Learning to Hiss
The Marriage of True Minds
Romance
A Bridge
PART THREE Finding Harmony with the Earth
From Wasteful to Simple
Seeing the Unity of Life
An Expression of Love
Seeing Love in the Sun
At Home in the Universe
Your Essence Is Kindness
Ahimsa
A Life of Peace
“They Ain’t Makin’ Real Estate No More”
Possessed by Love
A Garbage Experiment
Contentment
“Heart Roots” Revolution
Getting Out of the Fast Lane
Slow, Simple, Beautiful, Loving
Two in a Car
Allah’s Bounty
Speed
The Two-Thirds World
The Divine Self
From the Eight-Point Program: Spiritual Reading
Gentleness
A Healthy Profit
Every Child Will Be Your Child
Mother Earth
Take a Chance on Kindness
Peacemaking
A House United
Afterword
The Blue Mountain Center of Meditation
Your Life Is Your Message
Conservation biologists call the elephant a “keystone” species. Just as an arch cannot stand without its keystone, many other species, and sometimes entire ecosystems, would be lost without the elephant. On the African savannah, the elephant’s foraging creates a mixture of woodlands and grasslands, making the savannah hospitable to many more creatures, from the zebra to the giraffe to the baboon. In drier climates, it provides water not only for itself but for all the other species by creating new water holes and even digging wells. Because of the elephant, a huge, hungry animal with gentle habits, the entire ecosystem flourishes.
I believe that we human beings are meant for no less a role. Today, because of our skills and technology, human society has assumed the position of keystone in the vast, delicately balanced arch of nature. Like the elephants in the forest, our lives affect all the other creatures, plants, and elements around us. They all depend upon us for support and protection.
In one way, our influence now is far from benign. Rather than supporting the rest of life, human beings often seem to be at odds with it. Scientists tell us that many of our social and business activities are not only driving other species to extinction but are threatening the water, soil, and atmosphere on which our own lives depend. We seem to have trouble relating even to our own species. The tension and alienation of our inner cities, the increase in poverty and homelessness, the drug abuse and high suicide rate among our young people all suggest that we lack the wisdom to protect ourselves, let alone the rest of nature.
Yet in another sense, there is great promise today. Around the world – even in some of the countries most troubled by poverty or civil war or pollution – many thoughtful people are making a deep, concerted search for a way to live in harmony with each other and the earth. Their efforts, which rarely reach the headlines, are among the most important events occurring today. Sometimes these people call themselves peace workers, at other times environmentalists, but most of the time they work in humble anonymity. They are simply quiet people changing the world by changing themselves.
The purpose of this book is to encourage those people and the changes they are making. In it, I hope to underscore the tremendous potential of such “tremendous trifles,” to use G. K. Chesterton’s phrase, for improving our lives and the world we live in, and I will be offering some practical suggestions on how to make those changes more satisfying and more powerful.
Through such unobtrusive, almost inaudible work, the changes we would like to see in the world around us can begin immediately in our own lives, making us more secure, more contented, and more effective. Each of us has the capacity to become a little keystone, a healing and protecting force in the family, with friends, at work, in the community, in the environment.
Such little changes can seem painfully small when compared to the kinds of crises we read about in the headlines, but through my personal experience I have become convinced that there is no instrument of change more powerful than the well-lived life. Having had the privilege of growing up in Mahatma Gandhi’s India, walking with him, studying his life, and trying to live by his example, I can say that his simple, loving life has done more to benefit the world than all the speeches and policies composed by politicians in this century – however eloquent, however well-meaning.
Once, while Mahatma Gandhi’s train was pulling slowly out of the station, a reporter ran up to him and asked for a message to take back to his people. Gandhi’s reply was a hurried line scrawled on a scrap of paper: “My life is my message.”
This is the message which all our children are waiting and hoping for. In the coming decades they face the daunting prospect of inheriting our world, with its debts, its national antagonisms, its injured environment. What they are often trying to express through anger or rebellion is a need to be loved – not through words or gifts, but through our personal example. “Say it with flowers” is not enough. We need to say it with our lives. How else will they know that living in harmony with each other and the earth is possible?
Taken together, these small daily efforts to improve our ordinary lives add up to a very powerful force that, in the years to come, can become a kind of spiritual revolution, providing a firm foundation for the kind of political, economic, and ecological improvements we need to make.
In the past two centuries, the world has seen several revolutions. Some of them have brought salutary changes, while others have brought only suffering, but I would venture to say that none of them has brought us the peace our minds are hungering for or the love our hearts are thirsting for. Without such a spiritual foundation, I don’t think any political or economic policy, however new, however brilliant, can fill the crying needs of humanity or protect the earth from the pressure those unfilled needs exert on it.
What I am referring to goes well beyond what we normally call social change. While I have the deepest respect for all those working selflessly to serve the world, many of the so-called “reformers” I have seen both in India and this country have an unpromising approach. They look down from the soapbox or pulpit and say, “Let me reform you, Diane, and you, Steve, and of course you, Bob.”
If Bob says, “What about you?” they reply, “Oh, that can wait. Let me start with Diane and Steve and you.”
That is a familiar refrain in international politics, international economics, international aid, even international education. But the great spiritual teachers of all religions – men and women who have devoted their lives to the art of living in complete harmony, like Francis of Assisi, Teresa of Avila, the Compassionate