The Yin-Yang of Life

“‘Tis the season to be jolly.” Yes or no? This is not a trick question. It is, however, a tricky question, because there is no simple answer. My cultural traditions include the celebration of Christmas. This tradition is not my favourite, and I bet dollars to donuts – or dollars to shortbread cookies – that I am not alone. I believe anyone who counts the days, and even the hours, until it is over, can be forgiven and not be accused of being a grinch.

The problem is not Christmas in and of itself, when we can remember what resides at the heart and the soul of this occasion. In other words, what are the practices of love through which we focus our energies during the Christmas season? Expressions of love, of course, also include those particular gifts that bring light into a child’s life, and laughter – and such gifts are not limited to material things.

The practices of love in which we can awaken the childlike joy within all of us include: gatherings with loved ones or any group of fellow human beings; feeling grateful for whatever is good in our lives; as well as generosity and charity to help the less fortunate in practical ways.

Last but not least is reflecting on the historic birth so long ago of one of the world’s great spiritual prophets, Jesus of Nazareth, and also the Christmas symbolism of His birth. More than ever we hopefully feel compelled to pray for guidance in regard to how we can manifest “Peace on Earth, and Goodwill to [Humankind],” and add, “Goodwill to all Planetary Life.”

Fortified with today’s ecological awareness, we ought to know that our well-being is interdependent with other life, for humans to exist at all on Earth. Indeed, an excellent type of gift is a card/certificate showing a donation made in the name of the recipient, whether child or adult, towards an ecological programme, such as saving an endangered species, planting trees and protecting natural spaces for conservation into the future.

The problem with Christmas, therefore, is if and when we allow ourselves to get bent out of shape by the ridiculous frenzy of shopping, and long distance travel plans that go wrong when winter weather does not cooperate. Perhaps airports, train and bus stations should have meditation rooms for travellers. Alternatively, they could make a space available for `open-microphone’ comedy, so that anyone bold enough to be funny, and honest, about the craziness of it all, could brighten up fellow travellers.

Returning to my tricky question, about being jolly, let’s face it, the reality is not yes or no. Instead, the actuality is both/and. For every family, sooner or later, and then at irregular intervals, loses one or more loved ones, and Christmas is tough.

So it is this Christmas, for my cousins, their mother – the matriarch of the family, my Aunt Ruth (baby sister to my late father) – and the husband and two sons of my late cousin, Kathy, who crossed over this summer, too soon in life, from cancer. And I too grieve Kathy’s loss.

In such circumstances, Christmas can be the hardest time of year for folks, because everything about the meaning of life is distorted and smothered by commerce. Material stuff and money are superficial diversions that bring no solace to a grieving heart. Instead, Christmas calls on us to journey deep within ourselves to connect with the best of who we can be, in order to be present to each other with our hearts and our souls.

This sacred space of gathering is to share memories. Storytelling is an age-old custom that helps us to make meaning of life’s events, to recall the special moments, the love, the joy, the laughter and the sad times, and the gratefulness to be together and honour each other’s memories. Stories are healing, and some are not yet meant to be told.

Those stories will surface, if and when a future time comes, rising from the places deep inside us that cherish and protect what is dearest, most painful, and most private. Some stories, even so, may be kept in the treasure house of our soul, always, or maybe eventually be expressed in painting, sculpture, music, carpentry or through other creative expressions.

So, Christmas Day calls on us to pay attention, be tuned in to those loved ones who feel a need for less visibility, less talking, and feel comfortable simply observing, and basking in, the presence of, and love radiated by, the surrounding family or other circle of caring individuals. Quiet affection, kindness, and gentle attentiveness can be very nurturing.

I am writing these thoughts on Christmas Eve, between tossing wood into my cellar furnace and kitchen wood stove, and baking cookies to take to my above-mentioned family relatives on Christmas Day. They gather just a few hours travel by car from my darling farmhouse where I rejoice in a home life surrounded by the beauty of nature.

My constant gratitude is invested in rising each day, and able to look out all windows onto fields, trees and the wide open sky – and also see the stars clearly at night, unless a storm is approaching off the lake. What a blessing these past six years to have moved out of Toronto, and no longer be awakened by the constant flow of traffic, honking horns and other relentless noises, on top of being visually bombarded on all sides, and even under my feet, by advertising everywhere I walked.

I am grateful also for the related life-changing experiences, such as new friendships with some rural old-timers and other folks across generations. When I say `old-timers,’ I do so with affection and deep respect for the particular old-timers whom I have befriended, and them befriending me, who genuinely are the `salt-of-the-earth’ in character. The reason is, they have lived through unbelievable hardships, yet have such grace and humility. They experienced life on the land before chemicals were forced onto subsequent generations of farmers, and also are marvellous storytellers.

A few days ago, the most pleasurable moment of this Christmas season for me was not just to take clothing (still in good condition, and laundered or dry cleaned) to a local Salvation Army Thrift Store, but moreover to give a particular coat to one of my favourite old-timers that fit him perfectly, and to see his face light up with happiness.

