many thanks for this. what a blessed challenge that we are all in this together.
— dilawar orlando yaccarino on September 17, 2010
Dear Pir Zia and Friends,
You mention two challenges of planetary living and two remedies that can be adopted to support the renewal of the Earth. Reducing our traveling carbon footprint is one. I too fly for work. I have found making a financial contribution to offset the footprint of my flights one way I can support a more sustainable planet. Until we are able to travel with less impact, or more deeply experience our connections long distance, it may have to do. One easy place to make flight carbon footprint calculations and offsets is here: http://www.carbonfootprint.com/calculator.aspx?tab=3
Making conscious choices of what we eat (and buy) means increasing our awareness of the impact of those industries on the planet and our future. Plant-based diets and, increasingly important for me, buying locally grown/produced food are important contributions toward manifesting a safer, more compassionate world. Just buying less stuff is another step we can take to reduce disruption in air, water and land. Imelda isn’t the only one who has more shoes than she needed.
Thanks for reminding us to link our daily living to our higher ideals.
Rabia
— Rabia Povich on September 22, 2010
Pir Zia, thank you for the (perfectly) acceptable vocabulary addition!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albedo
Tom Sciaroni
— Tom Sciaroni on September 23, 2010
It is so lovely to receive your messages from time to time. Thank you for the clear statements of what is to be done and reminding us of all that is taking place in other parts of the planet. Will Fazal Mansil be open for us to visit you should we find ourselves there in the coming year?
— Valerie Neshoma on September 27, 2010
“It’s not the same as breathing the same air together. It may, however, be the way of the future.” I do so hope that many more people are able to be in a room where they breathe the same air as you, it is a true blessing. The waves of the air carry your baraka.
— Regina Dew on September 27, 2010
RAINBOW
I saw a rainbow lift out of water and leap
Back into its origins.
In one vast arc,
It cast a light that curved in falling back,
As if the sky were speaking to the deep
In mystical remarks.
It spoke of hope:
The bright unraveling of what is bound
Between the flowing river and the ground.
It spoke of things that swim in myth and sleep—
Things rarely seen, things that began before
A rainbow came to illuminate in mist
The darker patterns of a valley floor.
—David George
I stood transfixed—a shadow in the grass—
Thinking the thoughts of a child in a candy store
Who spends his penny on splendor and stained glass.
— L.A. Larrabee on September 28, 2010
Dear friends,
its nice to talk about carbon footprints, like almost everybody does in our days. However, I believe that our task is a special one. The humans of this globalising world are yearning desperately for the unity of religions (or religious ideals) by understanding their all uniting ideas and origin. We would have the answer to this. The Universal Worship. We are not making enough of it. We should spread this message of our time by creating a big movement. The secret of Prophet Mohammads (peace be upon him) success was the combination of religious and political movement, founding the message of his time.
The success of the christian church is only to explain, because it was adopted and supported by the roman empire (that was the necessary political impact)
We should do alike, otherwise, if the message of our time is not heard by the people of our time, how can it claim to be THE message of our time?
Thats my sense of it.
Towards the One,
Assad from Germany
— Assad on September 28, 2010
Hi to everybody 
smile as the sun do feel it in your heart and your heart will open and you will feel the whole world ... hey, now you touch the world what a beautiful world !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
— Haqiqa on September 29, 2010
It is not just about carbon footprints but relating to the community that is immediately around us.
— Jay Bender on October 2, 2010
Although the world has many troubles, there is always beauty alongside.
PINS AND WHEELS: A METAPHYSICAL
Do stones in the crystal chambers of their souls
Move without meaning in their molecules?
Do even the smallest, the insignificant least—
Like dust on the tusk of the most revolting beast—
Detect in the flesh of the invisible
A sense of purpose?
If souls have knees that kneel,
And stones have brains that calculate the cost
Of energy, then even the busy flea—
Vastly underrated by the cat—
Plays a part in a delicate balancing act:
The pins and wheels that keep the world afloat.
Now when I feel the pitch and tilt of an ark
That I have been riding too lightly in the dark,
I praise the water flowing under my feet.
—David George
— L.A. Larrabee on October 3, 2010
Thank you Pir Zia for staying in touch with us! Do we have or can we initiate a weekly Universal Worship Service on the internet? Perhaps coming from a variety of places that have the capability to produce a webcast. Maybe we can become like John the Baptizer in preparing the way/tilling the soil.
— Andaleeb on October 6, 2010
Thank you, Pir Zia, for sharing your struggle with your carbon footprint and your concerns for our planet that speaks for so many of us trying to be more conscious in reducing our environmental impact through our day-to-day choices, always a challenge for those of us living in a large urban center.
— Zahira on October 12, 2010
This is an interesting question: how to balance, the amount of air travel with one’s consideration for the planet. Questions of simple ethics are certainly deep questions reaching down into one’s very soul. Such questions have been contemplated by nature’s scribes like Kamo no Chomei, living in his 10 ft. square hut in 12th century Japan, and Thoreau in the 19th century, at Walden’s pond. Their contemplative wisdom seems now apocryphal. Their purity and poetry show us a redeeming feature midst humanity’s failings. Their writings weave soulful ideals with the pure and wild, and so weave meaningfulness into acts, into life. It was never what they didn’t do, but what they did do, their musings and their acts, which serve us even today, sorting out a beautiful ethic amid the confusion, contradictions, and paradoxes of living on the planet.
The many formulas for calculating our footprints, which give measurement to our ethics, hopefully emerge from the immeasurable soul of being; but, if one notices, these contemplative scribes choose for themselves ethics which contain the depth, texture and dimension, the antinomies and incongruencies which mark great art, great painting, great poetry, great lives. The incalculable is woven right into their calculations.
