“There is beauty above me. There is beauty below me. There is beauty all around me. I walk in beauty.” This is an old Anasazi Indian saying, and from our spring Windstar Journal, in Dik Darnell’s article, a quote from Sitting Bull. —“See brothers, spring is here. The Earth has taken the embrace of the sun and soon we shall see the children of that love. All seeds are awake and all animals. From this great power, we too have our lives. And therefore, we concede to our fellow creatures even our animal fellows, even to every living thing, the same right as ourselves, to live on this Earth.”
[Admin Note: this archival audio recording of John's speech has some issues due to loss of power at recording time, but it is such a powerful speech, one that if you lean into it, you will find wisdom, inspiration, and the depth of John's beliefs and commitments to the World. Listen to the end for a treat. Playing time is: one hour. So worth it. This clipping from the Windstar Journal is an edited, condensed portion of John's speech, so non-English speakers may translate it and get a feeling of what Windstar felt were the high points of the speech. Comments appreciated! :) ]
I wanted to read these poems because they demonstrate one of the
things that I want to share with you. I
would like to have you use this in your listening this weekend, and if it
serves you, in your life.
A poem is a work of art. Now,
I’m sure there’s probably as many definitions for art as there are people in
the room. I would like to share with you
my definition of art: Art
is a window into yourself. In the experience of art, you discover who you are.
There’s nothing you can do about it. It is magic in that way.
Let me explain. Perhaps
you see a beautiful painting, a scene of the ocean, the sun setting, the palms
waving in the breeze, and all of a sudden something might come to the surface.
Something you can’t restrain. What comes
up may be your memory of a time when you were at peace. Your heart and your eyes were open to that
beauty. It comes up in a flood. When you hear a song or see a dance and the
emotion comes, that’s art working. That’s
what art is for. It’s a way for you to
really begin to discover yourself, because what you’re experiencing there is
yourself. That’s who you are. You are the truth. So, the value of art is that it shows you
where you come from, what you believe in and the truth about yourself.
I propose to you that this weekend will be for many and
hopefully for all of you, a work of art. Perhaps out of listening to these speakers,
getting to know each other and sharing your visions, something will come up for
you that is like a flood. Something that
is so clear that it cannot be denied. Something
that is truly who you are. I ask you to
listen to that when it comes up, both this weekend and in the days ahead. Be open to that happening. Don’t shut it away when you start to feel it. Whether it’s an emotion, a laugh, a pain, a
fear or the kind of thing that says, “You
know that makes sense to me. That’s how I feel. I’ve never heard anybody say it
like that before but that’s how it is.”
That’s what happens for me. Sometimes I notice people in the audience when
I’m singing “my Sweet Lady” or another love song, and the guy has his arm
around his lady and he turns to her and says, “I was going to write that song.
If he hadn’t beat me to it, I would have. Because that’s how I feel.” That’s what I get to accomplish when I’m
working at my best as a songwriter and as a performer. I can put it out there so clearly that people
say, “Yeah, that’s how I feel.”
So, you ask questions and you start looking for what you can do.
You ask, “How can I demonstrate these
things that I feel, these things that I believe? How can I do whatever is
possible in me to live a sustainable life?” Part of the imbalance of everything that I see
in the world is due to a lack of sustainability. I don’t see how we can continue to sustain our
lives and lifestyles. Fifty cents of
every dollar we spend on food goes to transporting it to the consumer. It takes 80 gallons of gasoline to grow an
acre of corn today. It’s hard to
believe they grew corn back before they discovered gasoline!
One of the things that I have endeavored to do is to expand that
beyond things that I am able to write in my songs. Part of that has been my growing process, if
you will, because I think I’m putting more depth, certainly a broader and more
human experience in the songs that I’m writing today. I couldn’t write “I Want to Live” 20 years
ago. Twenty years ago I wrote, “Poems,
Prayers and Promises,” ten years ago “I Want To Live”, and a couple years ago,
“It’s About Time”. Last year, “Let Us
Begin (What are we making weapons for?)”, which I’ll tell you more about in a
moment. That’s a process in which you
keep peeling away layers and getting deeper inside yourself and farther
outside. In that process you become more
and more aware of the levels and the subtleties of life around you.
The best thing that I think I’ve done in my career and perhaps
in my life (in this instance they are totally connected), was a private
initiative to go to the Soviet Union. I
know that people everywhere are the same. Truly. Mothers
and fathers everywhere. Lovers-
everywhere. Children are like children
everywhere! In the Soviet Union, I had
an incredibly moving experience and out of it came a song. Quite often the completion of something moving
in my life is giving it a form in words and music. But on this particular occasion that wasn’t
enough.
Last October, I was again in the Soviet Union with Jerry
Jampolsky and Diane Cirincione and their “Children as Teachers of Peace”
program. I made arrangements to record
with a friend of mine, Alexander Gradsy, today’s most popular male singer-songwriter
in the Soviet Union. He is known as
Sasha to close to a hundred million people.
