Blessed Unrest

The first day of classes for the Fall 2007 semester begins tomorrow. And with it, I begin my fieldwork in the Upper Delaware River Valley.

Having enough hours in the day will be a challenge, and I spend time formulating a daily schedule that will keep me vigilant to my educational responsibilities. I am proposing to start my day at 7:30 a.m. with an hour of something I call “independent study reading.”

I am currently making my way through Paul Hawken’s “Blessed Unrest: How the Largest Movement in the World Came into Being and Why No One Saw It Coming.” Hawken postulates that there are over one million--and maybe even two--million organizations working toward ecological sustainability, social justice, and the rights of indigenous peoples.

It’s not a movement in the traditional sense, because it has no one leader or ideology. “It is dispersed, inchoate (which means, imperfectly formed), and fiercely independent.… It is taking shape in schoolrooms, farms, jungles, villages, companies, deserts, fisheries, slums and even in fancy New York hotels. It is tentatively emerging as a global humanitarian movement arising from the bottom up.”

Hawken believes this to be the largest social movement in all of human history and that it is comprised of coherent, organic, self-organized groups involving tens of millions of people dedicated to change. He questions whether it is an instinctive, collective response to threat.

The fact that there is an unrecognized movement underfoot is a heartening thought that seems to run counter, thankfully, to the average apathy on the street that we have no power to change our current path of environmental and cultural destruction. Even the thought of the upcoming election seems to have the populace supposing that nothing will change.

Hawken writes: “Healing the wounds of the earth and its people does not require saintliness or a political party, only gumption and persistence. It is not a liberal or conservative activity; it is a sacred act.”

“There is a vitality, a life force, an energy, a quickening that is translated through you into action, and because there is only one of you in all time, this expression is unique … You have to keep open and aware directly to the urges that motivate you. Keep the channel open …. [There is] no satisfaction whatever at any time. There is only a queer, divine dissatisfaction, a blessed unrest that keeps us marching and makes us more alive than the other."

Martha Graham to Agnes de Mille, Dance to the Piper

I look forward, with this work, with this challenge, to being alive with all of you. Together, we will be the change we want to see in the world. It's something we can count on.