Real talk: Alastair McIntosh’s Thought for the week
‘Vision is a reordering of how we see reality.’
Last month, just as the welcome news came in that the Dundonian Jim Skea has been elected chair of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, it was reported that over forty people had died in the wildfires that are ravaging the Mediterranean coasts of Africa and Europe.
The reasons for these fires are compound. They can include lightning strikes, accidents, arson, and changes in how people live with and use the forests. But the bottom line is that drought has made the forest floors tinder-dry, and few scientists now doubt that climate change is playing a driving role in contributing to such exceptional conditions.
But what to do about it? Politically, there seems to be a stuckness. Voters want to see global warming tackled, but fewer will vote for measures that they think might weigh upon their freedoms. We can blame the world’s governments, but it’s also true that stuckness hides in many of us.
And the consequences? There’s a poem by WB Yeats, called ‘The Second Coming’, that speaks of a time when, ‘Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold’. And when that connection to our spiritual centre is lost, says Yeats, ‘mere anarchy is loosed upon the world’.
Yet, there is an antidote. As the Hebrew prophet Habakkuk put it, ‘vision awaits its appointed time’ (Habakkuk 2:3). And vision in this sense isn’t just another strategic plan. Vision is a reordering of how we see reality.
Without it, we’ll never reach the roots of climate change, or war, or poverty. We’d just wallow in the same old stuckness of our limitations.
The Hindu scriptures say that vision is of ‘a light that shines in our heart… smaller than a grain of rice… or… mustard-seed [yet] greater than the Earth’ (Chandogya Upanishad, 3.14.3). And so great things begin from the smallest steps that are taken by the least of us.
We can’t buy the vision that restores right relationships with each other and with the planet. But in the still small moments we can reach into the ‘centre’, and ask. For, just as the poet Hugh MacDiarmid wrote in ‘On a Raised Beach’:
The inward gates of a bird are always open.
It does not know how to shut them.
That is the secret of its song.
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