With Sasha’s help on the Soviet end, together with the help of
other friends I made there on previous trips, I re-recorded the song “Let Us
Begin” in a studio in Moscow. To my
knowledge, it’s the first time an American and a Soviet artist have recorded
together. It’s the first time that the
same record was released simultaneously on Melodiya Records in the Soviet Union
(which is the only record label they have) and on RCA Records in the United
States. We made a video and again I
think the combination of the video, the song itself and its being sung by
people from two really different parts of the world, is the best thing that
I’ve done in my career. I wanted to share
that as an aspect of individuals continually taking it another step further and
asking, “What can I do now?” It was a
very courageous thing for Sasha and the other people involved, and it was a
very difficult thing for me to accomplish.
This leads me to something more in regard to my personal
perspective, that is our ability to grow, our willingness to grow and our
commitment to act out of that growth. You
know there are things in each of our lives where we can look and say, “I
know better now.” I’m reminded of that old country song “Oh, if
I could just go back and know what I know now!” But that’s not the way it works. Even if we do know better now, part of what
goes on in the world and certainly in our relationship with the world is acting
out of knowing better now, and it’s more important now than ever before. It’s one thing to see someone in the car up
ahead throw litter out onto the street, and to forgive them by saying, “They
don’t know any better”. It’s quite
another thing to allow neighborhood industries to continue polluting our air
and water and say they don’t know any better. It’s not the case, nor is it the same, it’s
unforgivable. Nor can we forgive our
country when we see it spend the majority of our resources, time and energy on
weapons at the expense of our health and the education of our children and the
future. The same is true when we look at
the results of the Chernobyl accident last year. Irreversible damage is being done and yet we
continue to act out of ignorance concerning our lives on this planet together.
People are always asking me, “What can I do?” I don’t
want to tell anybody what to do.
·
I want them to do what they are inclined to do.
·
I want you to do what comes up for you. Because what comes up
for you is the truth, is real and will be effectual.
·
If you keep looking, if you keep asking the question, things
will constantly come up. Then you need to have the courage to act on that.
Now I also don’t want to tell you the “way that it is.” I ask you to hear what I’m about
to say as my perception of the way that it is. I want you to listen to this openly and see if
any of it rings in your heart. That’s
all I want you to hear, if some little thing, a chord, like that feeling I
mentioned earlier when I was talking about art, gets plucked right down here. It’s not important whether one
agrees or disagrees, what counts is one’s ability to recognize that what you
feel intuitively can be translated into words and actions.
Now what this has to do with is change. If you look at events like the accident at
Chernobyl, the eruption of Mt. St. Helens, or AIDS, they are very real
occurrences that represent incredible change that are happening right now and
affecting our entire planet. These
things are happening very quickly. We
are immediately confronted with these problems. That’s one aspect of change and we have to
deal with it according to our own ability. That’s as simple as I can be about looking at
change, seeing what’s going on all round us.
There’s a statement I wanted to quote, also from the spring
Windstar Journal. In Payson R. Stevens’
article, it said, “We the people of the
world face a new responsibility for our global future. Through our economic and
technological activity, we are now contributing to significant global changes
on Earth within the span of a few human generations. We have become a part of
Earth’s system and one of the forces for Earth change, whether we want it to or
not.”
Truly one of the things that Windstar emerged from was a vision
that changes were going to happen to our planet. Changes that probably most people were not
going to be able to handle. I wanted to
create a facility, a place, that would be able to respond to these changes, to
perhaps guide people through these changes. I look at them as planetary changes.
I have done a lot of thinking and research about changes. I found out several things. In the process, I had a couple ideas. Why is it that every aboriginal, indigenous
society has legends of pre-civilizations? The Chinese have ten. The Hindus have
four, the present one being the fifth. The Aztecs and the Mayans speak of past
civilizations through their inscriptions and traditions. (I am indebted
to Greta Woodrew’s On A Slide of Light, New York, Macmillian, 1981, for this
information.) Although they
all have different names, every civilization has legends about times or places
like Atlantis, Lemuria or Mu.
Now how could that happen? What could possibly happen that would destroy
a civilization to the degree that it would start over again? I thought a lot about that. I didn’t think nuclear war was possible
because I’ve learned a little bit about plutonium and some of these things. And I don’t see how the Earth, which as we
understand is some 4.3 billion years old to get where we are today, could start
over from that kind of a holocaust, if you will. So what is it that happens?
I asked Bucky Fuller about the possibility that the Earth is a
magnet. And magnets, to my knowledge,
shift poles on a given frequency and a given cycle, depending on the size, the
density, the purity of materials, that make up the magnet.
The Earth is a magnet. It
has a North and a South Pole. Maybe it
switches poles too. The Encyclopedia
Britannica has information about the mid-Atlantic ridge where the Earth is
actually being formed or born. As it’s
spreading apart and comes up from the interior of the planet, it forms layers. There are some 176 pieces of evidence in these
layers that prove the shift in polarity from one age to another. It’s proven that this occurs. I think that’s very interesting.
If the earth does switch poles how long does that take? And what might human beings do to affect that
change? It’s a built-in cycle. So what do we do that either affects that or
recognizes it? Can we live our lives
accordingly to that possibility?
