Embodying Ecodharma

by Bill Earth-Mirror Corcoran 

 

Climate change, ocean acidification, habitat destruction, collapsing animal populations shout at us that we have fallen disastrously out of harmony with the earth and one another. Living in an unprecedented ecological crisis, many of us feel grief over the losses of the present and the losses to come. How do we respond as Buddhist practitioners? 

The crisis can seem so broad, the grief so hurtful, that we often turn away. Human beings have never before dealt with this scale of destruction driven by our own behaviors. We need to create and learn practices to engage with the reality of our situation. With this need in mind, during our recent Earth Week Zazenkai participants were invited to turn toward their grief and to cultivate gratitude for our planet and all forms of life. 

In the United States, we generally lean toward a belief that things will always get better as we hurry along to the future. It can be hard to allow ourselves time and space for our grief. Francis Weller, a Jungian therapist and grief ritualist, believes that we are descending into what he calls “the long dark,” in which we’ll need skills and ritual forms to acknowledge and be present to our responses, especially grief. Because our culture generally lacks these, he has developed a framework for mapping our grief and adapted and invented grief rituals to support people in experiencing their grief individually and communally. 

In my own experience, encountering grief and gratitude in deeply vulnerable ways has been a pathway to experiencing the true nature of interconnection and interdependence. For many years I was a professional environmental advocate. In that role I leaned into action and away from vulnerability while confronting the corporate and political powers destructively exploiting the earth. What I have learned is that if I am to experience the fact of this earth as my very self, then I must turn toward my grief and descend into loss and death. I need to dive instead of thrashing on the surface. In fact, my suffering increases when I avoid that descent. Franz Kafka wrote, “You can hold back from the suffering of the world…but perhaps this very holding back is the one suffering you could have avoided.” [quoted by David Loy in Ecodharma]

 

Rather than isolating us, turning toward our grief makes our heart both more spacious and more tender, opening us more deeply into the human community and the more-than-human community of all life forms. Our descent into grief enriches our life and frees our love and compassion to more clearly emerge and heal us. Our heart, by its very nature, hungers for harmony, to be in deep, edgeless relationship. We should attend to that! 

But in cultivating these aspects of our lives, we cannot bypass the realities of how we have gotten to this point. We have transformed the planet’s natural functioning into a machine to produce monetary wealth, trading forests for palm oil or cattle or toilet paper. Plans to mine the ocean floor are being put into action while others talk of detonating nuclear bombs on Mars to warm its climate. It’s madness. Feeling the pain of this madness, turning toward grief to be present with it, gets us beyond the intellectual and abstract and into our own embodied nature – to know the wrongs deep in our bodies and to work with them as our own. 

There’s a story of Chinese Zen master Dongshan Liangje ( Japanese: Tozan) that poignantly expresses this: 

Dongshan and a monk were washing their bowls after breakfast and saw two cranes fighting over a frog. The monk turned to his teacher and asked, ‘Why does it always come to that?’ Dongshan answered, ‘It is only for your benefit, Honored One.’ 

 

When the monk observes the cranes struggling over the frog, what world is he seeing? His question places a layer between him and the scene “before” him. He’s expressing dissatisfaction with the world as it is. Dongshan doesn’t answer the monk’s question with an explanation of suffering. 

He instead turns the question on its head, inviting the monk to be intimate with what is. By being with the pain of the frog and the hungry struggle of the cranes instead of moralizing about it, we experience our connectedness. When we let ourselves be fully present for pain and grief, we get bigger and more fully realize our relationship with this world, that we are this world just as it is. And when our heart fully opens to the grief, our sense of being separate dissolves. We are not apart! We wake up. 

David Loy, in his seminal book Ecodharma, writes “We must feel more deeply in order to be transformed more deeply—in Zen language, in order to solve the great collective koan of our time: how to respond to the horrific things we are doing to the earth and to ourselves. That means opening up to the repressed grief and despair that so often paralyze us, whereupon they can transform into compassionate action.” From this perspective, the cranes and the frog are the monk’s teachers. Who are your teachers? 

When we can turn toward grief, we disrupt our habitual mind that is trying to hold things together with one story after another, wrapping us in concepts as though they can insulate us from reality. We can let go into our connectedness and de-center our own self. Then, we can ask whose grief is this? If it remains only “my” grief, then we are still separated and need to keep working. While the details of our grief differ among us, in the end my grief is your grief, yours is mine. 

Making this journey with grief, we deepen our gratitude for this impermanent life in which nothing is fixed and in which everything is renewed moment after moment. There is great freedom in the fact that we can’t know where it’s all going! 

