The Inner and Outer of the Gulf Oil Deluge: Questions and a Prayer --James O'Dea

The Inner and Outer of the Gulf Oil Deluge: Questions and a Prayer

I have noticed that there are significant numbers of people praying and meditating
about the deluge of oil spilling into the Gulf. Marianne Williamson and a
host of others have been tweeting about meditating everyday at noon and
making this a global effort. But what is the content of those prayers? Are we
sending love to all species and to the human communities affected? Are we
expressing inner concern? Are we looking for miraculous clean-up? Are we
looking for remorse by those responsible? Are we looking for remorse in
ourselves for the way we live? Are we looking for transformative insight? Are
we practicing deep non-judgmental detachment? Are we intending the healing of
the waters? Are we healing our own despair? Are we channeling moral outrage
into a wave-form in consciousness which will bring our gas guzzling greed to an
end? Are we seeing in those prayers what we have to do to change the
story?

I know some people think it is quite old-fashioned to actually have
content to your prayers. But here is my prayer for the Gulf:

Forgive me, all life forms of the Gulf, and all exquisitely unique and diverse
sentient beings. I have colluded in your poisoning. Forgive me people of the
Gulf I saw it coming; saw the ruin that would befall you, but I did nothing
effective to stop it. I said a lot over the years but did not really transform
my words into creative enactments of moral imagination or sacred activism to
end our dependence on fossil fuels. Forgive me beautiful waters of the
Gulf and the ocean, I am one of those so called civilized ones who is addicted
to fuels and all of the plundering and destruction of Nature which that
addiction causes. I know that this is the way the human species
"evolved" to date: by overlooking our rapacious appetite for
machine-driven luxury. I know I am part of the blindness and distraction that
seduces us into participating as a species in the destruction of the collective
habitat of all life on this jewel of a planet. Other species do not destroy the
very habitat needed for their survival.

Help me now to return to deep community. Help me to commune with Nature, not as
a tourist but as a co-inhabitant of what was always designed to be an
inter-species domain of optimal co-existence. Help me to participate in finding
communal transport, communal food sources, communal spirituality and a politics
of local ecology in resonance with global ecology.

May consciousness witness the travesties and crimes that humans have committed
against Nature; and may this consciousness not seek guilt and punishment as its
new distraction. But, rather, let it seek to restore, to renew and revitalize
its common aspiration with all of life to live in the beauty and natural
fecundity of eco-Logical design. Inspire us to harmonize once again with
Nature's powerful wisdom and intricate generosity. Allow us to live without
these insatiable accoutrements of our marauding vanities.

Let our leaders fall to their knees in awe at the restorative justice within
the natural order and let it mirror for them the teachings that must be
followed if we are to end this era of ego-driven defiance of Nature's Holy
Order. I know that if we seek forgiveness the only atonement Nature will
ask of us will be to rejoin its oneness and end our rebellion. Are we
ready? Or must we kill more Life before we see that we have definitively
signed the death-warrant of our own species?

James O'Dea Crestone, Colorado