves and take responsibility to engage proactively in `participatory democracy,’ to stand up for what really matters – valuing and protecting life.

Indeed, beautiful to behold in the formal, regimented space of a public hearing have been the soulfully powerful voices of ordinary citizens not just “using” but, moreover, “reinforcing” the democratic process by making sure their voices are being heard.

In doing so, such individuals, who come together from neighbouring communities, as truth tellers, have exposed what is politically unethical, corporately manipulative, and environmentally not acceptable about the whole trajectory of this DGR project to date.

Also important to acknowledge are the professional experts who have dedicated their lives to various fields such as engineering, ecology, biology, law and human health. They travelled long distances to share their knowledge and concerns about the dangers of burying radioactive waste so deeply underground.

Ed Burt, the eldest presenter at age 85, gifted us with a 30-minute presentation that was magnificent. The reason is, he spoke from a place of love, as a gifted storyteller who offered the long view. Working on the land, Mr. Burt also has dedicated his life to raising nuclear awareness. I told his wife that I wish our Euro-western culture could honour elders and storytellers, like her husband, in the ways that Indigenous cultures do.

Indeed, further life-affirming about the public hearing process was to sit together with Aboriginal people. Our closest neighbours are the Saugeen Ojibway Nation (SON). Its eloquent spokesperson at the hearing is Chief Randall Kahgee who, with his astute legal counsel, spelled out what really matters.

The spiritual integrity of our shared concern for the earth, and the children yet unborn, is creating a major step forward in cross-cultural healing.

Last, but not least, were the voices of youth. In separate 30-minute presentations, Caitlin McAllister and Hana Splettstoesser, both secondary school students, expressed very articulate messages to remind us again that it is their generation and the generations to come that will inherit the outcomes of whatever gets decided.

For me, what links Mr. Burt, Chief Kahgee, and Misses McAllister and Splettstoesser in importance is their implicit recognition of the `sacred feminine,’ a running theme in my blog writings. The sacred feminine is the life force within everything alive, energetically connecting our spirit with the earth, and why human consciousness needs to evolve to heal and strengthen that reconnection as a species.

Standing together, as biological and spiritual beings, simple caring has helped us discover the best of who we can be, and perhaps awakened inner resources of strength in some of us previously untapped. Most of us took on a daunting task without funds, sacrificing much time through many months of our lives, to present scientific and spiritual insights that have been treated respectfully by the Joint Review Panel. Our work is not yet done.

As for the supporters of the proposed DGR who live in Kincardine, and Saugeen Shores next door, they simply put human faces onto the folly of what the larger North American society, so attached to its comforts, has been seduced into believing through the past half century.

I urge everyone, collectively, as a North American society (and elsewhere) to reflect upon how we got to this historic moment. One intervener defined this moment as “the chickens coming home to roost,” to characterize the dilemma of what to do with increasing radioactive waste.

Nuclear energy has been presented to us through a magical marketing machine, creating a myth that we all can enjoy affluence, while misrepresenting nuclear power as clean, safe and green. What then do you call the radioactive waste being produced?

I now intend to bury myself again in the public hearing materials, and prepare more questions as a concerned citizen, for the upcoming final three days of this critical event.

For your own further education about this complex and controversial issue, please explore webcasts and transcripts available on the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission website.

You also can study the written submissions and power-point presentations for the public hearing on the Canadian Environmental Assessment Agency website.

Each day that I rise and look out a window onto the beauty of God’s green earth, I feel grateful to be alive and to be blessed to have such an opportunity to experience the beauty and serenity of the world of Nature. This place of belonging is the glue that holds me together, as does essentially the loving kindness of a few close friends. They live geographically far away; yet, energetically, our souls are closely aligned.

Indeed, even on occasions when I do become unglued from the hardships of these times, the affectionate support of these earthly angels glues me back together. My homestead, meanwhile, provides the grounding to sustain me on a plot of earth that is a rough, yet restorative, kind of heaven.

That knowing is why I can tell you that it is possible to find heaven on earth. The reasons are the same as finding happiness. Both possibilities reside in a person’s state of mind, in other words, how we choose to respond to life’s uncertainties.

But the challenge, to reach that state of mind, is to develop one’s inner qualities of grace and humility – innate within all of us. Doing so requires a willingness to look upon life’s journey as a quest to learn and grow more fully into our higher spiritual qualities, and practice them daily. Added to the aforementioned qualities are: compassion, gratitude, forgiveness, and more.

These qualities are “spiritual” because they refer to the higher, moral qualities that all human beings carry within us, whether we are religious or not.