You will hear more about him and his delightful wife in a future blog post, because their human qualities are among the qualities that our troubled world, and a society out-of-balance, need to restore in order to become a more caring human family.

Speaking of the human family, and the fact that the majority of the human population still are here after the winter solstice date of December 21st – which some people believed would be the end of the world – do not dismiss what the Mayan Long Count Calendar foretold, because it simply was misunderstood.

Mayan spiritual traditionalists have a lot of important knowledge that informs us about the new cycle that we now are entering as a human family.

Stay tuned, because my offering of some insights about their knowledge will be in an upcoming blog post. These insights can help us to walk more compassionately into the future.

Choosing to be a helper to serve humanity usually calls us to take the road less travelled. Such a journey demands the responsibility to engage in personal inner development. That pursuit, in turn, requires a continuing willingness to learn and grow, assisted at interludes by wiser and more experienced teachers and healers. In my journey I have encountered some of these individuals through studying their books, watching interviews and being in their presence at workshops and related events.

Before pursuing a conscious seven-year journey of healing and renewal some years ago – to shift from a focus on human suffering and struggle to a focus on healing processes and transformation – I already had experienced some of the most authentic spiritual teachers whom I ever would meet, most of them no longer walking among us. Special experiences with these Indigenous elders usually happened unexpectedly, in their communities or at traditional gatherings.

Such spiritually gifted individuals often had resisted, or were unaware of, the spiritual responsibilities given to them, until a crisis awakened them later in life to do whatever was essential to carry the mantle placed on their shoulders. They recognized that the true calling required humility and personal sacrifice. Furthermore, the role must never be reduced to the pursuit of monetary and celebrity status.

Of course, as one Indigenous friend once cautioned, there also are the “shake-and-bake shamans,” in other words, spiritual charlatans who are neither humble nor authentic. Sadly, those misguided personalities exist in every culture and have cheapened the higher, original intention of the `New Age,” otherwise known as the `human potential movement’ or `consciousness movement.’

Fifteen years ago or more, however, I recognized one human truth – healers and teachers are humanly imperfect too. Being authentically spiritual, indeed, for anyone who is on a path of deeper understanding, means that we never can assume that we have arrived, even at life’s end. More and more, the concept of reincarnation makes sense to me, because it is not humanly possible to figure out the complexity of fully developed spiritual awareness within a single lifetime.

Therefore, in reading life histories of the more renown `gurus’ in the consciousness movement, I never place them on a pedestal. Recalling a passage by one particular celebrity `guru,’ the memory stays with me because I was not at all impressed by what she declared. Apparently, she felt that she had reached a moment in her life where she no longer could find wise teachers to enhance her growth – in reference, it seems, to fellow gurus renown through the popular media and the conference/retreat circuits.

However, I found her assertion not only arrogant, yet also profoundly missing what, to me, ought to be an incredibly obvious phenomenon – spiritual teachers are among us everywhere in unexpected places.

To recognize them, we simply need to have the humility, the grace, the openness of heart, and awaken an inquisitive mind and all of our senses, to pay attention to the world around us, living in the moment. Doing so offers a bounty of rewards in regard to the beauty and courage of the human soul right in front of our eyes, in daily life.

My intentional encounters among the homeless are one example. By “intentional,” I mean the chosen moments when I consciously stop and speak to a homeless person, look him or her in the eye, engage in a bit of a conversation without violating privacy, in a way that seems to be mutually beneficial.

Particular moments of poverty, feeling abandoned, and having to resort to my own steadily dwindling material resources, have taught me through rude and heart-breaking awareness how sensitive individuals can be pushed toward the tipping point, mentally and emotionally, when threatened by the loss of basic material security – to end up on the street.

Since the 2008 financial meltdown, news stories tell us how increasing numbers of people have lost their jobs and their homes. Now, the folks living on the street, some living out of a car with their remaining worldly goods, also include well-educated, experienced professionals, in North American cities. Poverty can crush anyone, as can environmental disasters, which we now witness too.

Consequently, humility and gratitude are what I feel, as in: “There but for the grace of God go I,” when I contrast my situation in life with those individuals who have been less fortunate. No human is meant to be alone, regardless of how much resilience and inner strength a person can muster. The difference between preserving any dignity versus losing the capability of self-care, and the will to live, resides in the presence or absence of loving kindness and compassion received from fellow human beings.

The less obvious teachings from the homeless, to heed by the rest of us, become visible when we take the time to make a human connection, regardless how fleeting. Specific individuals have remained in my consciousness because of their dignity and grace expressed even through a few short moments and, on one unforgettable occasion, their kindness to me.

To illustrate, a few years ago I waited for a bus in a Toronto bus shelter already occupied by a homeless man, who was curled up in one corner. Even so, he still was endowed with sufficient pride to be reasonably well-groomed. His aura deeply touched me. I asked him whether I could help him in some way, offering bus fare. With genuine courtesy, he replied that he had enough money until tomorrow, and thanks but no thanks.

