Interview with John Seed
"...we live in a culture of denial, where we are not supposed to feel grief and anguish, and horror and rage and terror about what's happening in the world...if we do feel these things, we tend to keep it to ourselves, ....we are afraid of distressing another people with our distress, and the problem with this is that these feelings are actually not socially constructed...and they are part of our intelligence; indeed, for most of our existence, all of our pre-human existence, these feelings were the entirety of our intelligence before humans started thinking, all of our ancestors made decisitons based upon another kind of intelligence, and the success of this intelligence can be understood by considering that - without exceptions - every single one of our ancestors was intelligent enough to reach the age of being able to reproduce herself before it was consumed. So, this incredible pedigree of intelligence that precedes us...we call it intuition, we call it instinct, it doesn't matter what we call it, it is the ancestor of what we call feeelings..so, then in the last hundreds of thousands of years, thinking has emerged as a very useful adjunct to this earlier intelligence, but now we behave as if we think we can make our way through life entirely by thinking and that we can somehow leave feelings behind...the enviromental crisis is an indication of the failure of this project: we know what is happening to our world, everybody knows this now, and yet it doesn't seem to change anything. The problem is that without the passionof our feelings to back up the thoughts, it doesn't lead to action, it doesn't lead to change in our behaviour. We feel paralyzed, we feel stuck, we feel helpless, we feel hopeless..."what can one person do anyway...?" and so on...what I learnt from Joanna Macy is that when we create a safe container to invite these feelings, a place where we can honor the pain that we feel for our world, when we do this...it leads to empowerment, it leads to a tremendous liberation of energy that becomes available in a joyous way to engage and to adress the problems that we face..." John Seed
