These days we often hear people say, “I no longer recognize my world.”
Many see our changing climate like this. The seasons come and go in ways new to us. Drought, hurricanes, fires, and floods surround us with overwhelming force, often stronger than anyone can remember. Millions of people are already on the move, fleeing rising seas, fires with smoke that pollutes the air across continents, and droughts that foreshadow those fires as the land turns to desert. Humans must learn to live in a world where we are no longer the “master of the landscape,” engineering everything to make it safe. Change is occurring at levels beyond our old understanding, change that we cannot control. We are facing change beyond change.
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The rising tide of such big changes has been predicted for many years now. When students asked Zen Master Seung Sahn how to face great change, he replied, “Hide under the Path.” What does this mean? How does one keep an open and generous mind to support everyone in the face of change so vast that the future is hard to imagine?
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Practice points the way to use and build on that understanding as we help one another. Everyone has to work together to forge the way ahead, and our practice points each of us to the work right there at our feet. Understanding alerts us, and then our practice expands and directs us, revealing and unwinding the practical path forward to healing this world.
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