Something about his presence suggested that he formerly could have been a functioning professional person. I also sensed the possibility that he had come to, and tumbled over, the tipping point. In other words, an experience or accumulation of experiences had pushed him to the breaking point. He struck me as a gentle person who no longer could negotiate the ridiculous pressures to which so many people are subjected in our deeply dysfunctional globalized society, a society in need of profound systemic healing.

I could relate a number of stories about such encounters that provoke spiritual outrage within me, that this reality exists at all in the 21st century. Yes, the homeless have been among us for thousands of years. But, today, I would argue it is willful negligence and greed that perpetuates it. Human decency now calls us to challenge whatever forces around us influence how we, collectively and individually – and often unconsciously – are reducing our own humanity.

In my second anecdote, one day while still living in Toronto, my back went into spasm from a chronic injury, and I collapsed on the sidewalk, in a neighbourhood inhabited by the very affluent and the very poor. Barely able to raise my head, and in agony, I could hear the click of various sets of high heels and men’s shoes pass me by.

Then, two sets of strong arms gently lifted me to my feet, although I remained doubled over, unable to stand erect. As I slowly turned my head, I saw that my compassionate helpers were street people. They stayed with me through the next while, helping me get across the street and also climb up the steps of a streetcar, homeward bound.

What I understood, poignantly, was that how these street folks survive at all is through the vital gift of compassion that they bequeath to each other. Again, the poor and the homeless can teach us so much about how to develop the human heart, and what really matters in being alive.

I never have believed that any one person is any better than any other person, on the basis of roles of authority, privilege, money, education, and other common measurements of status that, frankly, ring hollow. For none of these measurements have anything to do with how effectively a person is exercising higher, spiritual qualities to create a better quality of life for the larger good and planetary well-being.

So I say, bring on the “Occupy movement.” Let us come together and welcome folks from all walks of life and diverse cultures, who recognize the richness of gathering good minds and caring hearts. Functioning from love and reconciliation rather than from fear and violence are the approaches required to create a new humanity, and work together in peace to heal an environmentally wounded planet.

Thousands of caring members of the human family are accomplishing amazing feats in the face of many types of adversity around the world. To be inspired, and see perspectives not commonly found elsewhere, I invite you to browse my blog posts through the past year. Most particularly, see “Blessed Unrest Heralds an Unnamed Global Movement.”

But, first, on this weekend of mourning, I want to acknowledge the unspeakable killing of 20 young children and seven teachers in Newtown, Connecticut. Let us send our prayers for healing to the families and community. Let us also embark on seriously examination of the root causes of the widening net of mental illnesses, and pray that America’s deeply embedded paranoia and obsession with guns can transform and fade out.

“Oh my,” she exclaimed, as she peeked through the door slightly ajar. At daybreak, the vision before her was bleary-eyed, stiff, and on her knees, croaking, “The second key was missing.” The voice had almost disappeared, after several hours of shouting over loud music at a holiday season party of documentary filmmakers. The vision was me. Arriving in the wee hours, without the second key, I did not want to disturb my friend, knowing she rises at dawn.

My friend is a bit absent-minded. But, I could write the book on being absent-minded. In the late afternoon of that same bizarre day, at a post office depot I commiserated with a fellow customer who frantically was searching for a lost bag. With a twinkle in my eye, I told the sweet young woman behind the counter, “I’m a bit absent-minded myself.”

I do not know how many seconds passed, those words barely out of my mouth, when I left behind my eyeglasses on the counter. The young woman probably thought I was a bit dotty. First I had asked her, please, for a single sticky sheet to insert a note into an envelope; then, do you have scotch tape to seal the envelope better; next, do you have scissors to cut this tape, too long and mangled (after almost breaking the tape dispenser in my attempts to rip off a piece).

Occasionally, I fantasize that I missed my true calling in life, to be a comedienne. You know, I would have been perfect as a medley of comic characters in a Canadian version of the Monty Python ensemble, able to shape-shift into any characters seamlessly.

In real life, among my talents, I pride myself on being rather good at visualizing, most of all, to find misplaced items. For I have developed this skill through lots of practice. Consequently, I was able to retrace my journey of errands back to the postal office. The young woman smiled as she handed me my eyeglasses, with a twinkle in her eye.

Trying to visualize myself on a magic carpet with a foam pad floating in space, however, was not one of my more successful visualizations, as I lay on the floor of an apartment hall. Thank goodness, the building was a typical, over-heated, Toronto apartment.

I had spread out my parka, using three, earlier purchased, books about psychology tucked under my parka hood as a head rest. Since childhood, I always have wondered what makes people tick, and that quest motivated me to do a doctorate – that included training – grounded in spiritual psychology.

