Читать книгу Body and Earth - Andrea Olsen - Страница 9

PREFACE

BILL MCKIBBEN

If you were trying to identify the most useful quality for people’s lives in the twenty-first century, I think you could do worse than settle on “grounded.” We’ve spent the last fifty years in a consumer fantasy world, ever more disconnected from neighbor, from work, from our own bodies. This has caused myriad problems: the pervasive sadness that goes with the loss of communities, the steadily rising global temperature that comes from subcontracting all effort to fossil fuel. Even the alienation from body—and hence from spirit—that comes from spending every hour in front of some screen or another. It’s as if we’ve evolved, very quickly, into a new species—we’re the first of our kind to have no practical need of our neighbors, the first of our kind for whom obesity is normal, the first of our kind to figure out, inadvertently, how to wreck the planet on which we live.

And so we need an antidote. And I think Andrea Olsen has one. The rediscovery of connection, connection of all kinds. To the ground beneath our firmly planted feet (I’ve never met anyone who stands as solidly on the earth as Andrea, with that dancer’s taproot unshakeable firmness.) To the parts of our own psyches that we’ve allowed to become alienated, the parts that need quiet and reflection and the constant brush of the natural world that we actually evolved over long time to enjoy. The deep connection to deep satisfaction.

Relearning those lessons won’t immediately solve climate change, of course. For that we also need politics and protest (work that Olsen has helped with in important ways). But we also need people who remember what they actually need from the planet, who can feel the richness that comes from practices like the one described herein and hence have little need of the riches laid out at the shopping mall. There’s a real strength here, but it may come at a price—the price of realizing that the life you’ve been told to lead isn’t all that you need and deserve. This is a quietly subversive book, arguing implicitly that one way of being human must yield to a way both older and newer, a way that can endure, a way that matches chemistry and physics and psychology. This is a trail guide, which will give you the courage to get off the couch and start exploring. It doesn’t tell you exactly where to go, but it sure as hell points you in the right direction.