“The Vietnamese Zen master
Thich Nhat Hanh was once asked
what we need to do to save our world.

‘What we most need to do,’ he replied,
‘is to hear the sounds of the Earth crying.’

“The idea of the world crying within us or through us,
doesn’t make sense if we view ourselves
only as separate individuals. 

“Yet if we think of ourselves as deeply embedded in the
larger web of life, as Gaia theory, Buddhism, and many other,
especially indigenous, spiritual traditions suggest, then the idea
of the world feeling through us seems entirely natural.

“This view of the self is very different from that
found in the Business as usual model.

“Its extreme individualism takes each of us as a
separate bundle of self-interest, with motivations and emotions
that only make sense within the confines of our own stories.

“Pain for the world tells a different story,
one about our interconnectedness.

“We feel distress when other beings suffer because,
at a deep level, we are not separate from them.

“The isolation that splits us
from the living body of our world
is an illusion; the pain breaks through it
to tell us who we really are.”

~Joanna Macy & Chris Johnstone from
Active Hope