In fact, one of my film projects in development is the life story of a pioneering spiritual psychologist, and how his work is pertinent today. But, when I suggest the film idea, folks usually look at me as if I need my head examined. Being the independent spirit that I am, that dismissal is precisely why I believe such a story is needed.

In the wee hours spent laying on an apartment hall floor, I reflected on other unforeseen moments that had enhanced, serendipitously, the adventure of being alive. That is how I characterize, philosophically, at least some of life’s mishaps.

Believe me, I couldn’t make up the stuff that happens to me. Real life is stranger than fiction. Furthermore, I bet you dollars to donuts that the best narrative fiction is based on true life events, too imponderable (or personally embarrassing to the author) to write about biographically.

That fact, by the way, is why documentary films can be so incredibly engaging, meaningful and the most important form of storytelling in our time – in regard to global outreach – when you consider the bravery of anyone to speak uncomfortable truths, too often silenced in any country’s media-massaged, mainstream society, including Canada. My first film subject is a prime example.

For guess who came to mind, none other than my now-deceased friend, mentor, and consummate truth teller, Everett Soop. His unflinching honesty equipped Everett not only with a sense of humour as a survival tool yet, moreover, never spared any public figure from his searing political satire.

When shit happens, searching for the comic aspect as well as examining one’s own actions is wiser than bouncing off walls and having a hissy fit at someone else, often unreasonably. Everett, however, expressed his bouts of rage and scathing humour through various behaviours, all understandable when you know his full story.

The following tale, however, relates a scene from the story behind the film story in Soop on Wheels, which may provoke a few knowing chuckles – or, alternatively, wincing among fellow filmmakers – and blushing faces by some or all blog readers who recall at least one embarrassing, bizarre incident in their own lives.

Once upon a time, on a film shoot in rural Alberta, I misplaced a brown paper bag in which I had stuffed $3,000 cash. (It was for per diem payments distributed to crew, for meals and related expenses on the road where credit cards were not accepted.)

I can almost hear the chorus of groans and shrieks from fellow filmmakers. You did WHAT?! But, please comfort me, dear colleagues. Surely at least once in your lives you did something really hair-brained, maybe not related to a project-in-progress? I implore you to tell me I am not alone.

My film crew and I were at a reception at Lethbridge University following a speech given by Ovide Mercredi, a then-prominent First Nations politician, and preceded by a performance from Blackfoot traditional dancers. While my cinematographer was shooting Mercredi in conversation with Everett Soop, I sought out the dancers, their contact information essential to send them later film releases to sign, if we used the dance footage.

Trust me, as writer/director/producer, I am impeccable at business details, such as insurance and legal matters, organizing the film shoot itinerary, plus dependable in paying every single person promptly during production and post-production, etc. You can ask anyone who has worked with me.

Meanwhile, back at the site of the university reception, I madly zoomed around to find all individual dancers, notebook in hand, parking my knapsack close to the crew. A while later, I’m feeling dutifully diligent in my collection of names until I return to where my crew, and knapsack, no longer can be seen. Surely a crew member has it.

So I trundle off to reconnect with my crew, none of whom had my knapsack. After peeling myself off the ceiling – the saving grace of humour sometimes delayed – I hunted for a security guard. We searched on site and, at his suggestion, we drove to the lost and found office in another building on campus, where someone might have delivered it.

En route, a deer bounded across the road in front of the car. “Oh, a deer!” I exclaimed. “That’s a good sign. We’ll find the money.” The guard, in recovery from almost hitting the deer, gave me one of those looks, as if this woman was not functioning with a full deck of cards. I was, with aces to spare, given a life strewn with highly unusual experiences. (For a sweet tale, see my blog post about an encounter with a fawn in a marsh.)

Sure enough, the knapsack was found, with everything inside untouched, the crumpled paper bag tucked away at the bottom.

The moral of the story, regardless, is best not to carry around large sums of money in brown paper bags, even when blessed with other-worldly protection.

Despite being blessed with possibly an entire platoon of guardian angels (looking through the veil to our earthly realm, blanching, to conclude, “Good Lord, this one needs a lot of help”), I promise never to repeat this experience again – ever.

We are together on grandma’s sofa, me as a four-year-old, entrusted with holding in my arms cousin Kathy, a newborn whom I look upon with tenderness and awe. In a card to Kathy earlier this year, I recall that special moment and write that, in my heart, I still am holding her in my arms with prayers for recovery. This blog post is dedicated to the memory of my late cousin Kathy, her life cut short this summer by a rare type of cancer, the causes still a mystery.

How many thousands of individuals continue to have their lives cut short by cancers, the causes unknown? And who are the scientists doing the research to find the answers and, more importantly, pursuing this work in the public, not corporate, interest?

According to American biologist Sandra Steingraber, in North America each year the statistics of cancer deaths now total more than 600,000. That number is each year, a number that she compares with the total losses of U.S. soldiers estimated at 400,000 in WWII, commemorated by a Washington monument, a wall embedded with stars.

