Excuse the poor quality photo - I have never been skilled at selfies - but I wanted to illustrate my shopping trip yesterday. I bought two cardigans, two pairs of sandals and five dresses. FIVE! What kind of capitalist shopping-monster am I?
For at least a couple of years from 2019 I didn’t buy a single item of new clothing - choosing instead to wear things that other people had already used and discarded. This was during the time of my deepest eco-grief and fear - I was newly aware of the true horrors of the climate and ecological catastrophe, engaged in non-violent civil disobedience, and eating, sleeping and having nightmares about the climate apocalypse. I was making all the lifestyle changes I could - giving up flying, cutting out plastic, considering giving up our car - whilst putting considerable time and energy into organising others to protest.
What changed? How did I get from eco-warrior to a joyful shopping trip in a shop that probably doesn’t charge enough for its clothes?
You do not have to be good. It’s a powerful line. It’s from Mary Oliver’s well known poem, Wild Geese, and this morning I am pondering the implications of her directive. It leads me to wonder - can we human beings be trusted to, as Oliver puts it, ‘…let the soft animal of [our] body / love what it loves’? What if our bodies love fast fashion? Huge gas-guzzling cars? Frequent holidays on the other side of the world? Comfort? Power? Violence?
When I investigate the causes and conditions surrounding my shopping trip, I can identify some contributing factors:
I am a limited being. This means that I wasn’t able to make the choice to buy fewer items of more ethically produced clothing, because I surrendered to my desire for many dresses in bright prints.
I am saturated in the culture of my society. How I look matters to me because I have been receiving the message that how acceptable I am is dependent on how I look for all of my life (especially as a woman).
I have more climate denial in place than I did. As I’ve moved away from deep engagement with the climate justice movement (although I still go on protests as a ‘day visitor’) it’s easier for me to live my day-to-day life without connecting to the vast amount of suffering that is already happening and without being frightened of the chaos to come.
I am learning to be kinder to myself. I have recently accepted that my body is bigger than it was, and so it felt important to honour this change and buy myself nice new clothes in a bigger size rather than being miserable in the few things that still fit. This bigger shop had lots of styles in lots of sizes so I could find clothes that I felt good in.
I could go on. These kinds of decisions are often multi-layered and complicated, and mostly they happen without us doing this kind of ‘unpicking’ - our system makes an internal judgement call, based mostly on unconscious motives, and we go with it.
Where does this leave us not ‘needing to be good’?
I think that Oliver is speaking about a particular kind of ‘being good’ - the kind that relies on sustained effort and that is an attempt at staving off feelings of unworthiness and shame. I know about this kind of being good - again, especially as a woman (I’m reading Elise Loehnen’s ‘On Our Best Behaviour: The Price Women Pay to Be Good’ at the moment) - men are mostly socialised in different damaging ways. This ‘being good’ comes from a place of ought.
When I made radical choices during my climate activism - to be arrested, or to sit vigil for an hour a day for a year - it wasn’t coming from this ‘ought’ place - the things I decided to do felt completely natural and correct. They felt joyous - even as the police were carrying me away. I was happy to be contributing to a solution in a way that felt congruent and meaningful and possible to me. I wasn’t ‘being good’ - I was letting the soft animal of my body love what it loved. I loved the Earth - so deeply that I can hardly find words to express it - and my activism was a natural expression of that.
These days the soft animal of my body is loving running the ministry training programme we are offering here at Bright Earth, and giving loving attention to my psychotherapy clients. It is really loving writing for you. These days I am also more able to turn this love inwards - celebrating my gently ageing body with bright dresses, putting regular retreat days into my schedule, indulging in detective novels on work-day afternoons.
I think Oliver was right. We can trust what the soft animal of our body loves, and if we all tune into our own heart wisdom, we will begin to heal ourselves as well as the world. We won’t get this healing from ‘trying to be good’ in order to be loved. We are already loved.
We will probably continue to overindulge (I loved my shopping trip so much!) and then we will naturally reign it in (we have a very small wardrobe which keeps me in check nicely). Over time, we will begin to recognise when our over-consumption or denial or jealousy or rage is pointing towards a deeper wound that needs our attention.
When we tune into our own suffering, we will also be more able to witness the depth of each other’s suffering, and the depth of the world’s pain. We will begin to trust that healing continues to unfold, sometimes despite us!, and that - just maybe - there is Great Good underneath everything.
This won’t happen all at once, though. Some people won’t receive very much healing at all in their lifetimes. This remains a terrible tragedy. Some of us are born with much heavier burdens of karma than others. We are limited beings, and we live in an unjust world. As Oliver says, we all carry despair. We are all lonely. Sometimes we will remain trapped for a long time. Sometimes we will keep on causing harm to ourselves, to others and to the land.
And. The world is always offering itself to us, ‘harsh and exciting’ - abundant, mysterious and wise. Every moment is a fresh opportunity. Can you hear the wild geese calling?
I am Satya - sometime capitalist shopping monster, sometime eco-warrior. I do not have to be good. I just have to keep being me, and to keep listening to what the soft animal of my body loves.
Go gently,
Satya <3
Tell me: What pressure do you put yourself under to ‘be good’? What pressure do you feel from others or from society? What does the soft animal of your body love? What contradictions do you contain? Does it feel possible to imagine that you are loved just as you are?
Do you know someone who could be kinder to themselves? Maybe you’d love it if they could see themselves through your fond eyes?
⭐ ⭐ ⭐
Thank you, great post… am often ‘should ing’… telling myself I should be more this, do more that… it makes me so tired to keep striving! And have judgy tendencies that aren’t v helpful. What a relief to relax and love what we love without it feeling somehow decadent! I really liked what you said about being immersed in a consumer culture … v hard to go against and still be a part of.
Oh wow that spoke to something deep in my bones this evening! At the moment I’m on a bit of a health kick and trying to log my food intake etc. every day I’m trying to be compassionate and gentle that I’m not going to get anywhere by drastically changing my diet. I’m trying to celebrate the fact that every meal I add one more vegetable than I would normally do instead of chastise the fact I still ended up eating a packet of crisps or a cake or something. But I still find myself slipping into this “being good” mentality and feeling like I need to pretend I’ve not actually eaten 2 packets of crisps or drank an extra coffee with milk than I noted down. Who am I hiding this real data from?! It’s sometimes a lot of unpicking as to why I want to do this health journey anyway!