Spirituality and Sustainability

A woman in my class asked everyone back in the first week if we would be willing to invite a guest speaker, a friend of hers, to our class to discuss sustainability  and spirituality. We agreed, and he came to speak with us during lunch on Friday. (I’ll try to keep my Livejournal voice succinct.)
It was timely – I’ve been feeling distant from the other people in my class, especially the people I’m working closest with in our group project. It seems like I’m speaking from a place that doesn’t make people feel good, least of all me. I hate that I’m so aware of it and yet I continue to do it. And I can’t help but take it personally when others in my class seem to be cementing their relationships.
(I felt the urge to censor myself just now when I realize that my blog entries are imported to some certain meme-like social networking site where some of my classmates follow what I write. No matter.)
I told my friend last night that I’ve never felt as spiritually low and unenlightened as I have in the past couple of months. I believe the session on Friday brought to light that there was a lot of unresolved pain from the Toronto experience and my first weeks back in Vancouver, that I’ve moved away from but not moved past.

In the discussion with our guest, I don’t recall whether we talked a lot about sustainability – he mentioned his own experience and why he does what he does, and everyone else had a chance to talk about their ideas on spirituality. What I would have said, had I had the chance to say it, is that our lives as manifest in everyday society and espoused by mainstream culture, feel inherently unsustainable. The fact that our everyday trials are abstracted from the roots our living – food, water, companionship, leadership, spirit – feels like a rouse that we need to buy into, in order to buy what’s needed. The idea of deserving – that we deserve the things we buy because we’ve provided value to the market that says we’ve done a good job by paying us – grates at me relentlessly.

I’m not interested in sustainability because I think it is a hope for an end to this – I think most people, myself included, would crumble and we’d find new challenges for ourselves – but because it could be different in a way that only we collectively know. Our guest pointed out that the hope for something different can be very strong, a kind of faith even.