Steingraber, in the award-winning film Living Downstream, stands in front of this wall, pointing out how a larger wall would need to be created – every year – if the deaths of cancer victims similarly were acknowledged. For, all of our lives are implicitly engaged in the war against cancer – whether we see ourselves as passive bystanders or pro-active community members who challenge this reality – simply by being alive on this earth today.

This film – based on Steingraber’s book Living Downstream – raises further questions: Why isn’t more effort being invested into full disclosures about the synthetic chemical contaminants ubiquitous in our daily lives, in the air, the water, soil and food supply – and inevitably in our bodies – and where is the political will to ban production of such poisons?

These are just two among the awkward questions to which Sandra Steingraber has dedicated her life’s work, as a biologist, ecologist, cancer survivor, author and as an internationally recognized expert on environmental links to cancer and reproductive health. She wears the mantle, bequeathed by others, as this generation’s Rachel Carson.

What is so impressive about Steingraber, and renders this film so compelling to watch, however, is not just her grace and modesty, yet also a no nonsense clarity of mind and composure in declaring her personal truth and her quest. It is a truth irretrievably woven into the fabric of her quest, to fight against the production and uses of chemicals that are killing us, as well as poisoning the life support system of this planet.

The film Living Downstream illuminates the yin-yang of Steingraber’s personal and professional life, here showing scenes with her family and a cytology check up by her urologist, and there highlighting excerpts from various keynote addresses. In on-camera interviews through which Canadian director/producer Chanda Chevannes follows Steingraber’s peripatetic travels to other places, we follow the life of a woman not only physically on the move yet, moreover, whose scientific mind continues to seek answers. Like Rachel Carson, whom I profiled in the previous post, Steingraber does not suffer fools gladly – ever.

Steingraber has the deepest respect for Carson’s advocacy in an era when the notion was forbidden, in regard to any scientist, male or female, speaking publicly about personal issues. Poignant is the wrenching reality of Carson’s final stages of terminal cancer while at the same time being invited to speak at the U.S. Congress about the findings in her controversial book Silent Spring, mere months before her death. The “C” word was anathema even to Carson’s doctors in identifying her dilemma.

Regardless, in a few scenes intermittently inserted in Living Downstream, we witness Carson’s poise and scientific professionalism. We see her matter-of-factly telling the U.S. Congress: “First, I hope this committee will give serious consideration to a much neglected problem, that of the right of the citizen to be secure in his own home against the intrusion of poisons applied by other persons…I strongly feel that this is, or should be, one of the basic human rights.”

Indeed, Steingraber sees her own life’s work as nothing less than supporting an environmental human rights movement, for which the seeds already have been sown. She advocates that folks everywhere become environmental detectives in their own communities, and demand that the well-being of our children’s lives no longer be compromised by the continuing use of synthetic chemical contaminants around us. She declares:

“If we cannot talk about these things, how can we begin to take action…It’s time to break the silence about what’s going on. We need a conversation, and an honest one, about what is happening. That’s finding ways to prevent cancer, not just racing for its cure, as an imperative need.”

The reason is, in doing a bit of detective work you might find yourselves as shocked as I am, simply in googling the current status of the chemical “atrazine.” Before I tell you my findings, my choice of looking up atrazine, a weed killer – used extensively in agriculture (and on some tree farms, golf courses and in industry) – is the primary contaminant highlighted in the film. Other poisons are mentioned too, most specifically PCBs, in pointing out how many of them originate from petroleum and coal industries.

In Living Downstream, an excellent, multi-layered film, filmmaker Chanda Chevannes’ investigation also includes the research of several other scientists who, like Steingraber, explain very clearly the step-by-step biological processes how these contaminants accumulate through the food chain of the natural environment. They provide plainly intelligent reasons why atrazine ought to be banned. The European Union did ban it some years ago; but, apparently, not yet in the USA or Canada, according to my brief detective work at this time.

When I googled “atrazine,” the federal government page that comes up for Health Canada is dated 1993 – giving data from close to twenty years ago! But even then, atrazine “was therefore considered to be a Priority A chemical for potential groundwater contamination by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and ranked highest [my italics] of 83 pesticides in the Agriculture Canada priority scheme for potential groundwater contaminants.”

The conclusions would be comical if they were not so shocking. The suggestion on this page is that municipal, and individual home, water treatment systems can reduce atrazine significantly, and “a full re-evaluation of this compound currently in progress within the Health Protection Branch of Health Canada.” But, where is it?

Environment Canada was no more reassuring. Under the Canadian Environmental Protection Act, 1999, according to its section “Persistence and Bioaccumulation Regulations,” atrazine “was determined to be inherently toxic to humans based on a classification of `Group III: Possibly carcinogenic to humans’ according to Health Canada’s Guidelines for Drinking Water Quality (Health Canada, 2005b).

