Harmony
The world is out of balance. How many times has this been said? The machines of profit do not compute extraneous loss. They are out of balance with the natural world.
In the tradition of Taoism, actions that do not flow with the cycles of change disrupt the harmony of nature. Water is the purest expression of being, since water flows from shape to shape, from cycle to cycle, passing invisibly through the world. It offers no resistance to change, and therefore causes neither conflict nor tension.
The task of humankind is to harmonise the rigid structures of civilisation with the Great Tao, the ineffable, nameless, changeful, eternal One. By acting against the Great Tao, we cause problems not just for the natural world, but for ourselves, even if the consequences are not immediate. Global heating, the depredations of the rainforest and the highest extinction levels since the dinosaurs disappeared are symptoms of the lack of balance. Meanwhile, technology enables a large swathe of the global population to pretend the damage does not exist. What’s the problem? they say. My life’s scarcely been affected.
Other parts of the world have already felt the sting of climate change. Some climate scientists even claim that the resentments that triggered the Syrian Civil War were shaped not just by an authoritarian regime but by scarcity caused by global heating. The 2006-7 drought in the greater Fertile Crescent (present-day Iraq, south-eastern Turkey, western Iran, Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, Palestine, and parts of Egypt) was the longest and most severe drought ever recorded. Some climate scientists linked this drought to a long-term warming trend in the eastern Mediterranean which can only be explained by a rise in greenhouse emissions and human-induced climate change. The drought heightened social vulnerability, as agricultural collapse pushed large numbers of rural people into cities, and competition over resources and jobs, already scarce following decades of poor governance, took on an ethnic dimension.
Reality is extraordinary sensitive and flows to fill unexpected shapes. Our societies, if out of balance with the Great Tao, generate suffering. Excessive carbon emissions in the USA may contribute to bloody warfare in Syria. The fragile webs of life are far more interconnected than the politics of insular nation-states can accommodate.
Harmony is the art of flowing with the planet
We tend to organise our worlds by a rudimentary logic. If I do this, then I will obtain that. Love, however, acts without expectation of a tangible reward. We seek to help our loved ones because maybe one day they will do the same for us. Or maybe they won’t. Perhaps it doesn’t matter. If only we could extend the same attitude to the whole world! Then perhaps there would be harmony.
I wrote a poem about how a loving attitude can bring unforeseeable rewards in a later time. Flowing in harmony isn’t just a question of reforming the destructive superstructures of contemporary civilisation but also feeling and responding to the minute emotional resonances of the people and creatures with whom we share this space:
…Love is like water… it returns a year later to bring us rain.
Raindrops are promises of future life.
The silver streets
Of her and I returning home
In the winter before we knew each other
Dissolved my secret lawsuits;
Our dreaming was a lotus flower,
Four stories up,
In El Raval……Only water knows where love may flow.
So here we are, a different year,
The past has disappeared.
No treatise on the meaning of the world,
Just simple things, the everyday,
And then, behind all this,
A dream whose light we cannot hold,
Where all our words and thoughts
Resolve…