Life Beyond Measure (24 page)

Ah, but yours, Ayele, will be better educated, more worldly-wise at a younger age, and early adapters of the technological magic that the people of my time can hardly understand or utilize. Our society tends to cling to old ways, safe customs, and cautious acceptance of
new and sometimes seemingly strange ideas. We lag behind despite the speed afforded on the communications autobahn. We often watch but do not always listen. We have come to prefer entertainment to information. We blame some of these traits on the young, but we, the old, have been the ones at the steering wheel.

We hope you will accept our apologies.

A
s I’m certain you’ve concluded from my last few letters, Ayele, the purpose of the questions, answers, and mysteries that concern all of us, regardless of our station or background, is not only to provide grist for the philosophical mill. We can hope they do more by occupying us, awakening us to matters we have been ignoring or denying, and, for most of us, that they call us to action. In our time, dear great-granddaughter, the issue of our environment is of the utmost urgency.

Think of it. The air we breathe, the water we drink, the food we eat—they all bring us life, miraculously, year in and year out.

The snows and the rains come, and the water accumulates in mountain regions and flows toward the sea to form rivers and lakes,
and it happens every twelve months. Almost like clockwork, it comes, it comes, it comes. For thousands of years we have lived as if these forms of abundance were in inexhaustible supply. But here in the twenty-first century we have come to the slow realization that they are not.

Now we’re at a place where the coming of the rains and the snows is seemingly being altered ever so slightly, but more progressively than we might think. We are now hearing phrases like
global warming
and
climate crisis.
We are talking about shortages of water. We are concerned about those essential environmental aspects of our lives without which we are all doomed.

These concerns take me back to my original classroom in nature where I learned about the environment when I was a kid. Cat Island was the home, the environment, of some nine hundred to one thousand people, in a land area two times as large as New York City, of a shape similar to that of the isle of Manhattan. The environment itself was the force in control. The air over Cat Island was bathed with purity, clean and fresh, and it enveloped us. We’d breathe and not wonder if the air was pure. We drank water that came from the ground and never wondered whether it was contaminated.

Food on the island was abundant; we turned to the earth, and we turned to the sea. The sea constantly replenished us. The land nurtured us and replenished itself, year in and year out. In that environment where I spent my early years, I flourished. I learned how seeds placed in the ground burst into a sprig and then become a tree, and how trees bear fruit. I understood and accepted this as a part of my life, a tree’s life, and a part of nature itself.

But we’re now at a place where we have begun to tabulate our obligations to the environment rather than the environment’s obligations to us. The environment’s obligations to us have been met
for billions of years. The environment was in service to us, altering itself, changing itself, maturing itself, widening itself, dimensionalizing itself for our arrival. When we first came, the environment was ready to receive us, and it nurtured us. It was so massive, so pure, and so thunderously healthy that we had no need to worry for generations upon generations whether it would be able to sustain itself on our behalf. In its infinite beauty, it has done that, but now things are beginning to change.

We are 6.4 or 6.5 billion human beings on the planet. The water supply is shortening. The amount of topsoil to produce food is dwindling. The remaining clean, fresh, unpolluted air for breathing and for nurturing all living things is being poisoned by substances incompatible to its health.

Pollutants foul our air and water, damaging the food supply in the oceans and on land. They threaten the very ozone that protects that earth’s atmosphere. In our joy for life and our voracious consumption of resources, we have carelessly reached a critical point in our own survival. Even yet, Ayele, as I sit here, many people are reluctant to accept the responsibility that rests with us all to pursue answers to the problems and, as we find them, to engage in them.

As a society we have grown to prefer the easy over the difficult, the quick over the slow, the cheap over the costly—and those choices are not often to the benefit of nature.

Lord knows we’ve been warned; books and essays by the hundreds have been tumbling off printing presses since the 1970s; some even much earlier. Still we respond higgledy-piggledy, if at all, against multiple threats: nuclear meltdowns, acid rain, leaking oil, hazardous waste, and contaminated watersheds. All these present a menace not just to us in the industrialized nations, but to indigenous peoples threatened by expanding globalization.

Acid rain, that mixture of nitric and sulfuric chemicals arising from the burning of fossil fuels, affects large parts of the United States and Canada, damaging lakes, streams, and forests along with the plants and animals that live there. Using pesticides arbitrarily and haphazardly threatens to wipe out whole species of animal life, and threatens our food chain.

These are not theories, Ayele; they are facts. It has taken some time for too many of us to realize that the building pressure of world population, along with the mixed blessing of vast new technological capabilities, now threatens the survival of life on beautiful planet Earth. We are faced, as Nobel Peace Prize winner and former vice president Al Gore, a longtime champion of the environment, observes, with the moral responsibility to respond.