For example, I have met certain devoutly “religious” individuals who sorely fall short in expressing their better qualities, choosing instead self-righteousness, narrow-mindedness, and a lack of generosity. Conversely, I know individual atheists who have evolved to function more authentically from their `Higher Self.’ Even so, they would not necessarily use the `spiritual’ referent, preferring to base their chosen behaviour upon humanism.

The important question, regardless of our motivation, remains: Are we aware how profoundly we create our own reality, whether human interrelationships, material circumstances, as well as feeling interconnected or not with all planetary life and beyond?

The answer partly resides in our self-awareness that each of us is a `work-in-progress,’ in so far as our own consciousness informs us about how profoundly or superficially we respond to the world at any given period of our lives. For nothing alive stays the same.

In other words, what I suggested above in reference to religious versus atheistic persons refers only to particular individuals at a single moment in time or perhaps a specific period of their lives.

Regardless, life is a `spiral journey,’ and each living organism, including a human being, fluctuates in accordance with a series of responses, inner an outer, to ever changing events. In short, people can change. We can learn from the wisdom of Nature.

As for the `spiral journey,’ it shows us that even when we try to move forward, inevitably, we will confront once again familiar situations, as expressed by human personalities or events, that trigger old patterns that we have attempted to put behind us.

The triggers indicate, regardless, that we have more inner work to do, to release our own out-grown patterns, and that is okay. Growing closer to our full potential is a lifelong pursuit, achieved in stages, and achieved only as grace and humility evolve.

Patience and perseverance are two further qualities that develop through struggle. Their development is a significant challenge in our current culture that socializes us to expect everything to happen instantly, and with minimal pain.

The challenge is for us to recognize our own unhealthy relational patterns and learn from opportunities when particular encounters trigger old behaviours. Each time we will see ourselves respond differently, if we are giving less energetic power to feed the unhealthy pattern, until one day we find ourselves no longer feeling triggered.

That is the step-by-step process that enables us, authentically, to divest ourselves of outdated, and counterproductive, emotional and spiritual patterns of relationship that, if kept, hold us back from growing closer to our human potential.

My suggestion that life is a `spiral journey’ contains another aspect of reality, a reality that speaks to human imperfection and fallibility. On such a journey, each person can choose to move forward in life and shift how we respond or, instead, resist change through attitudes and responses to the world that remain frozen and crystallize.

Sometimes, therefore, it takes extreme events to break through and open a path to a new way of being. The road less taken can appear before us, whether after a meltdown from the heat of our passions and soul woundedness or, alternatively, the cracking apart from the cold rigidity of dogmatic thinking that, sooner or later, snaps from its inner pathological pressure upon our `life force.’

The `life force’ is our soul, a soul organically in flux and energetically interconnected with multiple levels of energy (and, I believe, other souls), on earth and beyond, to which many humans still do not give credence, let alone even begin to try and understand.

How then do we, as a human species, have the audacity to criticize what we fail to understand, because of our intellectual arrogance? I refer here to the mysteries of energetic dimensions that remain largely unknown, both spiritually and scientifically.

Why I become so agitated about this human dilemma is, first of all, because it has two outcomes. Furthermore, at no time previously in history has knowledge, and wisdom, been so accessible to transform human consciousness and create a more life affirming human interrelationship with earth. Yet human nature is so resistant to change.

The first outcome is, we hurt each other unnecessarily when we refuse to acknowledge our own imperfect behaviours, preferring to play the blame game, bereft of compassion.

The second outcome is, environmental degradation continues because of selfishness, and resistance to change – collectively as a species, despite the continuing and essential efforts of caring folks to heal and restore what is broken.

Selfishness expresses itself through: consumerism far beyond our needs; investments to make profits from destroying our planet’s life support system; and refusing to learn how to adopt different ways of life that are possible, using much less energy. We have the intelligence to do so, if we simply would have the will to act.

That is the key – the act of will. I believe it is not terrorism, but instead the least evolved expressions of the human mind – arrogance, indifference, lack of compassion, prejudice and persistence to judge others and, last but not least, the misguided belief that human life is superior to other planetary life – that will cause our undoing.

We, as a species, will be brought to our knees by such mindlessness, unless we learn how to develop `mindfulness’ to appreciate and protect what actually sustains life.

Reflect on what I suggested earlier, in regard to extreme events being required to open new ways of being. The earth is speaking to us. Extreme weather events are forcing people to rethink how to live on this planet, and rethink what to value, willingly or not.

