The correction of imbalances

The correction of imbalances

Mohandas Gandhi drove the British Empire out of India without firing a shot. He observed early on that empires always fall, no matter how strong they are. Power and wealth controlled by too few people is as unnatural as an upside-down pyramid.

The nature of healing is the correction of imbalances.

If you tip over you may fall, but at least it's more stable to lie on the ground. We are constantly balancing our health through waking and sleeping, eating and labor, hard exertion and relaxation, our needs and the needs of others.

Like India vs England, we too are faced with major balancing acts. Nature plays this game like a dance. Gravity and electromagnetism keep us safe on our little blue Earth, while the Milky Way holds itself together around a bright center. Storms occur when atmospheric water, pressure and temperature rebalance. Likewise, moodiness, depression and all kinds of emotional stress are storms that try to correct something in our personality. All of this happens beautifully whether you pay attention to it or not.

After college, I lived and worked for a while on a 4,000-acre ranch in the Colorado Rockies. Open grasslands and forests of spruce, aspen, doug fir and ponderosa were covered everywhere. There was one exception: the “Columbus Tree”. This gnarled, twisted memory of a tree was an ancient juniper, the only one of its kind in the area. A prominent local claimed to have taken a core sample and estimated that it predated Columbus' arrival in the Americas. At that time the region was covered with similar trees. This balance had naturally changed over time.

What happens when the change is us?

Check out this interactive map in the New York Times. Across the U.S., farmers are waking up to brand new, herbicide-resistant plants in their fields. One of the main players, called pigweed, grows so fast, large and robust that it grows massive bundles of cotton. There are growing fears that the agricultural system on which we depend will be thrown into chaos. How did we grow food before petrochemicals? Is Round-up the best our agricultural intellect has developed in the last 100 years? Surprisingly, the accompanying article never mentions organic, permaculture, biodynamic, or other sustainable farming methods. One might ask whether there is anything to be learned from this.

When Spanish conquistadors first came to the American West, it was not the sagebrush country it is today. The sage plant has grown steadily over the past hundred years due to increased grazing, land use and its own toughness. It is a medicinal plant for Native Americans and New Age spiritualists. Sage is believed to grow in areas where the land is unsettled. Viewed from this perspective, sage is a sign of healing that has shaped and become the land we know and love today.

Likewise, I don't worry about foxtails, just people. Fortunately, I found an example where the people involved – no less invested in the outcome than the farmers – changed course and something almost miraculous happened. In the United States, we overprescribe antibiotics for infections, particularly for the common earache known as acute otitis media (AOM). As a result, almost half of these cases now involve drug-resistant forms of bacteria called Streptococcus pneumoniae, or streptococci. I'm sure you've heard of strep because you've probably had it yourself. Over in the Netherlands, drug-resistant strep accounts for only 1% of AOM. Why the big difference? Where have all the drug-resistant strep gone? The answer reads like a page from the Gandhi script: When we stopped fighting, our enemy died of itself. You see, when Dutch children as young as two show up with middle ear infections, their doctors give them four days to mend themselves. By and large, the children are healing. It turns out that all of these drug-resistant strains are, well, weak. They literally evened out. Penicillin also works again. Today only 31% of all children in the Netherlands receive antibiotics for AOM. In the US it is over 95% and we use Keflex. Ouch.

Ok, I'm ready to go out on a limb and share some questions I've been asking for years. Given all the stories above, what are “invasive species”? Are they just happening faster than we are used to? Why are we fighting them? What do we not like about the change we are part of? What if humans were natural? What then is the mass extinction we are living through? What if a massive extinction of species on Earth, crossed with a true human flourishing, life on Earth simply becomes more intelligent? Are things just getting nicer and more complex? Is this some kind of miracle? What do we want to learn from this?

This is my message to you for 2011: Live from your heart. Radical. Don't wait for the economy or politics to catch up. There is a higher order organizing principle in the universe that you can feel in your sense of wonder and in your connection to the people, places, and things you love. Review each choice based on your opinion on it. Find out what you really think and feel. Listen to your intuition and the signals in your gut. It's time to get smarter and smarter about your life.

The truth is that our world is too complicated to understand with just our heads. There is only one way to become in tune with ourselves and everything around us: to be present, right here, right now, and to respond to our own innermost guidance with maximum mindfulness. Do you think you're unnatural? Guess again.

The constant shifting of people, species, ecosystems, money, cultures - all of our complex relationships between family, friends, nations and the earth itself - could take a long time to balance into a beautiful, stable civilization. But all things considered – and I mean all things – the future is looking up for you, me, everyone and everything on Earth. We're already on the way. You're doing it right now. It's inevitable.

I give it, oh, let's say 5,000 years.