Art, Grief, and Transformation…

So there I was, sitting on the stairs to the beautiful garden, green and lush with moisture from the sprinklers going on at the peak of the day, the sun is shining bright, perfect blue sky, not a single cloud, and all I could think was how wastefulness and out of connection with nature we live.

Been reading this interview of Chris Jordan, a photographer who made this very moving video “Midway” about the Midway atoll where the birds are dying from plastic trash that humans have produced on the other ends of the Pacific…

… it had me cry but also marvel at the beauty of death, while I’ve been thinking about what he said,

“One of the fundamental problems of our world, underlying a lot of the disasters that are happening, is that we’re disconnected from what we feel. I think it would be fair to say that American culture is the culture that is most detached from its feelings of any culture in the world. We’ve become separated from nature and urbanized in this weird, new, overwhelming way—and the only way many of us have found to cope is to disconnect from the anxiety and the fear.

The nature of the information that we have to deal with compounds that disconnection even further. We converse daily in numbers of millions and billions as if we understand them. When I say we use 210 billion plastic bottles in the United States every year, I assume that I understand what that number means, and whoever is listening assumes they do, too. In fact it’s totally incomprehensible. There are all these sociological studies that demonstrate vividly that the human mind cannot comprehend numbers higher than a few thousand. There are all these phenomena around the world, whether it’s the 1.2 billion people in the world who lack access to safe drinking water or the 10 million tons of plastic that are swirling around in the Pacific Ocean. We can’t see those phenomena, and the only information we have available to try to relate to them is in the form of numbers we absolutely cannot comprehend. It’s no wonder that we can’t relate to our global culture on any kind of feeling level.

That’s where I think art comes in, and why I think it’s so important right now, because feeling is the kingdom of art. I’ve gotten to meet lots of scientists who are uniformly wringing their hands in frustration at their inability to convey to the public any sense of the extreme urgency they feel about the issues that they’re studying. The underlying phenomena are profoundly important, and yet the information we’re receiving is fundamentally dry and incomprehensible. Art can act as a mediator between science and the public, translating what science can tell us into a visual language that we can understand, that allows for personal connection and feeling. My hope for all my work, and especially my Midway work, is to make the global personal.”

I think he has done a terrific work  (http://www.chrisjordan.com) and I wish more people would see it.

This world is dying! We are dying! But we are also being born, the world changing constantly…

Was that what Siddharta (the Buddha) saw when he came down from his fancy palace and decided to search for freedom from old age, disease and death, and found this world to be “unreal” and impermanent?

So what to do? Is there anything to be done at all? Perhaps it is just a lesson?

In the last parapraph in his interview Chris Jordan says:
“I believe that we need to allow ourselves to feel grief deeply. Anger and rage and shame—those are surface feelings. Grief is deep. Grief and love might be the two deepest human emotions. When we allow ourselves to really grieve, it’s a transformational experience.
People I’ve known who have gone through the long slow death of a loved one from cancer, who have fully grieved and fully said goodbye and fully experienced the process, have come out of that experience transformed. They know more deeply who they are and what their priorities are. The Dalai Lama is not the only person in the world who has access to that kind of wisdom. We all do, but it gets clouded and fogged over by our daily rush and the messages we keep getting from our consumer culture, that material things will bring us happiness. We’re all so involved in this headlong rush to a more materially luxurious lifestyle that we forget who we are and what really matters. We so badly need to reconnect with that right now.”

What do you think?