My heart, meanwhile, aches in wondering whether I will be the last generation to benefit from a lifetime of freely available clean water – when some of the poorest populations, wrongly, are already being forced to pay for water – and an economically accessible supply of food, in a world where Nature’s biodiversity still bestows human life with a wealth of beauty and serenity that no amount of money can buy once these qualities are destroyed.

This year, together with a small number of caring fellow human beings, I have taken action – and the battle continues – to fight against one of the most diabolical types of violation upon the life force of the earth – proposals to bury radioactive waste in deep geological repositories (DGRs) in my region.

Yes, I mentioned this activism in earlier posts, but want to widen awareness among newer readers. If interested, read When Spiritual Work Involves Science & Activisim. In that post, there is a link to a previous post that identifies a petition.

Margaret Mead’s quote is popular with our cause. Change does begin with the courage of a small number of caring individuals, from which a ripple effect then can awaken a growing circle of support.

Our latest work, as a coalition, has been the preparation and delivery of individually-researched written submissions to the Joint Review Panel of the Canadian Environmental Assessment Agency, in regard to the first of two proposed DGRs. The first DGR focuses on low and intermediate radioactive waste, and the second on high level waste.

Some interveners also are giving oral presentations at a public hearing this autumn. I am one of those individuals. After delivering my written text a few days ago, I now must find and organize supplementary visual materials, to deliver before the end of August.

What I learned many years ago, however, as a helping professional who came close to a nervous breakdown from overwork, is the essential need for self-care to retain inner and outer balance. As Art Solomon, an Anishinaabe spiritual elder and mentor, once told me, with his pragmatic tough love: “If you do not take care of yourself, you are no good to anybody.”

Today, with Nature’s rough beauty as my teacher, I know that life’s journey is not about achieving perfection, but instead the discovery, and protection, of the hidden treasures that sustain a life worth living.

When past memories return to one’s consciousness repeatedly through the years, they carry a message. Sometimes it symbolizes the need to tell a story. During my years as a fulltime journalist, my favourite articles to produce were interviews with individuals, some of whom were famous and others under-recognized or forgotten. I recall phoning ornithologist/bird artist Terence M. Shortt, to arrange a visit.

My intention was to honour his legacy by giving him an opportunity to share his wisdom, based upon a lifetime dedicated to learning about birds, and mentoring other bird enthusiasts. Mr. Shortt invited me to come and sit in his garden, to share the joy that he experienced daily.

One of my lifelong regrets is that I never made it to his garden while Terence Shortt (1910-1986) was alive. I immediately had recognized that his invitation came not just from a gracious willingness to be interviewed. Instead, much more importantly, the enthusiasm so obvious in his voice was his excitement to have an opportunity to share with another person the world of Nature that brought so much beauty and fulfillment into his life.

After confirming the possibility of an interview, I tried to find at least one Canadian magazine that would appreciate such a story – without success. What really angered me was the haughty response from one female magazine editor who sniffed while asking: “What has he done lately?” When I replied that I wanted to do a story on highlights of his life as he saw them and the wisdom that he has acquired, she curtly rejected the story idea. I was infuriated by her arrogance and disrespect, and decided I would visit Mr. Shortt anyway. But, sadly, I delayed arranging a date until it was too late.

Although I denied myself the pleasure of spending time with Mr. Shortt in person – and I hope he benefited instead from the presence of more dependable visitors – here I partially can make amends by acknowledging his legacy, albeit briefly. The fact is, he was a major influence upon the the lives of several living nature artists, such as Robert Bateman. They do acknowledge Shortt’s talents and generosity and have received much more public acclaim than Shortt experienced during his own lifetime.

Important to note about the internet is the reality that it never should be seen as the sole resource to find information. Books and other cultural documents need to be explored, in order to gather more fully insights on the lives and contributions to cultural history of people. Even in recent generations, who knows how many worthy individuals have been virtually overlooked in digital documents.

Ever the intrepid sleuth, regardless, once I identify a scent to follow I am like a hound dog on a trail of pursuit to the sources. I spent most of an afternoon looking up numerous online keywords in order, eventually, to track down any insights at all about Terence Michael Shortt.

He became an acclaimed ornithologist and renown bird artist, almost inadvertently it seems, because his fulltime day job through 46 years was Chief Display Biologist at the Royal Ontario Museum, in Toronto, where he also taught nature drawing. His job did support international trips to study birds elsewhere. Shortt somehow found the time, as well, to illustrate the books of several authors plus compiling his own books to feature his master drawings.

