Sustainability is a Spiritual Practice: a relationship to humanity and the earth
We have been lost in a thicket of distracting fog grasping for branches trying to find our way back home. We’ve been told to be safe and take one step at a time—to focus on reusable straws and plant based diets. But the hidden truth is we are already home, and each of our steps may be leading us farther away. We only need to dramatically clear the fog from our eyes.
Sustainability is deceptively simple. It’s been in practice for millennia by indigenous cultures around the world. The rapacious ego-centric Western colonial imperial culture has left a cavernous hole in our world and emotional intelligence. Sustainability has become a buzzword for brands to paste on marketing campaigns and to exhaust consumers with worry over having the right answer through their purchases. However, sustainability requires something completely different of us.
Sustainability is a spiritual practice and rooted in community. Community is beyond the sidewalks in our zip code or theoretical political borders. Our community includes every living being on our planet: from the physical shoulder you lean on and those in lands across the oceans to every creature and blade of grass in our ecosystem. We, specifically in Western ideology, have been taught that the world is for ours to use. It’s for ours to be apart of. Many indigenous cultures have understood and lived this throughout history. Our mainstream Western consumption culture has much to catch up on.
We must understand community as a collective connection on a much deeper level. Our souls are pieces of the larger life force of everything around us—plants, animals, people. If you have ever stood in silent awe by the immense weightiness of a cliff’s edge or a magical sunset, you may have experienced the true spirit of our greater existence and the deep peace that it brings. These small moments of recognition of your inherit connectedness to nature and all that come with it is the beginning to understanding the spiritual nature of sustainability.
Our creation is rooted in the creation of all. The South African IsiZulu culture has a beautiful saying: ubuntu ngubuntu abantu. The English language has a lacuna for the phrase—and subsequently meaning behind it. The phrase roughly translates to the principle that our humanity is all wrapped up in the personhood of everyone else. The creation of ‘the other’ has become one of the most dangerous belief systems destroying nations, cultures, relationships, and our earth. It has corrupted our intrinsic relationship to our world through nature and one another. There is no ‘other,’ because we are all woven into one greater life. Ubuntu ngubuntu abantu.
The circular nature of our breathe serves as an analogy for this unity. We breathe in life borrowed from the plants, return it for their support, for them to charitably give again and again to others. Just as breathing, living a sustainable life becomes second nature once you are tapped into the spirit running through our planet. You feel the deeper, innate connection and respect to your surroundings and all creatures, as you are one with them. There is an immediate desire to appreciate and honor everything this earth and humanity offer. Your choices become easier and lighter as you remove your worth from consumption culture to life—yours and all others.
You become free to see all the value in your surroundings and belongings. That t-shirt in your cupboard is now more: it is the fibre that was harvested from the earth, it is all the artisans’ hands that went into manipulating and sewing the fabric, it is the designer’s idea imagined, it is the factory conditions it was produced in; it is, and always has been, so much more. Understanding the depth of resources and work that go into any item or service elevates its worth.
Everything we consume has consequences that affect this supply chain. Enlightening yourself to this network raises the question of whether or not all the effort, resources, and often times oppression, are worth you owning that item or it being on the store shelf. Connecting to the sustainability movement in a spiritual way reveals the profound empathy that being truly sustainable asks of us.
For many of us who have the privilege of philosophically discussing sustainability, we are removed by oceans from the oppressive atrocities that corporations carry out in the name of greed and consumption. While we think it’s just another t-shirt, rivers needed for sustaining communities are being polluted with dye, chemical smoke is permeating their air, women workers are being assaulted, families are starving over lack of pay, and people are dying from unsafe work conditions. When you relate the items to their and your greater connection to humanity and nature, you realize you can’t separate the injustice. You begin to live consciously, wholly connected to life. And this is how we heal. There is no longer room for disassociation. We have to confront the issues plaguing our world and fight to change for the love of it. Once you’ve opened yourself to the spiritual side of sustainability, the fog disappears and love for community settles in at home.