In my opinion, when the Earth was formed it stabilized itself. Now it’s an unstable planet. We wobble in our orbit, we’re not perfectly
round and our orbit around the sun is not a perfect circle. This is an unstable planet we live on. Now, it
balanced itself once. And maybe more
times is what I’m trying to tell you. It has to balance itself. I
think it’s getting ready for a rebalancing.
·
You know if you look around you, you see 13 to 18 million people
starving to death per year, on a planet that produces enough food to feed twice
the population. That doesn’t sound like balance to me.
·
Look at over 800 million people living in abject poverty,
illiteracy and without access to medicine and things we take for granted. That
doesn’t sound like balance.
·
Look at nations spending 900 billion dollars a year on weaponry
out of our fear and insecurity of one another. We are investing in that fear and insecurity.
We in the United States spend close to 300 billion dollars every year. If you don’t count Saturdays and Sundays,
that’s a billion dollars a day. That
doesn’t sound like balance to me.
·
We had 47,000 small family farms go out of business last year. Just about as many small family businesses go
down the drain. It doesn’t sound like
balance.
·
If you look at the weather and look at the droughts and things
like that, it doesn’t sound like balance. It occurs to me that what we have done affects
this cycle shift. Who knows? Nobody knows.
·
I do believe that everything has a purpose, that everything that
happens in our life is purposeful. So I
look at this kind of change and I wonder what the purpose of it is. Especially if it’s something that’s built in. Then what is the purpose of this?
We begin as I. “I am.”
Consciousness. That very first aspect of consciousness separates you from
everybody else. I am. I am not you. I am me. I understand you’re like me, but you’re not
me. I am. I think that we begin in separation. A part of our path is to find completion, if
you will, and wholeness to learn that the “I am” includes you and every other
aspect of life on this planet.
I look at this as something that is built in by incredible
intelligence that created all of this. Whether you call her God or not makes no
difference to me. I think that there’s
something to keep us from destroying ourselves and our potential for being
here, which nuclear weapons are capable of doing.
What it’s about
is recognizing the change in consciousness and making the consciousness shift
from “you or me”, to “you and me.” If we can’t do that, after two world wars,
what does it take? If we can’t do that
out of the fact of 13 to 18 million of our brothers and sisters starve to death
every year, 35,0000 people every day, what does it take to learn? When an earthquake happens in Mexico and
10,000 people are killed, it’s news all over the world. All kinds of things happen to help these
people, and yet 35,000 people starve to death every day and we do almost
nothing about the ongoing persistence of hunger. We no longer see front page stories about
this obscenity in our lives. Either we
haven’t learned or we don’t know better. I don’t believe either. We have learned and we do know better but we
haven’t committed ourselves the past two years since We Are the World and
Live-Aid. Once again we have dealt with
a crisis and been momentarily successful and yet the problems remain to be
solved until there are no more hungry. We
can do something about it.
There is an analogy about the nuclear arms race that is very
interesting. It describes the arms race as being like two people sitting in a
puddle of gasoline, spending all their time, energy and resources making
matches. And of course, we want to get
rid of the matches as quickly as we can. But more importantly we want to get rid of
that puddle of gasoline. For me, that
puddle of gasoline represents the environment of fear, mistrust and insecurity
that we live in. Yet we continue to
invest heavily in weaponry, not as my friend Bucky Fuller suggested, investing
in “livingry”.
I look at all of this and ask “What does it take for us to
learn to begin and work together?” It occurs to me that the changes that are
going on now may be an effect of changes happening in the interior of the
planet. Maybe it’s getting ready to
re-balance itself. If we could get past
all the stuff that separates us from one another and begin to join truly as
human beings, we can probably figure that out. We could find, not only some peace in it, but
some furthering in it. Then we could
recognize how, as this particular civilization on planet Earth, as human beings
now, we can take the next step and not be forced back into beginning all over
again, which is what I think has happened before.
I think that there are very real changes coming upon us as human
beings on planet Earth. I believe that I
have a role and we all have critical roles to play in affecting those changes
and being responsive to those changes. Part of that is why I go around the world and
sing of the environment and the state of the Earth and its people. Part of that is why I’m so committed to the
end of hunger on our planet and the end of nuclear weapons, and encourage space
exploration and alternative forms of “livingry.” These are the opportunities for us to begin to
work together and to dispel the environment of fear and mistrust in which we
live.
This weekend we’ll talk about these things and the choices that
we can make as individuals. We have the
opportunity not only to recognize the changes and respond to them but to begin,
out of who and what we are and our conviction, to put ourselves on the line as
an expression of our commitment. That is
going to affect positive change all over the planet.
As I said last year, “We are the living place of incredible possibilities. As we
discover ourselves, as we expand our knowledge, as we make conscious choices,
we can create the world that we’ve dreamed about for ever and ever and ever.” We can end hunger. We can eliminate AIDS. We can rid ourselves of nuclear weapons. We can begin to live in peace, in prosperity,
in humanity and in spirituality. It is
my sincere hope that what goes on here for you this weekend will be a catalyst
toward that kind of activity in your lives.”
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