Friday, April 3..........Granada, Nicaragua
The locals say that one can really feel summer starting in Nicaragua this week. The air is hot and still, and starting to become oppressively humid. After an early breakfast and a walk about town I have returned to my lodgings. A small courtyard, shaded by trees, borders my room. It is a cool and pleasant place to write. Two young North Americans, a boy and a girl, 22 and 28, were sitting in the courtyard reading. They have been bicycle touring for a few years, around Europe and now Central America, and so we had that common experience to talk about. Letting the hours slowly pass, our conversation ranged over many topics. It was refreshing and intellectually stimulating. I found them to have thought more deeply about life than most of the other young travelers I have lately met in Mexico and Central America.
Staying at budget hotels puts me in contact with many young travelers in their teens and early twenties. Most of them have completed their university studies or are taking a break between years of school. Given their education, they are certainly not unaware of the problems of the world. Yet many of these young people do not seem to be much concerned with matters philosophical, ecological, or humanitarian. There is a sleepy sort of dullness to their minds and spirits. There is an aimlessness to their wanderings, which strongly reflects the confusion and emptiness of their greater lives. My heart aches when I meet these young travelers. It aches out of empathy for the pain of their unknowing and it aches because of my own frustration about how to best address peoples’ mental and spiritual lassitude. Again, I find myself wondering about matters that have become the central questions of my life:
1) How to awaken in people a clear recognition of the enormous severity of current environmental degradation and, more important, of the frightening implications of the worsening of that degradation during the next twenty years.
2) How to inspire people to become actively involved in healing and protecting the planet and its great fabric of interconnected life?
3) How to educate people regarding the awakening of ecospiritual consciousness as being the single most fundamental factor in addressing environmental problems?
4) How to clearly discuss the extraordinary phenomena of the recent birth and currently rapid development of a global ecospiritual consciousness?
I have been thinking a great deal about these issues lately because I sense the approach of what some people have called "my ministry." By this I mean the probability that I will soon become a public speaker to a large number of people around the world. As I have written about extensively in my Places of Peace and Power manuscript (its introductory chapters are now included on this web site), the spirits of the sacred places have given me certain teachings and visions, and have asked that I communicate this material to as many people as I am able. Upon my return to North America from my current travels I will immediately begin organizing and presenting my next series of slide-show tours (during 1999, twenty cities from Vancouver to San Diego and twenty cities in the Northeastern US, during the year 2000, thirty cities in Europe). I will no longer use my slide shows to talk only about the mythology and anthropology of sacred sites. I will begin to share the teachings and visions I have received from the sacred sites. Much of my current thinking and talking about the issues listed above is thus a grappling with concepts and words so that I may find the most penetrating manner of articulating the teachings I have received. I feel it is very important that many minds be exposed to these concepts, ideas, and suggestions. I believe that out of this exposure, this sowing of seeds in the hearts and minds of people, a new and higher level of thinking and living may be assisted in its current blossoming in the cultures of the world.