at the risk of seeming ridiculous…

As I reflect upon the fires that roared through San Diego last week, I’m filled with both hope and despair. On the one hand, it was a beautiful thing to see so many volunteers take time out of their day to come down to an evacuation center to lend their support and services. I felt honored to be among people who wanted to help because something told them that things need to be done beyond the realm of self-interest. Organizing pillows and bedding, directing people to specific locations, carrying water, serving food, laughing, talking… one learns the utter goodness of life when you actively make a choice to simplify life down to the service of the other.

On the other hand, I felt despair for the other side of San Diego. Those who weren’t even warned to evacuate. Those who had no cars to even get to an evacuation center. Those who felt too afraid to go to one because of fear of deportation. With an honest and loving look into the world in which we live, it’s not hard to see that there are really two worlds. One of the well-to-do… and one of the underprivileged. It is really in times of disaster that dramatizes this heinous dichotomy. 

It’s hard being idealistic about the world and hopeful about its people when you read about how wealthier areas had an abundance of resources… many volunteers were turned away from such the great turnout. Yet, when you then read a story about how undocumented workers were being round up by authorities who used evacuation as an excuse to interrogate… your heart breaks.

The evidence always looks grim. I’m not if sure I still have hope for the world that I once used to. But I believe in people. There was an over-abundance of helpers this time. The tragedy is that they only knew to go to the ones populated by wealthier people. We exist in two worlds where one doesn’t see the other. The task is to expose the illusion of the wall that separates the two.

Fire consumes. It burns away the unnecessary things. Perhaps it also exposes who we are. Not merely individually, but collectively.

Pray for those who have been affected by the fires. Pray for those who have lost much. Pray for those who were once again reminded that they don’t matter because they live in the wrong area. Pray for all of us that we would learn to love one another… passionately and boldly.

By the practice of active love.
Try to love your neighbors actively and steadfastly.
The more you practice love,
the more you will be convinced of
the existence of God and the immortality of your soul.
Should you attain total renunciation of self in
your love for your neighbor,
then your faith will be absolute,
and no doubt will ever assail your soul.
This has been tried,
this has been tested.

-Fyodor Dostoyevsky, the Brothers Karamazov

“If we speak of a healthy community, we cannot be speaking of a community that is merely human.  We are talking about a neighborhood of humans in a place, plus the place itself:  its soil, its water, its air, and all the families and tribes of the nonhuman creatures that belong to it.  If the place is well preserved, if its entire membership, natural and human, is present in it, and if the human economy is in practical harmony with the nature of the place, then the community is healthy.”

-Wendell Berry, Conservation and Local Economy

We all know the process very well.  Sometimes it happens during a lecture.  Sometimes it happens when we’re studying.  Sometimes it just happens.  It is this natural phenomenon we all like to call hunger.  Our bodies naturally need proteins, sugars, carbohydrates, etc.  And to achieve equilibrium, we eat.  Now, most of the time, this is a very mundane process for most of us out there.  Our stomachs grumble and we fill it.  If you’re anything like the average college student, it’s usually done with haste and in between classes.

Granted the circumstances most of us are in, I would assume that many of us don’t take those extra few minutes to actually sit there and think about the origin of the food that is sitting right in front of us.  Do we stop and think about how that piece of bread began as a seed that was planted?  Do we think about the cultivation of the soil that gave rise to the wheat?  Do we imagine the process from which the wheat is picked and gradually turned into dough, which is then baked into the wonderful, delicious treat that we so lovingly place onto our tongues?  If you do, then I must commend you.  But if you’re anything like me, there’s hardly a second thought.

I recently attended American Pie.  It is a quarterly program put on by UCSD’s International Center where they take international students to various locations around San Diego and beyond.  Each quarter has its own theme.  This quarter’s was on sustainability.  As a result, we attended two organic farms, the San Pasqual Academy in Escondido and Sage Farm in Hemet.  The latter of the two allowed us to plant strawberry roots.  Personally, it was a wonderful experience.  Knees on the dirt, fingers pressing the roots into the wet soil, breeze brushing against your face, and the sun providing its warmth.  But more than the actual work itself, it was incredible to be able to plant something myself that I knew would be eventually eaten by someone.  Furthermore, I knew that it would in no way be harmful to that person because no foreign chemicals were used.  The process was completely organic and nothing that was ecologically unfriendly was introduced.

This made me ponder about food itself.  I wondered exactly what I choose to put into my own body.  I wondered if I knew what sorts of chemicals were used on the produce that I buy at the grocery store.  I wondered about the breeding and raising practices of the meat I consume.  On a deeper level, I wondered what the affects of the agricultural economy that I support on a weekly basis are doing to its surrounding environment.

We don’t really seem to think about these things on a meal-to-meal basis anymore.  The reason is simple… we have lost our imagination.  We don’t get to actively participate in the cultivation of our own food.  This may be a relief to many of you who dread even getting close to dirt, but for the others, we’ve forgotten the centuries old wonder of turning wheat into bread.  And somewhere in that process, we’ve also forgotten how interconnected our food is to our local environment.

