Two weekends ago, I was one of 11 men on a Quaker weekend getaway at Temenos, a rustic complex of several cabins and a lodge without electricity on Mineral Mountain across from Shutesbury. We met there twice every summer until Covid cancelled us a few years ago. The weekend of August 9-11 was the first time we were able to gather again in the shelter of tall trees and silence.

Many of us are over 80, some in our 90s. We are all aware that we will continue to lose members to inevitable death. This collective awareness calms our “doing” self and opens us to our inner self. Some of us attribute this inner search to a spiritual quest. My own search is to find a connection with nature, with what else is “out there,” beyond the conventional, limited understanding of what is.

I know and feel (feelings opening up to a reality greater than what I have always known) that I – that we all – are somehow part of a larger life of which I have only had glimpses.

In 1936, the year I was born, American writer and radio personality Lowell Thomas popularized the idea (myth) that we only use 10% of our brains in a foreword to Dale Carnegie’s How to Win Friends and Influence People. In my early years, I believed that learning how to think and put ideas into action was the way to become “successful.”

I had no awareness of an “inner” life and how it influenced the way I lived. My early church was the theaters I worked in, whose playwrights “spoke” to me and explained to me what I felt was good and bad, right and wrong.

Aging, in addition to the inconveniences of declining physical abilities, is also a clearinghouse for what Irish-British philosopher and writer Iris Murdoch described as our inner lives, which are too often clogged up by the “fat, relentless ego.” By looking at the beauty of nature and art, however, she believed we could shed that ego (a process Murdoch describes as “de-selfing”) and open our eyes to reality.

I had to leave my Quaker retreat early because, among other things, I suffer from hearing loss. The new high-tech hearing aids were so ineffective that I could no longer hear 80% of what my fellow travelers were saying.

But I left the cabin filled with what I had seen, felt, and heard the previous night in my sleeping bag on the large screened porch at one end of the cabin. I was mesmerized as I watched the towering trees surrounding the cabin, dancing in the wind and rain. I felt like I was living, for a moment, in this larger reality of life that had eluded me for so long. My gut told me that we, the trees, animals, rocks, rivers—whatever—are ALL connected. And I felt like I was part of this conversation the wind, rain, and treetops were having overhead as I looked through the screened porch wall.

I revisit this experience in today’s column because I’m increasingly convinced that we humans are part of a larger life and a larger world. And because it helps me look at our current political climate. Murdoch’s view that we need to “move away” from our “fat, relentless ego” shapes my perspective. It feels like a pilgrimage from illusion to reality.

Maria Popova writes that Murdoch describes a possibility and limitation that defines our nature with “The self, the place where we live, is a place of illusion. Goodness is associated with the attempt to see the non-self, to see the real world in the light of a virtuous consciousness and to respond to it. This is the non-metaphysical meaning of the idea of ​​transcendence that philosophers have so constantly drawn upon in their explanations of goodness. ‘Good is a transcendent reality’ means that virtue is the attempt to pierce the veil of egoistic consciousness and join the world as it really is. It is an empirical fact about human nature that this attempt cannot be entirely successful.”

No joke! Trump and his followers are 100% focused on themselves. “Selflessness” is another world. In that world, there are circles of people whose enormous and powerful selves are working to destroy democracy and, with it, our environment. Six donor networks linked to the family fortunes of a handful of wealthy industrialists have been working for years to loosen environmental protections and repeal regulations necessary to maintain a livable climate.

Or a larger environmental reality in which we can be part of the dialogue with nature.

As long as I can still “Connect the Dots,” my biweekly column will be published in the Greenfield Recorder. I am also a guest writer for Green Energy Times. I appreciate serious feedback, comments and questions at [email protected].