For peoples in
earlier times, the gestalt of inwardness/externality had been a blending of
birth, clan, wildness, creatures, stars, and vibrancy. For us, the task of re-connecting the
disparate fragments and re-assembling the whole more resembles traipsing
through a junkyard littered by disaster, picking up our feet so as to avoid the
neon pools of caustic fluid and ragged metal edges.
Plutonium. Packbot.
Prostate Cancer. Brain
Tumor. Beached Whales. Wasting Elk.
The Biggest Shopping Mall in the World.
The Tallest Skyscraper. Scrape
Save Spend Crave. Credit Card Debit
Card. Melting Ice. Spaceport. Airport.
So The Animals Die.
I devoured Jerry
Mander’s book on television and found myself conceptually clawing my way up
between the cracks of the psychic numbing and denial that had paralyzed
post-WWII America. Suddenly the hills of
San Francisco looked more awe-inspiring to me, the espresso machines in North
Beach sounded frothier, the world felt more alive: I could see the formidable
place technology’s development had played in human history.
Two public events
thrust my nascent aliveness into action.
The first was Three Mile Island.
The second was U.S. President Ronald Reagan’s break from
previous Cold War policies of containment into reckless tirades against the
“Evil Empire.” At the same time, an
inner event jarred me with its echo of the outer crisis. It was a dream delivering a ritual for
containing human emotion in the face of possible annihilation. I described it in an article first published
in 1980 in New Age Journal.
That week as the
nuclear power station in Pennsylvania teetered on the edge of meltdown I --
residing 2000 miles away in San Francisco -- experienced the intensity of
feeling I might were the plant in my backyard. By day I darted from radio to
newspaper to television, consuming every word of every report as if my life
depended on it. At night I lay half-asleep/half-awake feeling myself hanging
from the slenderest of threads, dangling in space with no support, no Mommy, no
Daddy, no help.
In those
days the topic of the danger of nuclear technology was taboo, and to speak of
it -- even as a nuclear power plant neared meltdown -- was denied. I steered my
own course, scrupulously acknowledging each feeling that bubbled up inside me. Fear.
Anger. Despair. Grief. Surrender. Urgency. As I did, I became aware that just
as emotional patterns we manifest in adult life mirror mechanisms developed at
an earlier age, so these feelings harkened back to an earlier era. For the first time in almost 20 years, I was
experiencing a sense of universally impending danger. This time its catalyst
was an industrial accident, but the long repressed material -- laced with
memories of grade-school bomb drills, the day the Russians exploded an H-bomb, the
Cuban Missile Crisis -- was the threat of nuclear war.
I had a
number of epiphanies. First of all, techno-historical forces -- from blatant
nuclear technologies to the more insidious environmental contaminators -- have as
potent an impact on our human psyches as do families and early education. A second realization was that no matter what
political, economic, or social categories divide us, we humans are united in
our insecurity before such forces. A third: a crucial aspect of ensuring human
continuity is psychological. Not only is our predicament human-invented, but on
the other side of the taboo against having thoughts or feelings about it lies
the psychic wisdom we might use to mobilize for survival. Fourth: since both
insecurity and the task to survive are shared, addressing our unconscious and
conscious relationship to them would best proceed, not in the relative
isolation of a psychotherapy session, but in the mutually supportive context of
a group.
I decided
to dedicate myself to the task of providing such a context.
My first
opportunity came in June. I was scheduled to give a plenary at a woman’s mental
health conference. I wanted to design an experiential presentation that might
affect participants on three levels. By raising awareness of our predicament,
it could be educational. By crossing the taboo against expressing feelings, it
could provide a model of vulnerability in the Nuclear Age. Last, by making
conscious our internal relationship to the situation, it could catalyze psychic
shifts.
But there
was a problem. Despite the fact that I had been giving workshops for years, I
was stumped. If, as social scientists and philosophers are saying, the Nuclear
Age confronts Western peoples with the necessity for altering the very
foundations of how we perceive, the fact that the form of the plenary came to
me in a dream could suggest that what lies ahead may well exist at the edge of
collective consciousness.
The form
was not a conventional group therapy or workshop session: it was a ritual.
This development seemed noteworthy because so many rituals provided by modern
society have lost their abilities to teach and transform us and because, if we
are to forge the kind of reconnection with our psyches, each other, and our
planet, we may have to create rituals that speak to us and through us of the
peril, pain, and promise of our times.
I called
the plenary "Environmental Ritual." It consisted of three concentric
circles formed by the participants. The outer circle was to be the Circle of
Information, a place for safe witnessing and reporting. The next circle was the
Circle of Fear and Rage; the innermost one, the Circle of Sorrow.