A citizen could be forgiven for not having much faith that government departments are providing appropriate vigilance to study toxins dangerous to environmental and human health, given the above scenario that I cite here to illustrate a serious problem. In fact, Steingraber in Living Downstream, raises the question about how much evidence does it take before appropriate actions happen, such as banning poisons.

Reporter Tom Philpott’s article, dated April/May 2012, titled “Ban Atrazine NOW!” tells us that the (American) Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is not beginning to re-evaluate atrazine’s regulatory status until 2013, and no timeline on how long the process would take. Philpott concludes: ” In the meantime, farmers will continue dumping 76 million pounds of it onto farmland annually, to the delight of Syngenta shareholders.”

But, it gets worse. In an article dated February 21, 2012, the title reads “Syngenta Spends Million to Deflect Evidence Against Atrazine Herbicide.” Syngenta is the primary manufacturer of atrazine. The Center for Media and Democracy has gathered more than 200 court documents in a major lawsuit against Syngenta Crop Protection, Inc. This collected evidence proves Syngenta has spent millions of dollars to pay scientists an journalists to deny and deflect the growing documentation of the human health dangers of atrazine.

Why the film Living Downstream is so important is the call by Sandra Steingraber for all of us, as planetary citizens, to inform ourselves about the truth in order to choose specific actions to challenge the intransigence of power holders in government and commerce whose interests disregard the larger good.

In the film we see her elegantly dressed to present a keynote address at the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Museum, in Illinois, to one of her more challenging audiences. Steingraber is no fool. She clearly observes and feels, viscerally, the disinterest by many people there, who include politicians, legislators, CEOs, heads of boards, the types of folks who have the financial and political clout to make life-saving changes.

The contrast is poignant when we also see her visiting her home state of Illinois again, speaking this time in a small, intimate space with local farming families. Among them, she explains clearly the toxic, cancer-causing threats to what ought to be the healthiest baby food, mother’s milk. She cares deeply for these people, and wishes a different future for them.

Steingraber’s compassionate and astute intelligence is the force that drives Living Downstream, interwoven with her unflinching honesty in having no choice but to live through the rest of her life with uncertainty. One touching scene – to which any person diagnosed with cancer can relate – delicately reveals her vulnerability and the need to be strong, when a urology test detects a problem cluster of cells.

At age 20 she had been diagnosed with bladder cancer, and has no doubt that its origins were in the industrial environmental of her home town, Pekin, Illinois. Ten years into her profession as a biologist, she learned about “a vast accumulation of knowledge” connecting certain textile dyes with bladder cancer yet “little done to phase these chemicals out of commerce.” At that awakening in 1993, she left her tenure track job as a biologist, in order to research and produce scientific evidence for the public.

In several of my blog posts, I identify “a split in consciousness” in Western culture as being at the root of so many of our societal and environmental problems, a fact that once again plays out here. The imperative of our time is to mend our disconnected patterns of thinking, which starts with reconnecting the dots in our understanding about the web of life.

For example, each contaminant examined by health and environmental government departments appear to be examined singly, instead of what ought to be obvious, applying a recognition of the web of interrelationships between so many contaminants in our daily lives, hence the multiplied probabilities for cancers. As Steingraber says in the film:

“Each study is like a jigsaw puzzle piece, even though all by themselves you usually do not have absolute proof in the case of any one study. But, when you begin to assemble the pieces, all the arrows point in the same direction.”

Backstage at a Bioneers conference, she expresses delight in being approached by a woman from her home town. Steingraber, in response to the woman’s question about what to do, says that she never tells people what to do. Instead, she believes: “You have to bring your own passions and interests, and marry you environmental health concern with whatever it is you want to do.”

Two outstanding guides that accompany the DVD package for Living Downstream have been created, respectively, for community groups and school curricula. They embrace a range of thematic approaches for screenings and follow up discussions, written in the spirit of Steingraber’s belief that people can be motivated to choose actions from the starting point of their particular realities, whether rural or urban.

These guides offer step-by-step information from how to hold a screening, conduct a follow up discussion, facilitate workshops, and/or organize a campaign, based on various themes. Included as well are: a glossary of terms, handouts of clearly written background materials, and further recommended resources for citizens and students. Go to Living Downstream‘s website to learn more, and to order the DVD.

Sandra Steingraber’s quest, to fight the environmental causes of cancer, continues. Go to Steingraber’s website to find information about her books and related activities.

May we continue to be blessed with her gracious and intelligent presence in this world for many years to come.

The elm tree has a stalwart elegance, even in its leafless state, and tilting from the visible force of the wind. Behind and above the tree we can see the slate blue grey of the stormy sky. The tree is distinctive, standing tall in an open field that gloriously displays the autumn beauty of golden wheat almost flattened by the gale, the field bounded by the muted greens of roadside grass and red-leafed nannyberry bushes.

The image’s creator intended the painting to be an ode to the threatened elm. For me, however, the image always has symbolized the inner strengths of grace and courage of all living beings who withstand destructive external forces.