The arguments that contest a belief in limitless natural resources, or that confront those who insist air and water quality are not worsening, can no longer be dismissed.

Some of these problems may be less dire in your lifetime than they are today. Nevertheless, they are certain to be present well into your young life. And so, Ayele, there may be a need for you to look around yourself and take, as we are now taking, the small steps as well as the larger ones to make the earth a continuingly livable place. One example is energy; we use it to drive, to light and heat our homes, grow food, raise livestock, and dispose of mountains of garbage. All of this sets loose greenhouse-gas emissions, a noxious substance we can all curb easily by simply changing lightbulbs and properly inflating auto tires. We all desire clean water, but keeping it uncontaminated is not enough; it is a vital resource that must be consumed more judiciously than it has been in the past.

We are just now realizing that an army of one can be effective. We can turn off lights, computers, and other appliances when
they are not in use, and use electric appliances only when we need them. Energy-efficient appliances should be in abundance for your generation as some are now, Ayele—among them, refrigerators, air conditioners, washing machines, lighting equipment, and others.

We can avoid other extravagances of comfort: keep thermostats at sixty-eight degrees in winter and seventy-two degrees in summer, and turn them even lower in winter and higher in summer when we’re away from home.

In California, where I live, the automobile has replaced the old cowboy’s horse. Big-time! We each ride our own. But slowly, we are beginning to carpool, use public transportation, and a few even walk or bicycle whenever possible. Still, despite the enormous benefits, for the most part we continue to be resistant.

Why do I mention such mundane things to you, Ayele, such small potatoes, such middling advice? Because they are ignored by too many who sit greedily consuming resources with no concern for tomorrow. I do not want—and I certainly do not expect—you to join the ranks of the dim-witted or obtuse. So if you are with me so far, here’s a word or two more.

Besides the small steps in the salvation of our planet, there are larger ones to be taken. This may mean avoiding companies and their products if they continue to dump chemicals into water that poison sea life and us as well. If they send toxic fumes into the air, demand their change or closure. Some may argue that in too many cases the economy will suffer. But what good is a thriving economy to a dying public?

The planet and everything on it must be considered as an integrated whole of creation, and rallying to its cause must be more than a passing fad in the panorama of mankind’s life.

So, Ayele, talking to you about the environment is important for me, because I would like you to have a sense of its importance as well as the knowledge that your existence is intertwined with it. This makes you—you and the fellow human beings of your generation, of the generations behind you, and of the generation ahead of you—partially responsible for what used to be automatic. And what used to be automatic was clean air everywhere on the planet. What used to be automatic was an abundance of drinkable, usable water—for food, for nurturing the fields of the world, for accommodating the scientific needs that depend on clean, pure water.

Things are changing, so we must change. The face of the earth is being altered in certain ways that are alarming. We must do what we can to make the cut for our survival. To that end, I would hope that you’ll forever be cognizant of the importance—the absolute, absolute importance—of water, of air, and of food. There is no life for living things without those elements.

I’ve not been one to preach to you, and will do my best to keep it so as long as our relationship lives on. But I am now asking you to be mindful of the needs of the planet, mindful of the environment that must sustain the family of man—not for a century, not for a thousand years ahead, but on into perpetuity. And if we consciously work not to throw the intricate, extraordinary balance out of sync, if we are in harmony with the universe, the snows and rains will continue to come, and we will honor and preserve the earthly home given to us by our maker.

That entity we know as God is the subject of my next letter.

M
any letters ago, you will recall, I wrote to you, Ayele, about the evidence of things not seen—the faith in God—that sustained my mother in her anguish when faced with the prospect of losing her child, when confronted with not knowing how I was faring during those many years when, without a sign to the contrary, all she could do was believe that I would return.

I return to the subject of faith to add a few more thoughts that seem fitting in connection with the larger questions of our individual and collective purposes. And one of those questions we’re hard-pressed to ask at times when we look back at our lives in sum is whether our faith was well placed. Mine was not my mother’s religious certainty; rather, it was a spiritual recognition that I had a
purpose, even when I didn’t know what it was. Does that mean that God made all the decisions in which I was an instrument in His, or Her, design? Or was it the day-to-day choices that, in the aggregate of the day’s accumulation of choices, I had to learn to trust?

To answer those questions for myself I have to ask, again, whether I feel that what I have done in my life was by my own determination. No! I really do have a wonderful curiosity, an instinct for the possibility that God is as big as I think and as immeasurable as I perceive; and the faith that I have invested in that belief has delivered me into a life that is beyond anything I could have asked for or sought.

It is one article of faith to accept that I am here as part of a larger picture, in which my choices played an important but lesser role. It is a further article of faith to be mindful of what this power has done for me. I think it protects me. I think it will use me ultimately in a manner it so chooses, and my entity is a part of an energy of which there are many parts. So, for His design to be effective, my life has had to take a certain turn, as it will continue to do. If God needs me as an entity to sidestep the buzz saw, I will. And if I assume that my having sidestepped the buzz saw was all my doing—that’s crazy, that’s ego.

