By William T. Hathaway
To paraphrase Mark Twain, everyone talks about climate change but no one does anything about it. No one, particularly those in power, wants to make the necessary sacrifices. The latest round of international negotiations served mainly to postpone decisions and action. The Japanese government announced that their CO2 emissions would be increasing rather than decreasing as promised. The US government still refuses to comply with international environmental agreements.
Clearly we need a global reordering of priorities, away from short-term economic gain and towards long-term sustainability. But we’ve known this for decades, and the problem continues to worsen although scientists insist we could solve it if we had the will. Generating the will to make these changes, both in our personal lives and in the economic structures we are caught in, is going to require a change of consciousness.
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IT IS MOST IMPORTANT that you read this article in conjunction with this special post:
CAPITALISM ON A COLLISION COURSE WITH NATURE
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A new book, Wellsprings: A Fable of Consciousness, approaches ecology from that dimension. The novel is set in 2026 as the earth’s ecosystem has broken down under human abuse. Water supplies are shrinking. Rain is rare, and North America is gripped in the Great Drought with crops withering and forests dying. In the midst of environmental and social collapse, an old woman and a young man set out to heal nature and reactivate the cycle of flow by using techniques of higher consciousness. But the corporations that control the remaining water lash out to stop them.
In the story water is analogous to consciousness. People are out of contact with their own inner wellsprings of consciousness, so their lives are withering. And their ignorant actions have driven the earth’s water deep underground, so nature is withering. Human life and the earth’s life are trapped in suffering. The book shows the two main characters evolving their consciousness to a level where they can sense the water and restore its natural flow for humanity and the earth. A blend of adventure, ecology, and mystic wisdom, Wellsprings: A Fable of Consciousness is a frightening but hopeful look into a future that is looming closer every day.
It’s also a love story, which is of course also good for our consciousness.
The book begins with the narrator, Bob, leaving his hometown in California after graduating from high school. He meets Jane, a meditation teacher who is convinced North America’s water has retreated into a deep subterranean aquifer. She is searching for the place where it comes close enough to the surface to access it, and Bob agrees to help her with her quest.
Yosemite
As Jane drives over the Tioga Pass, the east entrance to Yosemite, the sun is setting over the Sierras, shooting rays of golden light through the haze, shining the clouds pink and violet. With a last gleam it drops behind the mountains and lights them from behind into miles of blue craggy peaks.
We have plenty of time to enjoy the view because her motor home is weak on hills; we’re lugging at thirty m.p.h. It’s dark by the time we get to the campground. I like it much better here than the desert — the air is cool and fresh, and I can pitch my tent under a tree.
I wake up several times in the night to the sound of little things falling onto the taut nylon of the tent. Raindrops! I go back to sleep with a smile.
In the morning everything is still dry. Instead of rain, the tent and ground are strewn with pine needles. The tree above me is shedding needles and small branches as it withers. Its bark is gray and flaky, limbs limp.
After breakfast we take a walk to the nearby Tuolumne River, which turns out to be a meandering creek about six inches deep. The meadows on both sides are brown.
We stroll in the Sequoia grove among trees soaring over two hundred feet towards the sky with massive trunks as wide as a house. Some are over a thousand years old. But they won’t get any older — an army of dead soldiers left standing at attention.
We drive into Yosemite Valley, the main part of the park. I remember the pictures I’ve seen of it, taken before the drought: Bridal Veil and Yosemite Falls with tons of white water cascading over granite cliffs, crashing down into deep pools on the canyon floor that’s covered with verdant grass and ferns.
But now the glaciers have melted and snow and rain are rare, so the falls are thin ribbons of water spilling over the cliffs then trickling through brown grass into what used to be the Merced River. We hear an occasional bird, but we don’t see them or any other animals. Jane finds a blue jay feather, which she sticks in her hair — but the jay is probably dead. We’re very quiet as we drive away from the park — as if we’ve been to Mother Nature’s funeral.
Mt. Shasta
(Jane teaches Bob Transcendental Meditation, and their visions help them find the cavern that connects to the water.)
Jane and I drive around to the north side of Mt. Shasta, hoping to be able to sense the subterranean springs from there. In the moonlight the mountain looks like a silver pyramid soaring up from the horizon into the starry purple night. The ancient volcano is lord of all it surveys. Veils of clouds are blowing around its peak.
We find a grassy glade in the forest, but the grass is dry and brittle and the tree branches droop from the drought. As we are spreading our blankets out to meditate, motion on the other side of the clearing catches our eyes. Out of the trees steps a black-tailed doe. She sees us and pauses, one foot raised, sniffing, listening, looking. Jane and I stare enthralled. As the doe gazes at us, our eyes join across the space, across the species. Communication flows between us: cautious curiosity about a fellow creature. She breaks contact, begins nibbling, then looks back at us as if saying, As long as you stay on your side, it’s OK.
We watch her in delight until she trots off, then we close our eyes to meditate. At first my mantra goes with my heartbeat then slows and goes with my breath. The sound stretches out into a long hum floating through me. I seem to be beyond my skin, filling the whole clearing. I feel like I’m sinking into the earth. I want to hold on, to keep from disappearing, but something tells me to let everything go. I free-fall through space, then realize it’s impossible to fall because there’s no down. I’m hovering … like a dragonfly over water. The sound fades away, leaving me without thoughts. I seem to expand beyond all space and boundaries to unite with everything. For a moment I know I am everything, the whole universe, but as soon as I think, I’m everything, I’m not anymore. I’m just Bob Parks sitting on a blanket over cold ground.
I start the mantra again. Its whisper clears my thoughts away, and my mind becomes quiet. Part of me is watching the quietness of my mind and enjoying it. I never knew I had this watching part before. It doesn’t need to think. It’s just there, aware of everything but separate from it — a wise old part of me.
I realize I’m off the mantra, drifting on thoughts, so I pick up the sound again and follow it as it gets fainter and finer until it becomes more visual, pulsing light behind my closed eyes. It seems to shine into something, a big cavern that’s inside of me but also outside of me. The boundaries between me and everything else disappear — no difference now between inside and outside. I can see dimly into the cavern. The walls and ceiling are crystal, its facets glinting in the mantra light. Below them in all directions stretches a vast dark sea of water, its ripples gleaming. It’s deep, deep as the earth, and I want to plunge in and dive all the way to the bottom. I’m sitting above it. Down there beneath me, beneath these rocks and dirt, rests the water.
I can sense this sea’s immensity, stretching from California under the Great Basin of Nevada, Utah, and Arizona, the parched American desert, the last place the corporate drillers would’ve looked. We’re sitting by the tip of it closest to the surface. From here it goes deeper and deeper, soaking through strata of sand and porous rock, a huge aquifer waiting to be freed and flow again.
I want to jump up and yell, “I found it!” but that thought makes it disappear. I take a deep breath and am back sitting cross-legged on my blanket. Too stunned to say anything, I lie back and feel the ground under me, this dry ground with all that good water under it.
Further samples are posted at www.cosmiceggbooks.com/books/wellsprings.
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William T. Hathaway’s other books include A World of Hurt (Rinehart Foundation Award), Summer Snow, and Radical Peace. A selection of his writing is available at www.peacewriter.org.