In the production of his own books, about which details are few and far between online, his most popular book (reprinted in different versions) was titled Wild Birds of the Americas (1977), in which his impeccable drawings were accompanied by equally fastidious written observations about his beloved bird subjects. Please note, the cover image shown here probably does not do justice to his palette, which is why seeing original copies of his books is the preferred choice for anyone who can appreciate the significance of colour rendition in book reproductions of original art.

Eventually I discovered an August/September 1977 edition of Books in Canada magazine, among its online archived back issues – a genuine gift to Canadian cultural history – in which Shortt’s above-mentioned book is reviewed on pages 34, 35, under “Rails, swans and Shortt takes,” and Shortt himself is interviewed on pages 41, 42, under “Birds fly over the rainbow and Terry Shortt has spent a long, happy life following them.”

Despite several typos, these brief insights offer clues to a uniquely gifted artist and observer of nature, yet unassuming and modest, apparently not interested in being in the limelight. His two-fold passion was to be a witness to the phenomenon of bird life and share whatever he learned with anyone interested.

I wish I had known him, and still kick myself in waiting for another day that never came. Probably each of us can recall someone whom we have overlooked, or perhaps still do neglect. Such individuals could exist within our own families. Also, they could include other individuals who do not seek the limelight yet have given so much to benefit other people, society, the planetary environment and more.

Perhaps such individuals have inner peace that transcends the need ever to be recognized publicly. They might even actively avoid the limelight.

Regardless, intrinsically, we require meaningful interactions in the world around us that enable our soul to feel welcomed. We are social beings who thrive on respectful and genuinely affectionate interrelationships.

Given mainstream society’s obsession with a celebrity culture in our globalized world, I strongly believe we need to give ourselves interludes to reflect on what really matters.

We can strive to restore more balance in a world sorely out-of-balance in regard to whom and what we value, in which daily life for so many people has been reduced to numerous, superficial, fleeting sound bites. I bet each of us probably could identify at least one person, perhaps several individuals, with whom a mutually beneficial experience could unfold by offering the gift of unhurried time spent together.

Each and every generation has something to offer, in order to create a holistic fabric of relationships woven from the continuity of human experience through time and space.

Consider what we are doing to ourselves, collectively, when the authentic wealth of our society is being marginalized, stigmatized and under-valued? What I refer to is the wealth embodied in the knowledge and experience of fellow human beings who have travelled the distance in life to move beyond egotistically assuming they know everything, to discover, eventually, that they know very little. Doing so is the beginning of wisdom.

A recent experience brought to the surface of my consciousness the infamous question put to me so many years ago: What has he done lately? As a creative professional, I just filled in a survey that included a number of questions about how the presence or absence of future royalties would impact on my production of educational work.

But, the survey – typical of various other surveys in recent years distributed to creators – focused only on the past three years. In other words, what have I done lately?

If I have been without paid creative work in that limited period, does that imply that I do not exist, that my voice is silenced from contributing to the wider cultural conversation about societal changes that profoundly affect the livelihoods of present and future creators? Indeed, the 2008 economic downturn severely impacted both veteran and emerging professionals in the creative sector as much as other sectors.

Does not a lifetime of production count? The fact is, I still do receive royalties, albeit modest, both as a writer and a documentary filmmaker, from continuing sales, most importantly educational uses of my previously produced work. Royalties are sorely needed in our current economy in which funding new creative projects is almost impossible. Financing, production methods and marketing all are radically being restructured. (That is why copyright must be respected, to enable royalties.)

Despite my human failings, when I could support myself as a working journalist, I did bring attention to a number of deserving individuals through my published articles and essays. As a filmmaker, my proudest contribution was giving recognition to a remarkable person who was socially, and professionally, marginalized until my documentary shed light on the talents, courage and spiritual tenacity of Everett Soop, in Soop on Wheels.

Who do you know as individuals who expressed generosity and caring to make a difference in the world, yet today might feel isolated and forgotten? Seek out these individuals, and honour them by your affectionate presence and acknowledgment.

Acts of caring are what reinforce our humanity, the most precious gift we bestow on this earth.

Spiritual work has many expressions that go beyond religious ministries and the power of prayer. Consider catastrophes and human generosity that ranges from monetary donations to showing up in person, when possible, to give physical and emotional help, whether through professional or volunteer services, and fundraisers.

Most recently, in Canada, we have the first July 21st charity run undertaken by citizens and visitors in eastern Québec, along the route of the inexcusable runaway train carrying crude oil, which derailed and exploded, causing death and destruction in of Lac Mégantic. Also, of course, have been the platoons of volunteers in several locations to help victims in western Canada after record-breaking Alberta floods.