But conversely, I don’t believe that God wants me to sit absolutely contented that He is going to make all the decisions for me. I think, as I perceive God, that it is my responsibility to make the choices in my life that I feel are necessary for me to be the kind of person that I am. One or another of those choices will kill me, probably, but that’s how it goes. Before me there were hundreds and hundreds of millions of people who died, generation after generation. All of us live and we die, and it is to the honor of this great intelligence that I perceive as God that we live life as we feel we have to live it if we feel decency, honor, respect, compassion, truth, love, sympathy,
and empathy. All of those are the forces, energies, dispositions out of which we make our choices, for they are very real for us, and within our abilities to offer to others, because somewhere within our individual existence is a need for love, for compassion, for a safe harbor in the arms of somebody.

My choice is to have faith in that infinite intelligence and to trust that we are where we are, when we are, how we are, for a reason—that each of us has a perfect life, lived as it was meant to be.

Of all the human beings alive at this moment all over the planet, some are moving slowly toward the closing of their lives, some are just beginning to come alive and are being spanked on the behind as they begin crying, some are enduring in the middle, some struggling for wisdom, some for clarity, some for understanding. That’s the whole process; it is constantly in motion. We reach for small, incremental improvements. We would like a better job; we would like health for our family; we would like a long life; we would like an absence of war; we would like an ability, collectively, to put a lock around the impulses we have that are destructive for others, and around the impulses others have that are destructive for us.

My faith is enough to stand on, no matter how early or late the hour of the day, to look at where everyone is in the course of all their struggles and triumphs, myself included, and to say—
My God, life is so arresting!
To take it all in with great thanksgiving, even knowing that we could all be dust in one fell swoop. I don’t mean in ten years or fifty thousand years or eight billion years.

We could all be dust for reasons we don’t understand. The dinosaur probably had no idea that one day it would be extinct. And we could go as well, because we don’t rule; we are not the driving force behind the planet. But knowing that we were here and believing that we mattered—that’s faith.

The ability to look back at your life and see all the things you might have done differently, but still recognize that everything happened organically and for a reason—that, too, is faith. I have put that faith in the only God that I can see in my mind’s eye, a God who is an invisible, intangible force that is the ultimate in forces that cannot be described, that does have a direct relationship with everything about us—how we come into being, how we breathe, of what use we ultimately are to the larger frame of existence.

What is our purpose? You have to either go into structured faith or, as I do, try to figure out—and I don’t have much time left—all of these possibilities. I just am reluctant to embrace a format for faith that says that the embracing of it is all you have to do, and then you’ll understand, and then you’ll leave it all to God. It is the nature of mystery, as I see it, and of God, not to settle for finite explanations.

How can we know whether we have measured up to our given purpose? Again, faith will tell us that we have, that we have done the best with what we’ve been given. After all, I doubt that God, if He exists in those terms, leaves all that much to us, and is sitting there clucking his tongue, waiting to give us a bad report card, or is watching us and saying, “Oh, Lord, there they go again. How can they not see that they’re going over a cliff?”

I readily admit to being bedeviled by thoughts about how imperfect we human beings are. I could argue that if there is a God, then He made us the way we are. No, I’m not placing blame, and let me hasten to add that I don’t question the actual existence of God. I believe that it’s either one way or the other. It can’t be that there is a God and there is no God. So I give the presence of God equal time with the opposing thought that there is no such presence. I can’t say
positively
that there is a God, because I don’t know. I cannot say there is
not
a God; again, I don’t know. So I leave it, but in the leaving of it
I have now granted myself permission to think further and deeper. And as I go deeper, I find other mysteries.

I assume that there is a power and that it has a relationship to us, and its dimensions and its image are beyond me. So I give it its due. Its due is, we’re here.

And not only are we here; the planet is here. And not only is the planet here; the galaxy is here. And not only is the galaxy here; billions of galaxies are here. And they all form a universe.

We don’t know much about this universe. Science tells us some little bits about it. We don’t know if there is an adjacent universe. We don’t know if there are billions and billions of universes. And with the limited capacities of our minds, that’s enough for us to figure out. It’s enough to drive us for billions of years to come if we’re smart.

Contrary to some thinking, science and faith to me are not mutually exclusive. I believe that only the God who has been a force in my life from the time I entered the world, ahead of schedule, could have been the spark that ignited it all.

Since these matters are highly likely still to be unresolved in your time, Ayele, you will need to do your own deep thinking and arrive at your own conclusions. And, if you are the educated, well-rounded, ethical, decent, moral person that I am sure you will be in your adult years, you will be able to make your own choices.