Stephanie Kaza: Green Buddhism
Sandie Sedgbeer: This is where we see what we can learn from Buddhism and Buddhism’s approach here. I don’t know that I would have thought about these things in the same way if you hadn’t detailed them so well in the book. I mean, take passion. We call it passion but often it is just greed.
Stephanie Kaza: Well, Western psychology has many complicated emotional responses that are described there. Despair, rage, frustration. There’s a long list, and we are pretty well trained, those of us interested in emotional literacy, to use those kinds of vocabularies. So, for me, the Buddhist psychology simplifies things, making it a little easier to study personally, and then it allows you to make ethical choices out of those three principles. So, for example, reducing harm. That’s the very first principle. Ahimsa [not to injure] in the Buddhist precepts, and you could see that you might be harming yourself with one of these greed patterns. So, if you want to reduce harm, then it might mean that you choose less alcohol. Or maybe you’re not digesting meat so well, so you might choose to do something with your diet, or perhaps with your transportation choices, or with your social relations. Maybe you need more Green Practice friends to support your choices. So, reducing harm is a never-ending field of opportunity, particularly in our very consumerist, materialist world.
Sandie Sedgbeer: You taught classes on unlearning consumerism. How do we unlearn it?
Stephanie Kaza: Oh, that was so much fun. It was one of my favorite classes, and I based it on a class that I’d heard about called “Unlearning Racism,” and I had the sense that our understanding of race was so powerfully influenced by social forces that it was somewhat parallel in consumerism. So, we tried to do a certain amount of deconstruction, but I based it all on experiential learning. Every week, the students had some little task they had to do – such as to measure their energy use – but the very first exercise sort of put the whole course in relief. I asked the students to make a list of every single thing they owned. They had to list all their hiking and skiing and snowboarding equipment. They had to list all their clothes, their underwear, their T-shirts, their prom dresses, their wigs. They had to list their toiletries. I said, “Don’t forget the kitchen and the bathroom.” Well, by the time they listed all those things and then wrote a very short, reflective essay, their minds were quite opened to how much stuff they had, and how oriented to stuff they were. So, we had a wonderful, wide-reaching, open-ended conversation, but the key to it was non-judgmental. That’s where I brought my Buddhist background into the classroom so the students would know it wasn’t right or wrong, what they had or didn’t have. I wasn’t going to jump on them, and I wasn’t going to allow them to jump on each other, either, because it was just to look, just to see how deeply shaped we are by brand names, by wanting to own something, wanting to participate in a certain activity and get all that stuff. So, my eyes were opened as well. I didn’t say too much, but it was interesting what they did own, and I appreciated most of all their honesty. That’s where we could start. It worked really well with undergraduates because, actually, they don’t own much yet, it’s all in one room – their residence hall room. When I’ve done this with adults, I have to restrict them to one room. I say this will be too overwhelming, so pick your bedroom, or the kitchen, or the living room, and just list everything in that one room. It has the same effect.
Sandie Sedgbeer: So, now let’s talk about Obstacles on the Path, like anger, frustration, impotence, all of which get in the way of us being able actually to be useful.
Stephanie Kaza: Well, we’re human beings, aren’t we? And these things are part of what makes us who we are. Part of what happens with the Obstacles is we protect ourselves. We don’t want to feel certain feelings. We don’t want to feel overwhelmed. We’re not strong enough for really difficult mind states. It takes practice. It takes a focus and a commitment, and it takes something else I talk about in the book “Spiritual Friendship.” I don’t think you can do this Green Practice Path alone, but in a hyper-individualistic society like in the United States and much of the Western world, we’re taught that we’ll do it all ourselves, a kind of tough attitude. These things are difficult. We need friends, we need people that can help us when we get discouraged and get stuck on some of these obstacles. So, I mention one possible exercise. There are a number of them from this wonderful teacher, Joanna Macey, who I’ve been working with a lot in the last year on a new to honor her at age 90. She’s been doing this work with obstacles for 50 years.
You start from gratitude, being glad that you can do this work at all, but then you acknowledge where you are, with whatever the pain is. “I’m feeling depressed. I’m grieving over losing the birds that used to come to my yard”. People feel these things very deeply and with a lot of sadness and anger, but they are still a powerful response to the world, and that’s where the energy is. If you feel that strong an emotion, it gives you a place to work with that energy and let it transform by being honest with it. From there, you can shift out of that self-absorbed perspective of your emotional state into one that reflects your sense of relationship with the rest of life. Once you’re in a state of relating with all other beings, there’s much more energy. Such exciting energy coming from trees or even from your cat or dog in your house. Or, currently, I’m very fascinated by mushrooms and fungi, and how they have little root hairs scattered all across the earth and dirt and tying the whole world together. So, that sense of being connected to all of that is a tremendous source of energy and joy in the face of overwhelming obstacles of difficult emotions.