To begin,
all participants were to stand in the outer circle. Anyone could start by expressing
a feeling or thought, personal or shared, about our common plight. "My
father was on the clean-up crew in Hiroshima and he’s dying of leukemia."
"The fish in Lake Michigan
have cancer!" "I feel scared." Then, to provide affirmation of
the truth of this statement, everyone in the circle would say: "So It Is." Since it is
terrifying to confront the experience of living in an endangered world, we
would then invoke a technique used in spiritual practices: to build bridges
among ourselves and to that which is bigger than us all, we would chant an
agreed-upon phrase. Then a second person would express a thought or feeling,
and the ritual would proceed. The only requirement was that each move to the
circle that best reflected her current state, be that fear, anger, grief,
calmness, or observation.
Concentric
circles are archetypal forms, but the concepts driving the ceremony derived
from influences in my own experience. One was the work of Dr. Elisabeth
Kubler-Ross,[i] with
whom I had studied. Called griefwork, her approach to the psychology of death
and dying is essentially an emotional passage past denial and through the
anger, depression, fear, and sorrow that the prospect of dying elicits. By
embarking upon such a process, the dying and their loved ones can arrive at an
acceptance of death -- and a new sense of what it means to be alive. Like this
process, the ritual provides an arena for participants to move beyond denial
of the possibility of collective death.
A
difference between facing individual death and this collective one is that in
this situation we do not know the outcome. We do not know if more bombs will
explode. We do not know how strong are the forces of life to counteract the
poisons already spread around the globe from bomb-making, bomb-testing, and un-ecological
practices. Another difference is that in this situation all people are facing
the prospect of death simultaneously. As we face it together, we lose our sense
of isolation, and our hitherto unexpressed experience is invoked, spoken, and
acknowledged in community. A final difference is that since the menace is
human-made, acceptance is not of
the inevitability of nuclear war or ecological disaster, but rather of our
shared responsibility to do what we can to stop them.
A second
influence derived from China: "speaking bitterness," a practice used
by peasants to heal the pain of injustice and inspire participation in social
change. A Westernized version of this is feminist consciousness-raising. Both
set up a conduit for individuals to deal with psychological problems caused by
social realities. Both serve as interventions in the immobilization of
individuals.
A last
influence in the creation of the Environmental Ritual was my experience with
ceremony. Because the rituals I had been performing focused on the relationship
of modern industrial people to nature, I had often seen sorrow, anger, fear,
and longing -- but it was not until the Environmental Ritual that I linked
their expression to harness them towards social change.
That morning
in 1979, 150 women gathered in a rustic clearing. I explained the origins,
purpose, and procedure of the ritual: I asked participants to speak their minds
about what is happening to us because we live in the Nuclear Age.
Hesitancy
stilled each woman in the circle. Expressing feelings about nuclear war or
ecological disaster was an unheard-of thing to do. Finally, one brave soul
stepped forward and announced that she had suffered a miscarriage she believed
was caused by environmental pollution. Another called out that she had been
having nightmares about fallout shelters. A third told us that her mother had
worked on atomic tests in Nevada, had eaten pork from live pigs roasted by a
blast, and was now dead. By the end of the two-hour session 150 people were
pounding their fists together, sobbing, and holding one another. We felt outraged, afraid and sad, and as we
realized how connected we are by the fate that hangs over us, a fourth circle
spontaneously formed -- one of kinship and commitment. The ritual completed
itself when a woman placed her nine-month-old child in the center of the
circle, and we held hands to sing. (1980)[ii]
Hope?! Kinship? Commitment?
What a starkly different world we inhabit today. Packbot.
Prostate. Twin Towers. I am struggling with how to apply ordinary
words to the totality of this high-tech/high-anxiety/high-calamity world we now
inhabit. Indeed, the changes that have
occurred do top those that ravaged the world through the industrial
revolution. Stephanie Mills puts it this
way: “The front has lengthened, almost
to infinity.”[iii]
This blog is a book. Please feel free to read the next chapter now. Go to the Table of Contents under the introduction on the right side of the page and click on the next chapter.
[i] Elisabeth
Kubler-Ross, On Death and Dying. New York Englewood
[ii] Adapted
from Chellis Glendinning, “Beyond Private Practice: An Approach to Mental
Health in the Nuclear Age,” in Kenneth Porter MD, et al., eds., Heal or Die: Psychotherapists Confront
Nuclear Annihilation. New York