Joanna Macy placed gratitude at the beginning of the transformative spiral that she and others have developed in the Work that Reconnects body of ecologically-oriented writings and practices. Participants start with gratitude, which buoys us to honor our pain for the world, allowing us in turn to see the world with new eyes and then engage in it. In her long experience working with thousands of people, she found that gratitude grounds and strengthens us, that it clarifies for us our intrinsic right to be here. She calls it “a stance of the soul, it comes like the breath. The primal movement of all spiritual traditions, the primal wow…it’s the gift of life and we don’t control it – it’s delicious and terrifying and that’s what life seems to be.” [Quoted in Ecodharma] 

Yes! 

Gratitude, like grief, disrupts our self-obsession. Macy says that “gratitude work is liberating, subversive, that we are sufficient and that means we can be free.” How many of us feel insufficient, less than? Knowing we are sufficient is an antidote to a consumer society that turns our mind and heart into a marketplace to sell us things and services to fill one imagined lack after another. It’s deliciously subversive and liberating to just earnestly express and feel gratitude. 

Gratitude practice is transformative. When we participate in ceremonies like service and oryoki, we can experience gratitude as a healing song running throughout ritual forms. Listen for that song in yourself, and you’ll experience the liberatory nature of ritual. 

Here’s another story about Dongshan:

Shenshan was mending clothes when Dongshan asked, “What are you doing?” 

“Mending,” said Shenshan. 

“How is it going?” asked Dongshan. 

“One stitch follows another,” said Shenshan. 

“We’ve been traveling together for twenty years and you’re still talking like that!” said Dongshan.  “How can you be so clueless?” “

How do you mend, then?” 

“With each stitch the whole earth is spewing flames,” said Dongshan. 

[Zen Peacemakers translation] 

 

The whole world is engulfed in suffering. Our mending is to face this, to accept it, to turn toward it, be it. Drop your strategies! Whole-heartedly engage, do nothing by rote. We can be wild like the unbound earth, our free life force circulating everywhere, penetrating everywhere. Be fully alive in the midst of spewing flames, fully alive as the spewing flames. 

Let’s be thankful for this life, this breath, for the ancestors who turned their lives over to the dharma to benefit all beings. To this great, wild earth and its humbling beauty, its seamless functioning. Our thankfulness is the wellspring of our life together, expressing it in our daily actions, in our ceremonial space, in our relationships with the human and more-than-human realms. Unconditional, non-transactional, non-bargaining gratitude frees us of the grasping self and allows us to plumb the depths of grief and not drown. 

This is how we have, instead of Earth Day or Earth Week, Earth Life.  We reconnect, we re-member our true nature, together here in the world of seeming chaos and deep suffering. We practitioners are always swimming against the stream. Let’s be grateful that we are doing so together in community. 

 

Grief and Gratitude Ritual 

by Bill Earth-Mirror Corcoran

(Inspired by the grief work of Francis Weller.)

 

 We consciously and unconsciously carry grief about the suffering of our earth and all our relations who crawl, fly, walk, and swim. Speaking our grief aloud provides us space to experience it directly and bring it out of the shadows. 

Water is the medium in this ritual. It is the boundless flowing forth of life, the endless cycling of this world, and the essential stillness at the heart of our life. It is transparent and still as though empty, it receives without judgment, and it flows freely. It sustains all forms of life. 

To perform this ritual, you’ll need a water vessel, a non-plastic bowl, and an offering from the natural world. Use a vessel that is aesthetically pleasing or that has a personal association to pour the water into the bowl. Don’t use the water tap. Half full is fi ne. The bowl is the container of all things, the shape of our world and our life. You hold the entirety of the world when you hold the bowl. Carrying the bowl with intention, find a place outdoors where you can sit quietly and let your energy around grief and gratitude gather. 

When you feel ready, speak your grief to the water. It can receive it all. You can decide the volume and length of your speaking – follow your intuition. Be aware of the energy moving in your body. Let it flow into the water through your words and hands. Be spacious. When you are ready, speak the gratitude that arises for you. It can be gratitude for your life, for the great earth, all living beings, community, ancestors, whatever feels alive for you. 

When you are done, offer something from the natural world by placing it in the water. Dedicate the merit of the ritual to the well-being of the earth and to all beings past, present and future. When the time is right, take the bowl, always holding it with intention, and pour the water and offering onto the earth in a place that feels right to you. You might sing, chant, or otherwise vocalize while you do so. 

If the bowl is compostable, please compost it. If it is not, then wash it by hand and put it away. Remain intentional. You may find it helpful to journal after the ritual. Consider sharing your experience with someone who has also done the ritual. Give yourself time to let the ritual percolate through you. 

 

Dharma-Holder Earth-Mirror is the ZCLA Board President and facilitates the Ecosattva Circle.