In recently reading Silent Spring, in its 50th anniversary of first publication, I am reminded of the extraordinary grace and courage of Rachel Carson (1907-1964), deservedly heralded as kick-starting the post-World War II environmental movement. The reason is, Carson took science out of the control of industrial laboratories and government offices, and made available important knowledge to the larger public for the first time, to awaken us to the fact that environmental and human health are interwoven.

In doing so, she is a heroine in all respects, professionally and personally. When I now look upon the painted image of the lone elm in the field, vulnerable to the stormy elements, I see Carson’s apparition within the elm tree’s body. Her gaze is directed, clear-eyed, at the viewer, as in this photo of her leaning against a tree trunk, in Nature where she experienced inner peace.

This woman does not suffer fools gladly. The woman we see here has been toughened by both private and professional battles. The cause of the latter was her discovery, then exposure of, the sordid truth behind the life-threatening actions of the chemical industry and, worse, such actions rubber stamped by government. She finds the scientific and medical studies that prove, empirically, why DDT and several other chemicals, are deadly poisons.

Meticulously, for example, in Silent Spring, Carson describes how the DDT spraying to stop the spread of Dutch elm disease, killed not just the predatory bark beetle. But, moreover, the spraying poisoned the trees’ leaves, all insects who ate the leaves, the earthworms who fed on leaf litter, the soil and the robins who fed on the earthworms – in other words, DDT destroyed an entire food chain.

Similarly, Carson described how several other chemicals were just as lethal to all forms of life, from all species in Nature as well as the soil, water and air, to human life, most especially children. Indeed, children were dying and many people were being afflicted with chronic, if not terminal, illnesses. Silent Spring includes 55 pages listing her principle sources.

Carson’s diligent research to reveal these facts must not be underestimated, for she was a scientist in her own right. How she presents information demonstrates her gift to translate complex knowledge into layman’s language, in order to be accessible to the larger public.

Furthermore, the depth and breadth of Silent Spring indicates a special capability to interweave multidisciplinary investigations as well as an implicit understanding of the principles of systems thinking. Carson understood – both experientially from her own inquisitive explorations in the world of Nature since early childhood, and also empirically from her post-secondary studies in aquatic biology and zoology – that all life is interconnected.

Her understanding, however, was exceptional in Western culture, then and now – a culture that systemically is slow to shift its collective consciousness to holistic insight.

Carson had to terminate doctoral studies for two reasons, The Great Depression and her father’s death from a heart attack in 1935, to support several family members. Few jobs in science available to women, she found a job writing radio scripts about the ocean for an agency that later became the United States Fish and Wildlife Service.

At this point in her story, one wonders whether destiny was at play in the direction Carson’s life took – the path of the writer and storyteller rather than a full-time job as a scientist, where her days thereafter could have been imprisoned within laboratory walls.

That first job gave Carson access to primary science sources while, importantly, developing her gift of writing. On top of a full-time job, she also produced freelance articles for magazines up to, and following, the publication of her first book Under the Sea Wind (1941). The next book was The Sea Around Us (1951), completed a year after her first breast tumour was removed.

Her first book received several awards, and persuaded her to leave government service, regardless of being given several promotions, so that she could write full-time. The Edge of the Sea (1955) became her third book – again, each book published to acclaim.

But, life was getting more complicated. Upon her sister’s death, Carson adopted nephew Roger, while also increasingly assaulted by her very private battle against terminal cancer that cut her life short in 1964. In 1960, she had a radical mastectomy. The entire Silent Spring (1962) book project, and beyond, was beset by a number of physical setbacks.

Her heroism, therefore, is two-fold. For in pursuing her research on Silent Spring, the societal battlefield ahead became increasingly clear, although not the extent of the future guns directed to the attempted destruction of her professional integrity and personal dignity.

The guns included: shameful sexism, slandering and soulless arrogance; denial of factual scientific truth; and, of course, the ubiquitous reality of the economic power and pressure of the chemical industries. The ugly wrath that would pour down upon her after the book’s publication came from individuals in the scientific establishment hired by the chemical industry, and also economically compromised politicians.

Former Audubon biologist Roland Clement, in a 2012 interview, told journalist Eliza Griswold: “the chemical companies were willing to stop domestic use of DDT,” but only if they could strike a bargain with politicians to continue export of it to foreign countries. As for the National Audubon Society, it would not even endorse Carson’s book.

Thank goodness there always have existed more intelligent souls through history, who usually tend to be those in dissent of the status quo. They do not submit to threats from the power holders. The dissenters this time included certain esteemed scientists, such as E.O.Wilson, The New Yorker magazine which serialized Carson’s manuscript, and her book publisher Houghton Mifflin.

Furthermore, President John F. Kennedy himself, after reading Silent Spring, called for the creation of a Science Advisory Committee to do independent research and publish a pesticide report. It confirmed Carson’s findings. Since her death, various pieces of environmental legislation have grown from the inspirational, and life-affirming, soil of that courageous book.

