WHY MIDDLE EARTH IS GROUND ZERO FOR THE APOCALYPSE
“...Things are getting worse and worse and worse... things are not getting any better. The world is getting sicker and sicker.� Sunny Baba, a dear friend and a great earth steward once said this to me during an interview with him for my film, Dance With Destiny, a documentary I made about the global economic, climactic and earth crises we are living through today.
BY BRUCE WEAVER
Hearing this quote may stir in many of us feelings of a doomsday (as it has for me at times) or the apocalypse. Yet, for me, being I am a realist, these feelings are not necessarily bad, but still I am neither hopeful nor hopeless.
By Bruce Weaver
IN THE MIDDLE The evening news is flashing images of Middletown California devastated by this latest California blaze. Reports inform me that six hundred homes have been consumed together with more than seventy thousand acres of forestlands. The media used the word “apocalyptic” to describe the scene. Middletown is a place of significance to me personally. Not only do I have a nephew-in-law fighting the fires there, I once lived and worked in Middletown as a caretaker of a spiritual retreat called Four Springs, a place of refuge for sacred and psychological retreat for over forty years. As I write this I’ve learned Four Springs was spared the fire’s rage, though Harbin Hot Springs—another sacred retreat center outside of Middletown for over forty years—was not. And as we speak there is another sacred place, an ashram on the outskirts of Middletown, created by the spiritual giant Adi Da, a sanctuary for serious devotees and spiritual students alike, is now fighting to protect its “Mountain of Attention” (aptly named) and save their place of refuge and the sacred earth on which it was built. When major fire devastates family’s homes, livelihoods and lives, it is always heartbreaking and disturbing to watch the news, and hear their stories of loss and homelessness. And when such devastation occurs in an area bordered by so many places of devotion or spiritual pilgrimage, I am compelled to cry out: “Attention everyone...Let’s come to attention!”
Call To Attention “Apocalypse” is fitting word for these events, but not in the context the media is using it to dramatize an end-of-world scenario. The word actually has far broader meaning. In translations that look deeper into its origins it means, “the unveiling.” From this context I propose each of us needs to have our own apocalypse to reveal to us the reality of what is happening on the earth and see what is at the root of these devastating earth changes like the one transforming Middletown and the earth around it: A vision sufficient to calls each of us to our own “Mountain of Attention.”
Middle Earth is Ground Zero For The Apocalypse Middle Earth was that fantastical place in Jr. Tolkien’s Hobbit novels, depicting a life where Hobbits lived simply, in beauty and in harmony with each other, nature, the Earth. In my “realist” view or my apocalyptic vision, is one of simplifying our lives do just enough to live on, the way the Hobbits did and the way these sacred places outside Middletown have done for years.
I’ve spent my life obsessed with seeking answers to the challenges facing our world (evidence by my documentary film on the subject) and living a soul-directed life and in the hopeful notion Middle Earth was not a fantasy for humans, but the real way humans ought to live, and a inevitable return to basic sanity born of the ashes of cataclysmic change.
My quest has led me to fewer answers and a litany of questions. The question I am wrestling with today: How to pay keen attention to all these changes, devastating as these are at times, while not losing hope and falling into despair or falling prey to naï ve hopefulness and doing things that make us feel better in the moment but add up to little more than a band aide on a gaping wound; like the money I and my wife rushed to the Red Cross when the catastrophe happened in Haiti.
As these heartbreaking, and disturbing issues press in all around us, the world does seem to be “getting sicker and sicker” as my friend said, and we may feel uncertainty, turmoil, chaos, fear or even gloom-and-doom. I pray these unsettling feelings amount to more than empty emotion and become transformed into a collective apocalyptic vision, where reality is seen it is, and we each find our own Middle Earth and begin to to make it real!