They say that Boulder, Colorado doesn’t see a lot of homeless people. It is, after all, an affluent community where on the one hand, homelessness is not prevalent, but where on the other hand, homeless from other communities might be drawn precisely because of its affluence. Yesterday, as I was stopped at a busy intersection in Boulder, I saw a man carrying a sign that read “Laid off, father of five, out of food.”  The man did not look like a chronically homeless person. He was well dressed in casual clothes wearing khaki pants, a clean shirt and jacket and a baseball cap.

Last weekend in Boulder, the renowned eco-activist, Vandana Shiva, spoke and dropped a bomb on the audience which has kept many people who attended buzzing about the one take-away statement that gave them insomnia most nights since then. Shiva said that if the human species continues its present destructive trajectory, it has no more than 100 years left on the planet.

Around the world, today is an international day of climate change demonstrations championing the number 350 parts per million of carbon dioxide it considers safe for our atmosphere. I really hate to tell all those well-meaning people, but the real deal is that NO part per million of carbon dioxide is  safe  in our atmosphere at this moment given the dire state of polluted plunder it is already in.

In an article entitled  The Fallacy of Climate Activism, by Adam Sachs, posted in Truth to Power’s Daily News Digest last month, Sachs tells us that global warming is a symptom of a cultural reality that must be addressed. Sachs writes:

“The root cause, the source of the symptoms, is 300 years of our relentlessly exploitative, extractive, and exponentially growing techno-culture, against the background of ten millennia of hierarchical and colonial civilizations. The second error is our stubborn unwillingness to understand that the battle against greenhouse-gas emissions, as we have currently framed it, is over. It is absolutely over and we have lost. We have to say so.”

Then comes a story this week from Pew Research that says that fewer Americans believe in the reality of climate change than did in 2007 and 2008. Well, if you’re laid off, a father/mother of five, and out of food, why would you want to add more to your worries plate, especially something as distant and remote  as global warming?

In Clive Hamilton’s article, How To Deal With Climate Change Grief, posted yesterday on the Truth to Power website and sent to all of you, he notices the various ways we deal with the bad news about climate change, but he also manages to find the  good  news underlying most of our responses to it:

“Although perhaps performed unconsciously, the process has therapeutic and thus adaptive value. A number of psychological studies have shown that, in the same way that traumatic events often lead to personal growth, considered reflection on death tends to bring about a shift in personal goals away from materialistic, self-focused pursuits to an intrinsic and other-directed orientation.”

In other words, all this bad news, as I stated repeatedly in Sacred Demise, is calling us to look long and hard at death our own and that of the ecosystem. But even more fundamentally, to ask the question: Why am I here at this particular moment in history as these particular events are unfolding? Am I simply a pawn in some cosmic chess game? Did I just drop in here when I did for no reason? Of course, everyone has a right to embrace the later, then reach for the Jack Daniels and/or the razor blades.

The irony is that what is most important in the face of death is to be fully alive or so the West African indigenous tribes tell us. So does the American poet, Mary Oliver.

When death comes
like the hungry bear in autumn;

when death comes and takes all the bright coins from his purse to buy
me, and snaps the purse shut;

when death comes
like the measles-pox; when death comes
like an iceberg between the shoulder blades,

I want to step through the door full of curiosity, wondering: what is
it going to be like, that cottage of darkness?
And therefore I look upon everything

as a brotherhood and a sisterhood,

and I look upon time as no more than an idea,

and I consider eternity as another possibility,
and I think of each life as a flower, as common

as a field daisy, and as singular,
and each name a comfortable music in the mouth

tending as all music does, toward silence,
and each body a lion of courage, and something

precious to the earth.
When it’s over, I want to say: all my life

I was a bride married to amazement.

I was the bridegroom, taking the world into my arms.
When it is over, I don’t want to wonder

if I have made of my life something particular, and real.

I don’t want to find myself sighing and frightened,
or full of argument.

I don’t want to end up simply having visited this world.

The best way I know to be fully alive, whether homeless, unemployed, or trying to feed five children with no food on hand whether terminally ill or choking on sandstorms left in the wake of climate chaos, is to open to the purpose and meaning of these experiences.

That is not to say that tangible solutions should not be sought; indeed they should and must be, but tangible is only temporary. The soul has its reasons for showing up here when it did, and those reasons will outlive everything else.

Carl Jung had this to say about suffering: He identified two forms of suffering: meaningless and meaningful. Meaningless suffering is everywhere, being part of the human condition, as the Buddha recognized. This existential suffering is the result of our trying to avoid pain, by denial and repression.

None of us wants pain. We naturally shun it. But doing so is like the spleen refusing to do its job. It leads to big trouble, dis-ease, and real problems. In the realm of the psyche, these are called neuroses.  Jung identified the long-term habit of repression (our stuffing  unpleasant feelings, facts, etc. within) as the cause of neuroses.

Because we all do this, we are all  neurotic  to one degree or another. This is  meaningless  suffering because it makes no sense, has no significance, and gives us no benefit. This form of suffering, in other words, is not a gift.

The form of suffering that is meaningful comes when we stop repressing and take up our moral task as humans to deal consciously with our pain. In this process, we take up the pain that is endemic to living and work with it, in the knowledge that pain has a purpose.

It is a warning, with an intrinsic message. We need to listen to our inner voices to learn this message.

To do this, we allow the full range of emotions to flow through us, without putting up resistance to the process. We set the intention to experience the full range of feelings be they good or bad. This requires moral courage, but, while it is uncomfortable (especially in the early stages), it affords the same benefits as a well-working spleen: We are more resilient. We have more energy. Our spirit is purified. And, most of all, we begin to be aware of the meaning behind the pain we experience.