An outstanding online exhibition now exists that maps the trajectory of the book’s influence that continues today, titled “Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, A Book That Changed the World.” The website’s content spans a timeline from a 1963 CBS Reports television interview in Carson’s home, and the ugly attacks by industrial and agricultural interests, to the ongoing influence in education, popular culture, literature and the arts, and 2007 TV programs revisiting Carson’s legacy, seen on CBS News and Bill Moyers Journal.

The exhibition website author writes: ” Moyers intended his program to counter the libertarian-conservative attack on Carson.” Even five years later, in 2012 – fifty years following Silent Spring‘s publication – the premise of her life’s work still is debated!

The good news is, such debate gives proof that her influence has been powerful indeed. The bad news is, the fact that such a debate continues sadly illustrates that North American society still has a long way to go to appreciate the fundamental message in her writings: Humans are biological beings interconnected with all forms of life on this planet; and what befalls the earth, water, air and all other species also befalls us.

A clue about the root of the problem, as I propose below, resides in the feature article by Eliza Griswold, September 21, 2012 in The New York Times titled “How `Silent Spring’ Ignited the Environmental Movement.” For I totally challenge this statement by Griswold: “But if `Silent Spring’ can be credited with launching a movement, it also sowed the seeds of its own destruction.”

Blaming a book, a person, or a movement, for the growth of political fracturing in the USA and other nation states, and increased partisan reaction to environmentalism, overlooks the root problem that has led to a divisiveness that is not limited to the environmental movement but instead could result in the severing of societal stability.

The root problem, I suggest, is the split in human consciousness through centuries, particularly in the West. This split has led to the consequences of industrial capitalism, globalization and the commodification of life.

A growing number of planetary citizens are saying, enough. We must change how we live on this planet. The divisiveness, therefore, is between people who hold on, and try to perpetuate, an environmentally destructive economic system, and those who want to co-create new ways of interrelating, ecologically and economically, with the planet’s life support system.

Two of my earlier blog posts provide a theory behind this split in consciousness, given by the late Leonard Shlain in his book The Alphabet and the Goddess. Shlain, a heart surgeon who studied the brain, describes the two brain hemispheres, right and left, as representing respectively, the feminine and masculine principles that, together, enable fuller, balanced thinking. He also explains how and why the feminine principle has been diminished in patriarchal cultures, with an emphasis on the West.

Our collective challenge, therefore, as a human family across cultures, is the task to shift our human understanding, step-by-step, to integrate the feminine and the masculine principles and function much more in balance. This is the life journey towards our human potential, to come home to our soul, to awaken those qualities innately within each of us to become whole, and work together to heal ourselves and our imperilled planet. The possibility always is there for us to choose.

In Paul Hawken’s important book Blessed Unrest, my September blog post cites his recognition of Carson’s ground-breaking accomplishment in Silent Spring. Hawken, moreover, speaks to the global grassroots movement happening everywhere, which “sees the feminine as sacred and holy.”

Given the inevitable internal ruptures within an ever-evolving environmental movement, it is refreshing to read Paul Kingsnorth’s August 1, 2012 article in The Guardian, provocatively titled “The new environmentalism: where men must act `as gods’ to save the planet,” which he challenges, astutely. His argument is well worth reading, because it pulls us toward the essence of Carson’s message – for individuals to take responsibility to engage with natural environments as we experience them in lived reality.

Meanwhile, what speaks more about the omission of soul among Carson’s critics than about what they criticize in her is their failure to recognize her inner and outer strengths. Spiritual, emotional and intuitive resources, nurtured by direct experiences in Nature, comprised the feminine principles that carried her through daunting circumstances, including the knowledge of her own imminent death.

Yet, these feminine principles are what her critics labelled as weaknesses, while they were further ignorant of the fact that she aligned the best of the feminine with the best of the masculine, in expressing the latter through intellectual, analytical, pragmatic productivity.

Carson’s spiritual fortitude is brilliantly conveyed by screenwriter/actress Kaiulani Lee in her one-woman stage play A Sense of Wonder, performed around the United States and filmed for PBS-TV. I strongly urge you to watch Bill Moyers’ interview with Lee, and see a few excerpts from the play, on the September 21, 2007 Bill Moyers Journal episode. Carson’s soulful call for environmentalism is powerfully communicated in this play.

One poignant moment shows Lee, as Carson, reflecting on the invitation by the editor of The New Yorker to serialize Silent Spring. She recalls in a softly spoken voice how, upon hearing that news, she had put on a recording of Beethoven’s Violin Concert, and let the tears come. Her work would reach the wider public after all.

Last but not least, another website presentation of Rachel Carson’s life, generously shown by her biographer Linda Lear, at The Life and Legacy of Rachel Carson, can take you to several insightful sections. Clicking here, however, directs you first to a photographic series that begins with my favourite portrait of Rachel Carson, that exquisitely radiates the visage of her gentle soul.

May her heroism and writings continue to teach and inspire.