Sandie Sedgbeer: That’s been brought home to us a lot in recent years with all the books that have emerged about trees and the way trees support one another. The community, the society they have, the brotherhood in a sense, and the way they work together. This has been a real eye-opener for many people, opening our minds to other ways in which we’re connected that we cannot see.
Stephanie Kaza: Exactly. “That we cannot see.” It really pays to have what some Buddhist teachers call “Don’t know mind.” Just take the attitude of humility that there is so much more we don’t understand, and before we chop it down, or spray it with pesticide, think twice about what else is going on here? What is the story behind this tree or these little flowers that just popped out that you’ve never met before? To take a little bit of a precautionary stance. We could slow down the rate of destruction quite a bit with just that first precautionary principle.
Sandie Sedgbeer: In 1993 you published a book called The Attentive Heart – Conversations with Trees. Which recorded the series of your personal, sometimes spiritual, relationships with individual trees. That book has now been republished this year, and in the preface, to the re-released version you point out that many of the stories you share reflect the changing conditions for trees and forests throughout the West Coast of America owing to Climate Change. You talk about how, with Climate Change accelerating and National politics precarious and the future of the planet is at stake in such a frightening way, many people are feeling overwhelmed, despairing even at what is happening to the planet, and to us. In this context, you raise the question of what the stories in Conversations with Trees offer us. How are these stories about trees helpful to us?
Stephanie Kaza: When I first wrote this book, I felt incredibly shy and maybe a little bit crazy to be putting these stories in this kind of form, and I was greatly encouraged by a teacher. I was in a Seminary Program for the Unitarian School of Thought, and I even considered becoming a Minister. In fact, right now I’m sitting in a Minister’s office in our local, downtown Unitarian Church. This teacher encouraged me and said you should keep going with these, and so my classmates and the teacher helped me get this to the form of a book. Then I was quite deeply encouraged by meeting a wonderful man at a meditation retreat just before I moved to Vermont, who turned out to be a very good artist, and I was really hoping we could convey something about the stories through the art. So, he did these illustrations, and in the course of working on the book together, we fell in love and got married, and we just celebrated our 21st anniversary. So, I didn’t put all that in this new preface, but there is a joyfulness in this book that I think can offer a respite, a refuge for people. In a time of being overwhelmed, there’s a hunger for taking a break from the pace of social media and internet and email, Instagram, everything that moves so fast. The hunger to slow down and think deeply is coming back to life amid all the craziness.
So, this book is one island of refuge, and for people who have a little bit of a fellow feeling for trees, they’ll find a fellow spiritual walker here. When the book first came out, people would come up to me after reading it and say, “you know, I have this Maple Tree in my backyard, and I look at it every day, and it really means a lot to me,” but they were whispering. They weren’t sure it was OK to talk about a tree-like this like it was a child or a pet or something, and I just encouraged them. So, what I think of this book now is more encouragement, that whatever messages of love and care and complexity around trees and their stories we can spend time with, the stronger we’ll be individually, and the more we’ll feel we have friends. Anyone reading this book will know they’re not alone. That there is a swelling cry for caring for trees and for doing it in a beautiful, organized, personal and intimate way. So, the trees are just an example of a deeper relationship with some other part of the natural world than just human society. So, I’m looking for, hopefully, better relations between humans and trees, but I’m also as interested in spiders and songbirds and the other beautiful things that make our lives so rich. So, I hope the book is a bit of a refuge and an encouragement to be listening to one’s own soul in relationship to the other living members of our community here. It’s much bigger than just our people.
Sandie Sedgbeer: There are many people who want to do something about Climate Change, but may not necessarily have the time, money, or the skills to do something big, but I’m sure there are many small things that we can all do. What would you recommend for somebody who says, “I don’t know where to start?”
Stephanie Kaza: I get that question a lot, and I really love it because just even asking the question means something is opening inside that wants to respond. So, I say stay with that. The fact that you want to respond will lead you to something that makes sense for you to do. It doesn’t have to be a prescription, but staying open is the most important part. So, what I often say is just talk about it. Even if you can’t think of a thing to do yet, if you can talk about the news, the Greta Thunberg talk, pass that on to a bunch of friends, or bring it up at a family dinner. If you can talk about the Extinction Rebellion tactics, even if you don’t like it, or you’re not sure what you think, you’re still talking about it. So, talking about climate is the most important thing we can do right now because the world conversation is swelling so quickly. This is only, really, maybe a 10-year-old movement.
Continue to Page 4 of the Interview with Stephanie Kaza