We live in a globalized world.  It is a world where we no longer are intricately connected to the soil upon which our nourishment comes from.  Our veggies no longer come from Escondido.  They come from Chile.  Things are produced in mass quantities.  And with anything done in overhaul, we must think about the sustainability of its ecological surroundings.  When we over-produce something to feed a country from a particular area, we kill the soil.  When we kill the soil, the community, and its surrounding economy, dies as well.  Now this is a scary thought not only for American farmers, but also for their global counterparts.

Now that environmental issues are somewhat of a fad, we have more liberty to discuss these sorts of issues that will profoundly affect us in the years to come.  But like with any issue, it must survive the media hype in order for it to substantially change anything.  Put simply, we don’t need another Al Gore.  We need a critical mass.  So I ask you to join me in something.  When you sit down to eat your next meal, take about a minute and ask yourself, “Where exactly did this come from?”  And if you’re still intrigued, ask, “How was this made?”  This act of questioning may not change the way we steward the environment today, but it is a step in changing ourselves.  It is a step somewhere.  And like the great writer Flannery O’Conner once wrote, “Somewhere is better than anywhere”.

*Published in Common Ground, a newsletter for UCSD’s Cross-Cultural Center.

I’m sure many of us have felt it.  I’m not talking about instances purely related to the spiritual.  I’m talking about those moments where things just seem to come together.  Things that are seemingly unrelated just happen to come together at a certain place in time.  This phenomenon has many names.  Grace, providence, destiny, chance, choice, etc.  I would personally call it hope.  Hope that something bigger than all of us is at work.  That perhaps there are moments where truth clothed in beauty breaks into the world.

The collective unconscious and the theory of synchronicity were probably the most notable contributions Carl Jung gave to the world of psychology, or perhaps just the world in general.  Whereas Freud would not differentiate between an individual and collective psychology, Jung focused his work around the collective.  He talked about there being something that happens in our unconscious, which is common to all, that intuitively knows and has a better grasp on our ideal selves than our own egos.  Jung calls this collective unconscious the “reservoir of the experiences of our species.”  I’m reminded of this scene from the film, Waking Life, where two of the characters start talking about puzzles.  A test was conducted on a person, one of the characters said, on how fast he can finish a puzzle.  The first puzzle given was not yet released to the public.  The interesting phenomenon was the second puzzle.  Unknowingly to the test taker, the second puzzle had been released to the public a day before.  The person finished the second puzzle significantly faster than the first one.  The character concluded that it seems as though once the answers are already “out there,” we seem to all intuitively “know” it.

So why the talk of psychology?  And how does this relate to “the work of the spirit” as my entry is perhaps pretentiously called.  Well, it is wrapped up in this notion of synchronicity.  Jung developed this theory by describing it as an experience where multiple events that are meaningfully connected occur together, but these events are also unrelated.  Things happen together, yet the actors involved in those events are somewhat unaware of the happenings of the other events.  This idea was used by Jung to describe the dynamic of the things that govern the human experience.  The mover of the collective unconscious if you will.

The 60s.  1960s to be exact.  I can think of no better decade in history that dramatizes Jung’s theories (also because I’m obsessed with the 60s… but that’s for another day).  Here we have this moment in history where people rise up and take the direction of history into their own hands.  But what makes this event incredibly significant is that it was not just in America.  Many of us will often think of the Civil Rights movement when thinking of the 60s.  MLK.  Malcolm X.  But we fail to recognize that the liberation movement of the 60s was a global event.  Barack Obama often refers to the civil rights movement as something that gave ripples off to other parts of the globe that inspired movements.  This is a bit too glorifying for America.  I would argue that it’s something greater.  Something that took hold of people not just in the states, but also in Europe, Latin America, South Africa, China, etc.  Malcolm X, after traveling around the world, said it well in that the world was having a revolution.  Not just black people.  Something took hold of the world and pushed it forward to its dynamic liberation.

Jazz and blues.  It only takes traveling to various countries to realize that music is a synchronistic phenomenon as well.  As jazz was having its heyday in Harlem, Bossa was springing up in Sao Paulo.  We mustn’t also forget about the developments of South African jazz.  The basis of these forms of music is the dissonance created by the 7, augmented, flat 5 / flat 9, and diminished chords.  These chords represent the anguish experienced by suffering people.  To that effect, one could also see the emergence of arirang folk songs in Korea during the Japanese occupation as well as its further development through Korea’s tragic history.  It is in the nature of the blues to sing your sorrows away so that you can be free.  I don’t think that it’s by pure chance that these developments across the world emphasized the struggle and liberation.  Again, I believe that it was something greater that knew the hearts of men and its yearnings for freedom.

Jung touched on something profound.  Perhaps it was the spirit of God he was tapping into.  That’s what I would like to think anyways.  Nevertheless, I am filled with hope because I know that something knows our ideals better than we do.  And that it is dynamic in its push to get us there.

*Much of this was inspired by talks with d.sohn during this past summer.