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Deep hope
 

EARTHFUTURE.COM by Guy Dauncey

 
Once-fertile fields lie fallow
where the seeds were never sown,
and dust is deep around the dreams
where idle winds have blown.
So unfulfilled ambitions fade
and slowly disappear,
while introspective hours pass
in swan song to the year.
- S.F. Records

It all began 4.5 billion years ago, 50,000 years after the Earth was formed, when Earth’s crust was still molten magma. A planetesimal the size of Mars came crashing into the Earth, pushing it off its vertical axis, creating the tilt which gives our planet its seasons. As Earth orbits the sun once a year, the tilt affects the amount of sunshine that reaches parts of the planet at different times of the year.
When the northern part of the Earth tilts towards the sun, we receive more sunlight, causing lovers’ hearts to break into song, and everything to burst into blossom.
When the northern part tilts away from the sun, we receive less sunlight, causing leaves to fall to their quiet winter beds, snow to fall, and poets to write sad odes to lost hopes and passing loves.
Spring, summer, fall, winter. Bird and whale migrations. We owe them all to that ancient collision.
It also created the moon. The metals in the planetesimal sank deep into the Earth’s core, and some of the rock was flung back into space where it coalesced to form the moon, causing lovers all over the world to experience the most enchanting of feelings.
Here on the wet, west coast of Canada, as December moves towards the longest night of the year, and hopelessness for some becomes worthy of its own shrine, it seems appropriate to dwell on hope. For as the winter solstice passes, at 4:42 am on Tuesday, December 21, Earth’s orbit around the sun will begin to bring us longer days and more sunlight.
There are three kinds of hope. There is simple hope, that says, “I hope I win the lottery,” or “I hope my children find love, and happy marriages.”
There is heroic hope that says “However dark the times, however dire the threat, I will never give up hope. As long as there is breath in our bodies, we can continue to hope and work for victory.” This is the kind of hope that Churchill offered the British people in the darkest years of the Second World War, when Hitler had occupied most of Europe. It is the kind of hope that many activists hold tight to as they struggle to end the onslaught against nature that the human race is pursuing, led by the world’s most powerful nations and corporations.
And there is deep hope that says, “However dire things may seem, the universe wants life to succeed. It wants dreams to be realized and love to be fulfilled. Deep down in its evolutionary origins, it wants life to discover that it is part of a wondrous miracle, with a spiritual nature and that all consciousness journeys towards wholeness.”
Is this just an interesting idea? Is it an article of faith, like the virgin birth, regardless of what science says? Is it a foolish fallacy that gives us comfort against the cold emptiness of space, despair and death? Or is it a potentially valid description of evolution that may one day be proven scientifically, becoming a new guiding paradigm, linking science and spirit, political change and human hope?
We have to hold strong to science as the means by which we explore the secrets of nature; but we must also remember that science has set itself an artificial boundary, limiting its inquiries to the realm of matter, leaving the realm of spirit and soul to others. The boundary was established in the 17th century as a way to keep the church happy by not poaching on its territory, and to guarantee that scientific evidence was solid and tangible. “Here there be angels” was not something that lent itself to scientific scrutiny, so it was easier to leave it alone.
But in leaving it alone, science deprived itself of access to the whole inner world of consciousness. Later, some scientists would say that consciousness was simply an artifact, created by the brain’s chemistry. They would even deny that animals (and male babies) felt pain. Their intellectual descendents still insist that evolution is no more than a random process of selfish genes, seeking to replicate.
If we acknowledge that the spiritual world is real, because of our own inner experiences, we need to cross that boundary. In so doing, we open the possibility that evolution is more than a random material process, and we have to ask the critical question, “If spirituality exists, where did it come from? Where is it going?” It is here, when you ponder deeply on the nature of love, life and the universe, that deep hope emerges. In spite of stupidity, in spite of cruelty, in spite of death, a deeper force prevails and lives within us, every day.

Guy Dauncey is author of Stormy Weather: 101 Solutions to Global Climate Change (New Society Publishers) and other titles. He lives in Victoria.
www.earthfuture.com .
 
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