I’m not a professional who works in the “Mind Arts” — in other words, I’m not a psychiatrist. So I don’t know how much correlation exists between a person’s net-worth-slash-ego and how the person conducts himself in everyday affairs.
Yet after years of putting up with the constant news of Rich Privileged Snobs, I’ve come to the personal conclusion that the often-poisonous combination of Money and Mind really does make for Dummies and Derelicts.
Case in Point: a recent gathering of A-listers from around the world at England’s King Charles III’s Highgrove Gardens: a series of connected “outdoor rooms” that His Majesty and his staff of landscapers tenderly manage at his Gloucestershire country estate.
King Charles III summoned the creation of these gardens decades ago as an “embodiment” of his love of nature, and all the good and forthrightness that entails. That said, of their own reverence for the earth and sky and everything godly in between, the Highgrove Gardens guests dressed to the hilts: prim suits, elegant dresses, and, among indigenous dignitaries from the Amazon, South Africa, and elsewhere, feathered headdresses, beads, and opulent leather….
And now, for the ironic part of our story.
As the partygoers were routinely reminded that the party was sponsored by an environmental group, their most esteemed guest, The Environment, wallowed in discomfort from the occasion’s big sooty bonfire.
Actor, Environmental Activist, and Highgrove Gardens Attendee Rainn Wilson, whose house half-burned to the ground in January’s L.A. wildfires, quipped, post-party: “About six years ago, during my daily practice of sitting in my underwear and sending out angry tweets to climate science deniers, I looked at myself in the mirror and decided it was time to be more than a keyboard warrior. [For in order to] transform our relationship with our planet in this time of climate crisis, we need to value nature as profoundly sacred. Spiritual, even.”
Of course, transforming our relationship with the world — given how woeful this “relationship” is — is currently impossible, because too many human beings don’t practice spirituality (at least, not the earthly kind), and of those, most don’t even know what the word “spirituality” means in a personal context. Ah but heck, onward and upward.
If you may not realize yet, or if you do but don’t care, you’d better buckle up, because, given our species’s gross propensity to ignore adversity until it hits us in the face, and the current presidential administration’s disavowal of manmade climate change, we are, unequivocally, destroying the earth and sky: and, by association, also ourselves.
It’s way, way past time for all of us to stand up against the world’s increasingly Destructive Climates, and curb the mayhem. In the U.S., begin by barking at your congressional representatives — often.