At the risk of sounding like Scrooge or the Grinch, I often call our season of winter festivities the “Hollow Days” – the time of year when we get busy doing what we “should” but don’t always feel as we’re “supposed to.”
What society tells us we should be doing is getting into the “holiday spirit” and giving gifts, gifts and more gifts while we participate in a variety of seasonal activities meant to keep us cheery.
But our “supposed to” feelings don’t always jibe with our actual experience. We often feel as though we’re on a treadmill of social expectations where we’re asked to dig out our credit cards, shop till we drop, stage or attend the obligatory rituals and eat and drink more than we should to subdue our performance anxiety and stress.
Where did we go wrong in our celebration of the season? Many pundits, of course, have pointed out how commercialism has elbowed out spirituality, how consumption has come to define the holidays.
I believe our current anxieties have evolved – or must evolve – to stem from the recognition that we have exceeded our limits. The planet’s capacity to provide for our perpetually burgeoning consumption and even our own capacity to absorb what we consume has been surpassed.
We know it; and it scares us.
To recapture the meaning of the holidays, we must re-establish our spiritual and emotional connection to the Earth. We must celebrate in ways that enhance rather than degrade life.
Here much more is required than taking a pleasant hike in the woods with family and friends – although such activities might be just the way to enjoy the holidays without acquiring more stuff. Communing with nature, while personally uplifting, remains an isolated act that does not in and of itself engender the shift in global consciousness needed to put humans and the biosphere into sustainable balance.
We need a new revelation, one that appeals to both our rational and spiritual sides. It is found, I believe, in the recognition that everything on this Earth is connected – and that this interconnectivity is both scientific fact and a mystery, comprehensible but simultaneously nothing short of miraculous. Rationally, this revelation could be called “biosphere consciousness, ” although I prefer to call it “biospirituality.”
To contemplate our connections to one another and everything else in our environment, to deeply understand and come to terms with those connections, is to free oneself from oppressive – opposed to supportive and sustainable – materialism. Gently urging others to such contemplations can be your gift.
But how can this gift of a new biosphere consciousness be given to and received by a world that is racing toward oblivion? Can it come in time? The hopeful answer is inherent in how connected beings interact, a topic we’ll explore in upcoming columns at our ecological house.
Philip S. Wenz, who grew up in Durango and Boulder, now lives in Corvallis, Oregon, where he teaches and writes about environmental issues. Reach him via e-mail through his website, www.your-ecological-house.com.
