The Urgency of Interconnection
I am writing this in early spring as the flowers are just beginning to blossom. Which makes me marvel again at the way the change of seasons always takes me by surprise. Even though I know spring is coming I am still surprised by the lengthening days, the hint of warmth in the breeze and how dazzling the daffodils look as their crowns burst open in golden glory. I have become accustomed to the cold, dark mornings, when only a few months ago I was feeling shocked by their oncoming.
Every aspect of nature makes this seasonal adjustment - birds migrate, bears hibernate, bulbs lie dormant in soil like babes in the womb - until spring calls us out of our nooks and crannies into brighter, lighter days. What amazes me is that it is so natural and obvious yet also so surprising and deeply interconnected. The natural cycle of life and death, winter and spring, dark and light is so beautifully and perfectly designed to create growth. For beneath the stark nakedness of the winter landscape the ground everything is humming with growth which starts exploding around about now.
So it is with life - I have learned to trust that the barren patches are often, in retrospect, incredibly fertile times when growth is taking place at deep subterranean level. I am learning to trust my own emotional weather for I’ve witnessed in myself and others that out of confusion grows clarity, out of fear courage, out of desperation resilience, out of disease recovery. We often draw towards us that which we fear, dislike or get deeply triggered by in order to dialogue and dance with it, until we realise that it is often a blessing dressed as a curse, a lamb in wolf’s clothing and a friend rather than an enemy. Through facing and mastering that which most challenges us, we grow as rapidly as tulip bulbs and can explode in as victorious technicolour glory.
Surprised that I have actually come to like these funny old damp and dingy days, I realise again that the old dualistic divisions between dark and light really do not serve me or indeed, I believe, our global community. There outside my window is the living proof that from deep dark things grow beautiful flowers. Black and white are not separate polarities, they are shades in a constantly interacting spectrum of light dancing with itself into infinity.
As I approach Equinox and World Water Day and the event that has preoccupied me over these dark months, Ocean of Song, I am aware of how much growing I have had to do this winter. As the birthing time also draws near for another album, I’m aware of that familiar kick of fear in my belly combined with the rising sap of enthusiasm which accompanies and ultimately helps me stretch beyond it.
What propels me to make the stretch is my sense of my interconnection with everyone in this global community and my dharmic responsibility to make a contribution in the brief batting of the cosmic eyelid that is my existence. And whilst I do not believe that the end of the world is nigh just because the Mayans ran out of stone tablets at 2012, I do feel an incredible urgency pushing up from within the soil of existence that is propelling us to change the way we live on every level.
The fact that I can turn on a tap, flush a loo and take a shower whilst one child dies every second from water related issues is an insanity I find hard to live with and has prompted me to Sing for Water. The fact that Women perform 66% of the world’s work, produce 50% of the food, earn 10% of the income and own 1% of the property, stirs me to take a stand. The fact that 90% of the world’s hungriest nations are the chief food exporters to the richest nations, turns my stomach. The fact that every 20 minutes another 3,500 humans are born whilst one or more entire species of animal or plant life becomes extinct, deadens me. The fact that despite all this, I still face a daily barrage of adverts encouraging me to buy products from industries that devalue our existence, destroy our environment and devastate communities across the world, blows my mind. The cultural schizophrenia that has us as consumers wired up to worry about the numbers on the bathroom scales whilst others starve, or the number of pennies in the banks who source income from nations crippled by debt or the numbers of calories in the food harvested by those same nations and then processed in such a way that strips it - and us - of nutritional value, locks us into a schismic spin of consumption, guilt and denial.
I do however see signs daily that within the desperation of these times that new ways of interacting as a global community are emerging. As the global growth of communication technologies lift the veils of illusion, deception and separation, we are coming increasingly to see and understand the depth of our interconnection.
We are connected to the people who live in abject poverty, whose labour feeds and clothes us. We are connected to the factory farmed animals living in dark, airless barns, standing in their own waste. We are connected to forthcoming generations of children who will be born deformed due to nuclear testing and disasters, and to their wailing mothers. We are connected to the whales that beach themselves when the sonic ecology of the oceans is disrupted by human sonar. We are innately connected to each other, regardless of species, race, status, politics, culture and creed. It is the power of our interconnection which calls us to find new ways to co-exist and it is urgent that we all respond in our own unique way.
The challenges up ahead are vast, yet as I have learned from WaterAid the solutions start with small, simple actions. Enabling communities to manage their water source effectively and address hygiene issues, transforms lives. We can all do something, and the something that we can do is the something that we love doing. That the doing of that which we love will involve working the soil of our own personal wintery spaces is perfectly designed to have us coming up roses. I am not a plumber and I would be probably pretty useless at fitting taps but I can sing and I can raise my voice for those who are voiceless.
I invite you to join me at Ocean of Song - either in person at St John at Hackney Church on March 23rd - or online at Sounds Orange - and to celebrate how doing what you love can make a contribution this World Water Day.
Wishing you a Wonderful Spring Equinox
