a noon day star

Waking yesterday was like a minor miracle; the world was snowbound, even quieter than normal around here, the muffling up of noise by the blanketing of snowfall left a world that was almost silent and somehow strangely charged. But last night, with the news, it is like sadness or dismay but some sound sense of things has not departed, the sense that things are at a woeful ebb but that more hope, more force of attitude will surely still return because it must.

Perhaps negotiations were destined to fail by the standards we had set for them, perhaps it’s better that we are not locked into some binding half-arsed settlement when the situation calls for so much more. The road to Copenhagen was a long one, which makes it all the harder that we have so little now to show for it. But this must still be just the beginning of a mettling of wills to bring about a treaty that is in any real way acceptable.

We all know what’s at stake, we all know the gravity of our collective situation. But our fate is not yet settled. What’s clear, what the summit shows above all else is that we must put faith in the power of the world’s people themselves to affect the course of history. Efforts by our governments are surely to be welcomed but even the most effective, binding targets are quite meaningless if they do not have the will of the people to support them. And the absence of such targets puts only more responsibility on our shoulders; as individuals and communities.

And besides all this, it seems our governments are bound by an economic model of constant growth that is as much of a problem as - and which in any case goes a long way to beget - any number of chimneys, any amount of oil of dirty coal. These things are twinned, go hand in hand; without a major shift of fundamental paradigms we are locked into a model of destruction that renders any summit little more than a frantic rearranging of the deckchairs.

The future comes up from the ground, from underneath our feet, and is borne out in the visions that we hold, is breathed to life by the extent that we can imagine something different, by the scope of our diagnosis of the ills that we sit side by side with and accept as normal or just inescapable. The system, or simply the dynamics of a global infrastructure built on oil and the long distance transport of all kinds of goods, determines what we must seek to overcome. Power, and heat, the means of keeping our machines in motion; these sources are a boon but so smoothly given it is hard not to take them for granted. We must face up to the cost of our daily consumption and the more we can provide for ourselves in ways that we can clock, the more we can wean ourselves off what is extraneous, then the more we can come to value the great gifts the world has laid at our door and which we daily work away at; beyond what we can actually afford, beyond all scale of what is human, of any sense of where the balance lies.

There are those who might welcome in what’s coming as some kind of cleansing, or who at any rate value the wild above our human ship, call it what you will; civilisation, dystopia or collective hallucination made real. And the scale of our various imbalances are not helped by the maths that state that there are more people than the earth can actually support, that we are eating into resources of all future generations. And yet we are all caught up in a dream and for the lucky ones amongst us it is beautiful; life, health, friendships, family, the thousand watersheds and markings out in life that make it meaningful. For many, any kind of wish to see it all come crumbling down seems simply intransigent or worse.

The reality though is that a major change is on its way, whether from a climate driven to the brink, or just our dwindling resources of all kinds and that the road will in every likelihood be at least rocky at times. Which simply makes it all the more imperative that we must prepare while there is time, that if we cherish all that is good about a culture, about what it means to lead good lives, to value our humanity, we must change our customs and our course to keep hold of what is meaningful. And, crucially, we may just about be able to achieve this if we can pull ourselves away from everything that no longer serves, from anything that goes beyond what is needed. And comfort is a human need, even if we may need to redefine how we come by it. The truly good things are generally not bought or sold and it may well be, if we can come together, that we will be richer - in time, in company - than many of us are with how things stand.

Meanwhile our governments will hammer out their treaties and I hope that doing so over the coming months and even years may go some way to addressing the most fundamental imbalances in the global economic system. I hope that justice can be agreed upon between North and South, just as I hope the southern hinterland within our northern nations can find a greater voice, that we can build a future based on individual awakening to responsibility for our every action, for our every pattern of behaviour. We need not wait for global politicians to forge the way ahead.

Here, around my flat, around the hills surrounding this old town, the snow lies thick and speaks of long established settlement, of peace. All is quiet and the feeling still persists that things can somehow still work out. Whether this will actually be so will depend on a shifting state of gears, of stillness waking up to motion, even to a storm of movement. But for now, the world is quiet and though the logic says we should be only too dismayed, the feeling of some promise is still with us, albeit battered, albeit even partially betrayed for the time being.

In a few days time the sun will shift, the days will grow again, we will stumble from our hangovers into another year, bright or harsh or coldly real but clearer and we’ll carry on because we each of us carry as great a potential for hope as any international gathering, because the future can be found in what we choose to carry in our actions, in our every intent, in the dreams we choose to keep alive because not to do so never was an option and every one of us holds power equal to the miracle of the noon day star enshrined by Buddhist philosophy, the miracle that lets us take our place upon this earth that we must now all hold as dear as any other relative.

Copyright all Text and Images J.A. Hindle 2008