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Fall 2002
NAMASTE,
I’ve lived in Maryland all my life. From early spring to late fall, every year, we experience frequent thunderstorms. Some of these storms are severe and cause local damage, such as power outages, fallen trees, crushed roofs and cars. Most of them do little harm and provide fabulous light shows and awesome displays of the power of wind and rain. Occasionally, though, they spawn a tornado.
Back in the spring, a tornado ripped through La Plata, MD, wreaking terrible havoc. Five people died and the damage estimates approached a hundred million dollars. The town was wiped out. It was a disaster.
A week after the La Plata tornado, a front moved through the area that touched off thunderstorms and created conditions that instigated a tornado watch. (A watch means that conditions are present that might lead to tornado. A warning means that there is a high probability of a tornado or that a tornado has been sighted.) Severe thunderstorm watches and tornado watches occur often throughout the warm weather months. Fortunately, the actual occurrence of tornadoes is rare. In my memory, there have been maybe ten tornadoes in our area in the past twenty years.
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In any case, the week after the La Plata tornado, when the tornado watch was announced, Unity Woods received a number of phone calls inquiring whether we were holding class. Now I have to tell you that during the winter we get calls checking on classes when the possibility of snow is forecast for the next day (I’d love to see the figures on the reliability of those forecasts, but the weather services won’t release them), so I wasn’t surprised that folks might be concerned about the announced tornado watch, what with the memory of La Plata so fresh in their minds.
What astounded me, though, is that some people became angry - really, angry - that we would hold classes under those conditions - conditions that are relatively commonplace during the summer. We have a liberal makeup policy and lots of classes. If people are truly worried by the semi-reliable forecasts of local or national weather services, they are free to stay home and do a makeup class on a clear day. We are not interesting in luring people into dangerous circumstances, and we have closed on occasions when the situation seems to warrant it. However, we are certainly not going to cancel classes because some forecaster says it might snow the next day or that we might have a severe storm in the afternoon.
That people had actually become angry, though, made me wonder: How in the heck did we get so scared?
I mean, that’s why people were calling the center and getting angry, isn’t it? They were frightened. Sure, a tornado had just ripped a whole town apart only a week earlier. That’s pretty scary. But we’re going to have watches and warnings all summer, just as we do every year
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The fact of the matter is that there is a ton of scary stuff out there all the time (a lot less of it around here than in a lot of places, I’d say), and there always has been. How did it get to be where people feel the need to drive around in tanks (read SUV’s) for protection? (Few of these people are taking them off road or hauling huge loads in them). Where moms drive their kids 400 yards to the entrance to the cul-de-sac to catch the school bus and meet them after school to drive them 400 yards back home, all on a bright sunny day? (These kids can’t walk 400 yards?! Are fiends really lurking everywhere to snatch our children?) Where if it might snow later in the day, the schools close early? (Schools let out early the other day because it was going to be hot. 95 degrees. They didn’t even say the AC was broken. It was just going to be hot). Where more and more people live in gated communities for fear of crime; vacation in walled all-inclusives so they don’t have to venture out amongst the locals; turn playgrounds into high cost, antiseptic rubber rooms because wood and dirt are dangerous, and on and on.
Yes, these are scary times. I live and work pretty close to ground zero for anthrax, small pox, nukes, whatever. And the environment of the entire world continues to suffer extensive degradation because of the greed and short-sightedness of corporations, industries, and politicians (whom we empower, by the way). And political institutions and governments - local, national and worldwide - are in upheaval. And countries with wacky, frightened constituents point weapons of massive destruction across imaginary lines at each other. And disease and famine devastate millions and threaten the stability of countries and continents. It is a grim picture in many respects.
But it has been scary since forever. Sabertooths near the campfire. Vandals at the gates. Floods, fires, cyclones. Feudal tyrants, Inquisitions, slavery. Poverty, economic depression, starvation. Plague, influenza, HIV. And throughout history, war, terror, genocide.
Why are we, it seems to me, scareder now than ever before?
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For one thing, instant communication has made us much more aware of all this stuff. We watch disasters around the globe, often as they happen. More insidiously, the media play up catastrophe and horror to grab our attention (and sell their sponsors’ products), creating the impression that we are completely surrounded in a world of crime, wickedness, and mayhem. Maybe it’s only true for big cities, but the evening news here is almost guaranteed to include murders or followups on murders or trials about murders and at least one horrible accident (car, bus train, plane) in addition to stories of robberies and malfeasance large and small.
You’d never know that crime has actually gone down in the past ten years, that the Potomac River is cleaner than it was twenty years ago, that there are fewer air pollution alerts than ten years ago, that the welfare rolls have been substantially reduced. Paying attention to the media, especially television, would lead you to believe that there is more crime than ever.
So we’re freaked out by the media. No getting around it. But there is more to it than that. I raised the question about why are we so scared with my friend Tara Brach. She’s the Buddhist-psychotherapist-author-meditation teacher lady I co-teach workshops with twice a year. More than all those labels, though, she’s a very thoughtful, smart, and wise person.
She pondered it a bit and said, "I think it’s because we feel disconnected - from each other and from the earth."
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I thought about her words, and they kept making more and more sense to me. People experience the world in an almost second hand way anymore. They spend much of the day - truly hours and hours - sealed off in their cars, talking on the phone, watching TV, playing video games, emailing on the internet, going to movies, etc. Not that any of these things is, in themselves bad, but piled all together, it’s a pretty vicarious way to live your life.
We don’t get our hands in the dirt the way folks who live and work on the land do. We don’t see birth and death in real life like our ancestors did. Most of us have hardly any contact with our immediate neighbors. We really are disconnected in a very profound way.
Maybe one of the potential silver linings of all the current madness is that it will cause us to look at what we do and how we do it - to see, as I wrote a few newsletters ago, that death may always be right around the corner; to see that most of us spend so much more time with images and reflections of the world than with the people we live in it with.
When this becomes inescapably evident, the value of loving relationships and spiritual awareness takes on much more powerful meaning. Perhaps this has much to do with the increasing interest in yoga and many other spiritual traditions. Maybe when - through yoga (which literally means "connected") or whatever path we’re drawn to - we can touch our mortality and see it as simply another step in the dance, when we can feel the truth of our connection to all beings in our hearts, with every breath we take, then we won’t be so afraid to take the risk of being really alive.
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