BY BRUCE WEAVER

W H Y M I D D L E E A R T H I SG R O U N D Z E R O F O RT H E A P O C A L Y P S E

By Bruce Weaver

“...Things are getting worse and worse and worse... things are notgetting any better. The world is getting sicker and sicker.” SunnyBaba, a dear friend and a great earth steward once said this to meduring an interview with him for my film, Dance With Destiny, adocumentary I made about the global economic, climactic and earthcrises we are living through today.

Hearing this quote may stir in many of us feelings of a doomsday (asit has for me at times) or the apocalypse. Yet, for me, being I am arealist, these feelings are not necessarily bad, but still I am neitherhopeful nor hopeless.

IN THE MIDDLE The evening news is flashing images of Middletown California devastated bythis latest California blaze. Reports inform me that six hundred homes havebeen consumed together with more than seventy thousand acres of forestlands.The media used the word “apocalyptic” to describe the scene.

Middletown is a place of significance to me personally. Not only do I have anephew-in-law fighting the fires there, I once lived and worked in Middletownas a caretaker of a spiritual retreat called Four Springs, a place of refuge forsacred and psychological retreat for over forty years. As I write this I’ve learnedFour Springs was spared the fire’s rage, though Harbin Hot Springs—anothersacred retreat center outside of Middletown for over forty years—was not. Andas we speak there is another sacred place, an ashram on the outskirts ofMiddletown, created by the spiritual giant Adi Da, a sanctuary for seriousdevotees and spiritual students alike, is now fighting to protect its “Mountain ofAttention” (aptly named) and save their place of refuge and the sacred earth onwhich it was built.

When major fire devastates family’s homes, livelihoods and lives, it is alwaysheartbreaking and disturbing to watch the news, and hear their stories of lossand homelessness. And when such devastation occurs in an area bordered by somany places of devotion or spiritual pilgrimage, I am compelled to cry out:“Attention everyone...Let’s come to attention!”

“Apocalypse” is fitting word for these events, but not in the context the media isusing it to dramatize an end-of-world scenario. The word actually has far broadermeaning. In translations that look deeper into its origins it means, “the unveiling.”From this context I propose each of us needs to have our own apocalypse to reveal tous the reality of what is happening on the earth and see what is at the root of thesedevastating earth changes like the one transforming Middletown and the eartharound it: A vision sufficient to calls each of us to our own “Mountain of Attention.”

Call To Attention

Middle Earth was that fantastical place in Jr. Tolkien’s Hobbit novels, depicting alife where Hobbits lived simply, in beauty and in harmony with each other,nature, the Earth. In my “realist” view or my apocalyptic vision, is one ofsimplifying our lives do just enough to live on, the way the Hobbits did and theway these sacred places outside Middletown have done for years.

Middle Earth is Ground ZeroFor The Apocalypse

I’ve spent my life obsessed with seeking answers to the challenges facing our world(evidence by my documentary film on the subject) and living a soul-directed lifeand in the hopeful notion Middle Earth was not a fantasy for humans, but the realway humans ought to live, and a inevitable return to basic sanity born of the ashesof cataclysmic change.

As these heartbreaking, and disturbing issues press in all around us, the world doesseem to be “getting sicker and sicker” as my friend said, and we may feeluncertainty, turmoil, chaos, fear or even gloom-and-doom. I pray these unsettlingfeelings amount to more than empty emotion and become transformed into acollective apocalyptic vision, where reality is seen it is, and we each find our ownMiddle Earth and begin to to make it real!

My quest has led me to fewer answers and a litany of questions. The question I amwrestling with today: How to pay keen attention to all these changes, devastating asthese are at times, while not losing hope and falling into despair or falling prey tonaiv̈e hopefulness and doing things that make us feel better in the moment butadd up to little more than a band aide on a gaping wound; like the money I and mywife rushed to the Red Cross when the catastrophe happened in Haiti.