For some, microliving is largely motivated by the current environmental crisis. For Earth Day 2015, I was recently asked to confront the question of how we personally conceive and live out our lives in a time of climate change. Beginning with a draft essay, a series of questions emerged: Are we permitted to grieve? Can we seek comfort? How best do we work? Most of these questions I could not answer but with sincere hopes. And so, surprisingly distant from the original intent, I found myself writing a prayer.
Across time and cultures there have long been prayers for rain, for good harvests, even for fair weather for battle. In December 1944, after D-Day, General George Patton sought a prayer to stop the downpours that threatened Allied victory. Finding none appropriate, he famously composed a prayer to call for a cessation of the ‘immoderate rains’ that prevented troops from advancing.
We find ourselves today in another struggle, one to limit the collective results of human action from forever degrading the natural world around us. Fittingly, many faiths have litanies and prayers calling for the care of creation and climate. Some are simply heavenly prayers to keep the heavens stable, but most rightfully call on us to act to make it so. Without a faith tradition of my own, I offer this short prayer for living through unprecedented days.
a weather prayer
Let us grieve. To feel unflinchingly what is at stake, look deeply at change, even while others refuse. May we study the fine contours of pain wrought by saws and chemistry, not just the on the soils but on our souls. For to ignore our grief is to ignore the costs, to deny part of the reality of what is happening before us, to us, by us.
May our circumstances awaken us to truth, and may we come to know and name causes: an evolutionary and ideological impulse to growth, understandable yet now inappropriate, which clouds still our recognition and respect for natural limits. Might we come to see how such attachments create separation from nature, and among each other.
May we cultivate joy and wisdom in respecting limits. Might we limit far travels, to relish more fully what is near. Might we find simplicity, freedom and quality in smaller spaces and fewer things. If unable to birth, may we discover the gratitude of the millions who would cherish our home and attention. May we have no limits for love.
Let us seek comfort. But may it be a wise comfort, that of the vastness of the universe, of our own focused minds, of our considered faiths, of the changes that have come before and will come after, even without us. Let us not fall too far, too often for conditional pleasures that leave nothing changed.
Let us rejoice nonetheless. May we not find ourselves overwhelmed with sacrifice, self defined as a means to an end, ignoring the countless human gifts that may keep us fully alive and connected, relishing the images, sounds, words, smells and touches that brings us intimately closer to who we fully are, and what is at stake. May we attempt to savor while saving.
Let us work. Resolutely, creatively, while also finding a certain remove to let us travail with greater clarity and duration, but with no less passion. May we not forget that no matter the day, optimism remains the best working environment.
And so may we begin again with much lost, and much yet to lose.