Wild West Virginia

In an unexpected turn of events it is Sally updating the travel blog! The wi-fi at McDonalds wouldn’t let Tim get on! So it’s me.

We’ve been treated to a cabin on the side of a mountain near Hinton, WV. Our hosts John and Lynn have been kind and generous and we are relishing the beauty and rest that this setting affords, both before and after a well-attended screening in Lewisburg last night. Tim will have more to report but this is my reflection on the post-screening dialogue:

We’ve started to ask people to speak directly to how they are moved by the movie, and what feelings are moved inside them. Glad, sad, mad, scared and/or ashamed? Of course many people report all of those feelings but I was struck in the W. Virginia circle by the willingness of people to speak of shame.

We are ashamed. We are ashamed that we as individuals have not already acted on things we’ve known about. And we are ashamed of the human species, collectively, for allowing the destruction that this culture has wrought on the planet.
What struck me was not the fact that people feel shame. Of course we do. What struck me in this circle was that people were willing to put voice to that shame, to acknowledged it, to own it. What a rare experience in community life to acknowledge that feeling! It is the opposite of being politic. No politician ever admits shame. That would be shameful.
How heartening to hear people admit to feelings of shame. If there is hope to be had, it is to be had in acknowledging our feelings about the state of our precious earth, and especially in acknowledging our shame. Because when we acknowledge our shame we also acknowledge our part in all of this, our complicity through denial, avoidance, pretense, and indulgence in the belief in our helplessness. Shame comes as we accept our responsibility, as we accept that we do, in fact, have the ability to respond. We all have more ability to respond than we exercise. And so we feel shame. Not the debilitating shame that there is something at our essence that is wrong with us, but the healthy shame that we have been turning a blind eye, ear, heart, to the world around us.
It is out of that healthy shame that people will act, will move toward changing their lives and to becoming active members of a local community. It is out of that healthy shame that people will begin to choose to spend more of their money on locally grown food, for example, rather than on corporately produced commodities. I have just begun to read Barbara Kingsolver’s new book Animal, Vegetable, Miracle. It’s a good book about how the most basic of human activities, our intake of sustenance, has been utterly co-opted by empire. Buying and eating local food is a key action we can make. If we eat local and support a growing local economy we make a no regrets move in the right direction. There will be no shame in that.