Runnin' on Empty December

Runnin’ on Empty

Conversations with Caren Black on the View from Oil’s Peak

December

Musings on the Abundance Bypass

Never you mind the exit signs

We got lots of time

We can't quit 'til we get

To the other side

Aretha, Freeway of Love (Pink Cadillac)

— C. 1985, Narada Michael Walden and Jeffrey Cohen

‘Tis the season of ceremony and songs. Song titles, like proverbial sugarplums, dance in my head as I write this, my eleventh column -- and my last, at least for a while. Like all of us, I need to budget my time, and that need forces a hiatus from hipfish.

“My mama told me, You better shop around (shop, shop around), whoa-yeah”, wrote Smokey Robinson and Berry Gordy in 1960. Seems we took them to heart. News in my email today: “A survey suggests consumers spend about $28 billion over the first weekend of holiday shopping. That’s more than the GDP of at least 119 nations.” Maybe Billy Joel should change his 1993 lyrics from, “It’s all about soul” to “It’s all about ‘sold’.” He’d be all over that, ‘cause he also wrote (same album),

“There ain't much work out here

In our consumer power base,

No major industry,

just miles and miles of parking space….

Low supply and high demand,

Here in No Man’s Land.”

Suggestion: Check out the Alternative Gift Fair Dec 11 in Manzanita, where you can donate to a local nonprofit in someone’s name as their holiday gift. What greater gift than to put the name of someone you care about on something worthwhile? Beats prepackaged plastic crap from Wal-Mart. Meaningful giving makes it “all about soul” again.

Truly, I think the vast majority of us are driven by Soul not “sold”, but we get stuck on a bypass and miss our exit. In 1912, Eleanor H. Porter penned an American classic, Pollyanna, a name now synonymous with wishful thinking. Walt Disney then built an empire on this image, and the largest generation in history grew up on it:

Like a bolt out of the blue,

Fate steps in to see you through.

When you wish upon a star,

Your dreams come true.

(Ned Washington, 1940)

By Jiminy, let me illustrate…

Your friend comes home from the doctor with a diagnosis of cancer and a prognosis of six months to live. She could obediently follow all the doctor’s treatment recommendations and die six months later. Not good. Instead, she decides the doctor is being “negative.” She “stays positive,” refuses treatment, envisions herself as completely healthy, and goes on with her life. ‘Til she dies six months later.

Pollyanna Positivism’s fatal flaw? Trying to bypass the dualistic reality of this life. “Positive” is defined by “negative,” cannot exist apart from it any more than light exists apart from darkness, up from down, or birth from death and regeneration.

Regeneration is key. We seem to have forgotten that death is as much of the womb as the tomb. Seeds germinate in the dark before they grow; life returns to the earth to nourish the seeds. Yin and yang.

Pollyanna Positivism, aka “New Age Bypass,” keeps people positive -- that someone (else) will find a solution and save them. Positive that no new or different action is needed from them personally, just a lot of talk. Positive that they “live in abundance” and can continue to reproduce themselves into overshoot and still expect the highest material standard of living in a finite world -- off the backs and out of the mouths of millions of other humans, and with the resulting extinction of millions of other species -- because they “deserve” it.

They’re riding on the freeway of love in pink Cadillacs, bypassing the problems we all face, pointing derisive fingers at anyone who does not follow their lead in turning a blind eye, proclaiming their lifestyle “not negotiable”.

From whence comes such self-indulgent, adolescent arrogance?

Can’t answer that one. But, I can tell you this: Though they may not acknowledge it, may refuse to discuss it, their lifestyle is out of gas. And, while their Pollyanna Positive friend with cancer takes only her own life, Pollyanna Positivism threatens to kill us all.

There is a third way.

Your friend’s cancer diagnosis and prognosis elicit a life-changing response from her. She weighs treatment options and decides which she’ll follow. She changes her diet, increases her exercise, lowers her stress, decreases her exposure to toxins, possibly moves and or changes her job. She takes the diagnosis as a reality check, a warning, neither a curse to fulfill nor a “downer” to ignore. Indeed, she builds her lifeboat. Reality-based and informed, hers is the only truly positive response, because it faces the negative as both challenge and opportunity. She goes into remission, the cancer recedes, and she outlives the doctor.

Instead of singing, “We are the world. We are the children,” perhaps we ought to become the adults.

Someone said

That the truth's too much to take.

But tell me how we can face it

If we only want to look the other way.

(“This Island Earth”, Loggins, 1997)

Kenny Loggins said of his song, “…when we stop denying and numbing ourselves to the pain of our lives, we will be propelled into so much anger, that we will be forced into action, simply because the pain will be too great!”

‘Tis the season of ceremony and songs, and I echo Kenny’s: “Maybe it’s time to cry the tear that matters…”

To a new beginning!

Shine for all it’s worth,

This Island Earth.

Happy holidays!