Meditations in an Emergency

02/02/2026

But this ideology goes beyond separating humans and our actions from nature; as you can see in the current US government, it wants to segregate us through a hierarchy of inequality, in which straight white Christian men are at the top, and in which women are separate from men and don’t deserve the same rights, immigrants from US born, white from nonwhite, Christian from nonChristian.

It is a sad and lonely worldview and one whose most devout believers often seem miserable, angry, and eager to punish and harm. They have in recent years even directly attacked the idea and value of empathy. The word empathy literally means feeling into, the imaginative extension of the self into the other. I believe that this feeling at its best, as compassion, extends the boundaries of the self, literally makes you bigger as it makes you more connected; the intention of feeling compassion is the intention of expanding and relating and connecting. Its opposite withers you into the smallest version of yourself, a hard knot of ungiving. It robs you of the wealth of relationship; from that comes the sense of poverty and the insatiable hunger for more of our billionaires.

At the very heart of the conflict raging in the United States is a conflict about human nature, a deep moral and philosophical conflict. I believe the isolationists will lose in the long run because they are not only out of step with the majority but they are out of step with reality and because theirs is an impoverished version of who we can be, walking away from the possibilities of love and joy and the sense of abundance and connection from which generosity springs.

In the opposite of the ideology of isolation, we recognize that everything is connected. That is the first lesson that nature teaches if we listen, if we learn, though capitalism and related systems of alienation and objectification taught us all to forget, ignore, or deny it. Nevertheless this cosmology of interconnection has grown more powerful and influential over the past several decades, thanks to many forces seen as separate but that all move us in the same direction: antiracism and feminism which reject discrimination, inequality, and exclusion; gay rights which insisted that gender does not narrowly define who we can be and who and how we can love and become beloved, become family; environmental activism that charts how damage moves downwind, downstream, how sabotaging one piece of an ecosystem affects the whole. The past two hundred years have expanded the idea of universal human rights and equality through revolutions but also through cultural shifts, which themselves can amount to slowmoving, incremental, subtle, and therefore too-often unnoticed revolutions that manifest in a thousand small ways.

Since the early 1990s indigenous people have become far more powerful, visible, taken leadership roles in the global climate movement and become hugely influential on the thinking of us settler-colonialists, first of all by correcting the story that we used to tell that culture and nature were somehow inherently at odds with each other, that human beings were inherently destructive. It has been a great revolution that I have been watching with joy, wonder, and exhilaration since the early 1990s. I talked about the expansion of the idea of rights and equality; the rights of nature is the next phase unfolding across the globe, from Peru and Colombia to Canada and New Zealand.

Indigenous peoples of the Colorado River are seeking personhood for this exploited, exhausted river right now.
But this cosmology of connection comes from many directions. As Roshi Joan Halifax knows from lived experience, since the late 1950s and 1960s, Buddhism has come to the West in a big way and brought us many visions of interconnection – Thich Nhat Hanh’s word “interbeing” is one description; dependent co-arising another, and compassion for all beings and the Boddhisattva vow to liberate all beings one of the central tenets of Mahayana Buddhism.