The mathematical models of today are helpful for imagining the scope and breadth of our seemingly little footprints but do not really tells us which footprints to make.. One can only hope to discover an ethic, a mode of behavior that imagines well, an ethic which emerges from soul, or is ‘soul searching” as they say. Of course no calculation can ever supplant the full spectrum of the contemplative spirit.
This quandary which you pose raises quite a challenge to us as an organization. The deeper implications concern our approach to answering such difficult questions. Of course, each of the organs of this organization surely is meant as contemplative community, each member an unfolding process. These dialogues of our lives, are certainly a meaning-making process leading to unfoldment. So, with regard to a specific and organization-wide question, such as you pose, do we not need a soul searching approach?
These days, any business operation which is serous about respect and care for the planet as a whole, will employ an ethicist whose job it is to monitor compromising actions, and to simplify answers with measurable standards. Yet, in the end, the best of the best companies are led by a person with a singular sense of his or her own responsibilities and purpose. Even with the “great leader”, a person with a far reaching vision, who feels her or his responsibility so very deeply, even this is not enough.
Today the idea of contemplative dialogue, which provides a process for these deep though simple sounding everyday questions, is gaining some currency. In the Ziraat certainly there is an obvious mode of contemplative process directly addressing these problems of living. I would love to collaborate with any Ziraat initiates in this. Also there is such process in Healing, Kinship, and the Universal Worship… each a slightly different orientation to the deep questions of everyday life .. it is so dynamic!! I find your question an inspiring challenge ...
Considering the approach to an answer
Even if the question is simplified to an assessment of one’s carbon footprint, even if we can all agree to some ethic behind such a calculation the answer, poetic, flush with meaningfulness, is not so reducible to a calculation even as it is simple, especially if it is elegant. The very question is awash with complexity, comes complete with the web of life, a cache of many threads yearning to weave themselves, as many threads as there are contemplatives, I think.
As I see it, hoping to see with Murshid’s manner, it seems to me the elements of an approach toward the challenge which you pose, and the elements of any answer, should include the following:
—- Threads. There are so many threads and themes which arise within the questions, for instance: whose decision is it? how to arrive at a solution? what does the numinous voice of nature have to say? And this last question is it not the crux of it all! ... how to value the presence of the Pir and how to value the ecologic and economic complexities of a real and present community ...what principle is the loom for all these contemplative threads?
—- Ethics What are the ethics of the SOI? how do they arise from the moral, the soul of each member of this organism? There are deep questions of process, hopefully addressed within the inspirational structure which Pir-o-Murshid has given us as legacy.
The answers to such questions can be either surface, for example, the use of a carbon footprint calculation, or can be deeply tied to one’s soulful sense of purpose. I’m not dismissing the use of carbon footprint measurement in the least. It seems to me that an organization needs to have in hand an ethic which is generative rather than only limiting. It is like the Cash for Clunker program, which at some point was about improving the carbon footprint of the USA, and yet one can now understand that it was reflecting intentions other than carbon footprints. I can see how your personal decision to use big air travel or any kind of travel, must reflect a myriad of reasons and so, as a community, we need to know and understand that an ethic is merely an unprecise accommodation, and yet it can also be generative. An ethic, as does a moral of the soul, can speak directly from that numinous experience which has written itself into our souls as our Become… And so, “The Message” can be reflected in the acts of an organization. At it’s depth, then, this refection, these ethics are generative because they are the sum of all the mureeds regardless of rank or position ... because they emerge from the soul of those souls who are the organizm.
——Response This brings up one other element necessary in responding to the question. Certainly we can agree that the answer: “if you do not come to the mureeds the mureeds will need to go to you and the carbon footprint is worse not better” does not seem to be enough. However that answer does reveal one obvious part of any useful response: if an answer does not come from the community as a whole, filtering upward rather than from the top downward, it won’t work. It won’t be either whole or generative.
As in a weaving metaphor, it is not enough to think of the answer in terms of a linear hierarchical decision. Weaving is not a linear continuum (neither is nature). It is better described as a web of hierarchy, a web of life. This question which you pose implies a web-enabled answer, as any ethical question (and therefore any organizational question) demands a response from a web of weavers, a response with humanity woven right into the fabric. In this web, the answer finds it’s source which springs from the soul level motivations of those to whom the Divine has spoken through the harmonies and purity of the wholenss we call “wilderness”, the planet.
Whew!!
I know that is a mouthful..
And yet.
as Jupiter mocks and challenges the moon in tonight’s evening sky
with delight and impertinence
the threads and elements of your question
all the distinctive yarns in the weavers cache
a web of weavers,
as cloth upon a loom
as ethics upon a contemplation
as water in motion
With these elements and threads, it seems to me, we proceed from concrete realty in a meaning-making process
leading to unfoldment,
weaving lives and realties , frailties and ideals in communities of dialogue.
This is how I think such questions need be addressed, especially in an organism dedicated to unfolding the Divine Voice of nature, the prophetic, those ideals of our deepest yearning.
Perhaps in the SOI there is some nascent community? I know that contemplative dialogue is something being learned and considered in the Seven Pillars… perhaps some winged seeds are flying about?
So, I’m writing to ask, to inquire, or stir some soup, to respond to your challenging… this simple yet core question.
As for vegetables and fruits and good food, I once asked a Parisian, (twenty years ago) if they printed on their bottles and cans
and packages, as we do, all the nutrition, ingredients, percentages etc.. to which he said “No, we just put the name of the farmer.” ahh, an answer inspiring and complete!!
- Asha Kent
— Asha Kent on October 19, 2010
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