{"id":197652,"date":"2021-10-18T12:00:29","date_gmt":"2021-10-18T11:00:29","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=197652"},"modified":"2021-10-15T05:16:20","modified_gmt":"2021-10-15T04:16:20","slug":"a-zen-koan-on-columbus-day","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2021\/10\/a-zen-koan-on-columbus-day\/","title":{"rendered":"A Zen Koan on Columbus Day"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>13 Oct 2021 – <\/em>It\u2019s too easy, right? Too simple \u2014 shoving Christopher Columbus off the historical honor roll, pulling down his statues, yanking his \u201cday\u201d away from him and renaming it in honor of the people he murdered, kidnapped, turned into property?<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Or is Indigenous Peoples Day seen by the world as simply a starting point, a launching of the transpatriarchal change in collective humanity we so desperately need but do not understand? I certainly put myself in that category: clueless. I both oppose and participate in environmental devastation, consuming my share of fossil fuels, plastic, etc., etc., even as I join those demanding change and pushing back against political-corporate interests. Yeah, Indigenous Peoples Day, that should do it . . . even as the Amazon burns, the tar-sands oil flows, militarism rules and moneyed interests continue getting what they want.<\/p>\n

Is that it then? Outrage and a shrug just aren\u2019t enough. Even the Green New Deal isn\u2019t enough, not if it involves \u201cextractivism,\u201d i.e., mining lithium<\/a> and other resources crucial in green technology. If the world \u201cgoes green\u201d but stays focused on wealth and domination, new systems will be gamed and indigenous peoples across the planet will continue to be exploited and displaced, their needs and wisdom ignored.<\/p>\n

Maybe the place to start is with this (controversia<\/a>l) declaration: We are all indigenous. By this I mean we all have roots deeper than our comfortable, but guilt-inducing, middle-class lives \u2014 we are all, in fact, part of the circle of life. I say this solely with the hope that believing so will permanently open our minds and let us face what we don\u2019t know, indeed, that it will both let us acknowledge the enormity of what we don\u2019t know and begin realizing and valuing, once again, the sacredness of life. We can then begin contemplating change not with outrage and certainty but with humility.<\/p>\n

Vijay Kolinjivadi<\/a>, in an extraordinary essay published several years ago in Al-Jazeera, notes that for the Green New Deal to work, for it to \u201ctransform the economy and our lives, it must be decolonial.\u201d That is to say, green thinking can\u2019t just slide into place in a context of global domination and the sacredness of money.<\/p>\n

\u201cOur development trajectory,\u201d he writes, \u201chas been marred by the idea that humans are the overlords of the world, who have to tame nature and submit it to exploitation for their exclusive benefit. It implies that human civilization is somehow separate from nature, whose only role is to provide unlimited resources to feed and expand the human material world.\u201d<\/p>\n

As long as we remain structurally separate from nature, we are able to regard environmental collapse as \u201cmerely a symptom of bad management\u201d and attempt to fix the problem without making profound \u2014 and inconvenient \u2014 changes in how we live.<\/p>\n

\u201cAs long as we erroneously see ourselves as outside and above the rest of the living world, we will continue to contribute to its destruction,\u201d he continues. \u201cA decolonial GND (Green New Deal), therefore, requires repositioning ourselves vis-\u00e0-vis nature as an integral part of it \u2014 just as many indigenous peoples have consistently sought to do in their historical and ongoing struggle for cultural autonomy and self-determination.\u201d<\/p>\n

If we begin reconnecting with nature \u2014 whatever in God\u2019s name this means! \u2014 we will have to reconsider virtually every aspect of Western-style development, including the necessity of ever-expanding economic growth, which is the nature of the god we actually worship, a.k.a., money. Bringing about such sociocultural and political rethinking is almost impossible to imagine \u2014 which is to say, we, the global overlords, are not even close to where we need to be. But then again, we will never be. Our journey has no end.<\/p>\n

Kolinjivadi offers this bit of wisdom for our journey: \u201cA decolonial GND requires constant learning, building mutual consent and trust, and self-reflection of the embedded thought processes . . . that we all hold in contributing to such oppression, whether we realize it or not.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe have reached a point of no return and we must realize that there is no savior and no quick-fix solution for the climate catastrophe we currently face. While the \u2018mess\u2019 we are in was not created by all of humanity equally (and we must recognize this!), it is a \u2018mess\u2019 of such proportions that we need committed and unconditional solidarity to get ourselves out of it.\u201d<\/p>\n

My final focus, for now, is on the idea of \u201cconstant learning.\u201d I think there is value to it beyond measure. Every last soul on the planet can engage in constant learning. All that\u2019s required is pushing oneself beyond one\u2019s certainties.<\/p>\n

The other day, in my attempt to re-believe I am part of the circle of life, I took a walk through my Chicago neighborhood. I wound up calling it a \u201cliteracy\u201d walk because mostly what I focused on was the litter that was everywhere, and my goal was to bring it with me back into the circle of life.<\/p>\n

Here\u2019s some of what I encountered: endless cigarette butts and shards of broken glass, a crack spoon, a tennis ball, half a sandwich (with mayonnaise plus lettuce and dirt), a floss holder, a grocery store receipt, a plastic cup and gum wads. In the midst of it all was a Zen koan, which kept asking: What is nature?<\/p>\n

Removing designated trash from the streets, dumping into landfills and\/or the ocean, doesn\u2019t \u201cget rid of\u201d it. So what\u2019s to be done? If we stopped calling it trash, would an answer be forthcoming?<\/p>\n

I ask the question of Christopher Columbus as he disappears from history.<\/p>\n

______________________________________<\/em><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Robert C. Koehler is an award-winning, Chicago-based peace journalist and nationally syndicated writer. His book, <\/em>Courage Grows Strong at the Wound (Xenos Press) is still available. Contact him at koehlercw@gmail.com<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\u00a0Go to Original \u2013 commonwonders.com<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

13 Oct 2021 – It\u2019s too easy, right? Too simple \u2014 shoving Christopher Columbus off the historical honor roll, pulling down his statues, yanking his \u201cday\u201d away from him and renaming it in honor of the people he murdered, kidnapped, turned into property?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":122360,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[41],"tags":[1655,534,1620,866],"class_list":["post-197652","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-tms-peace-journalism","tag-christopher-columbus","tag-indigenous","tag-indigenous-culture","tag-indigenous-rights"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/197652","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=197652"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/197652\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/122360"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=197652"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=197652"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=197652"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}