Other expressions of `spiritual work’ can be more challenging, for these reasons. They involve forms of nonviolent citizen protest pitted against environmentally-threatening activities that, first of all, divide the regional communities affected and , secondly, get reduced by the news media to “activism,” usually in the reductive, pejorative sense.

In this second case, mediocre news reporters, who attempt to look “objective,” undermine the deeper truths that concerned citizens try to expose. Such reporters quote misguided, if not corrupt, politicians who try to diminish such citizens not simply as “protesters” yet, moreover, by labels such as “interfering outsiders,” foreigners,” and who sometimes invoke, abusively, the attention-getting “terrorist” label.

Another activity in public protest to characterize as `spiritual work’ is the unseen, thus generally unheralded, deep and complex research to which concerned citizens dedicate themselves for months, if not years, on end. They do so to discover and expose the more important facts about industrial decisions that endanger life.

These citizens feel compelled to do so, when confronted with self-serving political power-holders who abdicate their own moral responsibility to carry out relevant scientific and medical research that is independent from the mutual self-interests held by certain corporate interests and such willfully ignorant politicians.

To be clear, I am not referring to all forms of activism as spiritual work. The human condition is complex, and so are the motivations within the human heart that can be conflicted about what actually is compelling a person toward public protest.

Our world today is moving through a major transition, at multiple levels, in which several aspects of a person’s life can be in upheaval, even without natural disasters, political revolutions that become extended with no predictable outcome in sight, or the inevitable industrial catastrophes caused by arrogance and negligence.

As readers familiar with my blog posts already know, I regularly refer to the `sacred feminine’ as a thread that weaves through much of my writing. The sacred feminine is grounded in the life force within each of us as well as within all forms of life on this planet.

Essential today is to know what we must protect, what we must “stand for” more than what we stand against, and to do so from a place of love and caring, rather than from hate and anger.

Taking a position from our “Higher Self,” from which we manifest our higher – namely, spiritual – qualities such as love, compassion, humility, gratitude, grace and more, is the ground on which a human being needs to stand in order to carry out `spiritual work.’ The further aspect is that these higher qualities are expressed from an innate recognition of relationship.

Ultimately, what really matters about being alive is how we take care of each other and the planetary life that sustains our life, not only now yet for the future generations to come. Acting now, however, is imperative in order to safeguard the children today and the children to come.

That is why much of my time this year is dedicated to doing scientific and related research, and prepare interventions to fight against the first of two proposed deep geological repositories (DGRs) to bury radioactive nuclear waste. Please see blog post “Do You Know Where You Live? May I Suggest – A Bioregion” about this issue.

I also explained in that post why I am writing fewer blog posts, because such research is taking most of my time. Nor can I look for paying work, while committed in a volunteer capacity, as a caring community member, to prepare written and oral interventions.

Please know as well that writing a blog is not a hobby, but instead one way for me to contribute educationally to the wider world. Donations, therefore, are appreciated, and needed, to cover basic living expenses.

A public hearing will be held for a month this autumn, beginning mid-September. The Joint Review Panel (JPR) on this proposed nuclear waste dump project has accepted my submission outline; hence, allowing me to contribute a 30-minute oral intervention. However, I must deliver the detailed written paper for a mid-August deadline, with extra days given if I choose to add visual images.

So, this is going to be a long, hot summer in more ways than one. After sweating through the previous week-long horrid, sleepless heat wave, in my rough yet darling century-old farmhouse, I am trying not to fry my brain.

For I am exploring thousands of pages of documents, both from the nuclear industry and also seeking independent literature from which I can glean opposing scientific views, to illustrate why a DGR is fraught with uncertainties.

This intellectual exercise, by the way, relates to my previous post titled “Internet’s Impact on Brain – What You Need to Know.” In that post, I emphasized the value of taking opportunities to enjoy natural environments, which allow a person to be present to the moment at a soul level while also developing the brain’s capacity for contemplation.

Interwoven with such a holistic perspective is the very real, and very practical, need to develop the brain in order to build the capacity to investigate and comprehend a lot of information at deep levels. Doing so is essential when a person chooses the task to organize complex facts and present a case to argue against dangerous, industrial activities, particularly ones in which risks to human and environmental well-being will continue.

To be equipped to address the high stakes of our time, and participate in decision-making that impacts on the quality of life of our planet, we, as planetary citizens, are called to take responsibility to become well-informed, in order to make wise choices and to be clear about what we stand for.

Wherever you live, what is it that you stand for, and how are you preparing to protect what you cherish?