I got back from the field last night, and this morning finally had a chance to savor the running discussion of capitalism, spirituality, vegetarianism and what-have-you, and like so many others can't resist putting in -my- two cents. Let me introduce myself -- Rachael Kamel, a North American working for the past several years in Costa Rica and recently finally, and happily, with access to electronic communications. My work here is in the creation and production of environmental education programs, campaigns and materials directed at rural communities. I've worked with alternative media for many years around international, gender, global corporations and militarism issues -- becoming increasingly troubled by the limited reach of that work in terms of its audience, and the difficulties of producing media that actually reach the grassroots. Living in a Third World country I've also become acutely aware of how alternative communications tend to reproduce the pattern of dominant media -- creating images of the South for consumption in the North, rather than to develop an internal or South-South dialogue/discourse. My current work is a flawed, contradictory but fascinating stab at transcending those limitations. In the mainstream development agency where I work, there is as yet no space to integrate an ecofeminist perspective into our environmental work, so the discussions in this new list are like a breath of fresh air for me. First, on spirituality. For me spirituality is the direct experience of the connectedness of all things: society, nature and even the nonliving world. I was raised in a hyperrational, atheistic, sort of Leftist family and grew up believing that religion and spirituality were bullshit. With the years and my own personal struggle for transformation I've come to understand that that stance is an interiorization of the incredible levels of alienation and isolation created by pariarchal capitalist culture. I don't believe in "individual" solutions, but I know now that it is possible, and necessary, to experience that connection, and the incredible sustenance it gives for continuing to be able to fight and to love. Yes, this experience is connected to the aesthetic impulse, to creative power, to sexual energy, to love, to human community and solidarity, to the passion for justice, to love of nature: to love of life, in the end. But it also has a dimension that goes beyond all these elements: a whole that is more than the sum of the parts. I understand now why people through the centuries have prayed for strength, for comfort, for faith -- not because they were superstitious dupes, but because prayer, meditation, spiritual connectedness offer us the incredible gifts of serenity, the power to endure and survive, the hope and courage to struggle. The gift, ultimately, of transcending alienation, of filling the void inside. All experiences I, too, was raised to scoff at. Today I see the rejection of spirituality as one of the great flaws (among others) that has led to the decline, not to say collapse, of the Left in our times. We can be spiritual, and still be totally clear about the profoundly contradictory character of religion, its misogeny, its role in legitimizing oppression, its vast hypocrisy. Likewise, we can be spiritual without zoning out into the romantic, neo- Victorian essentialist take on nature or ecofeminism. We can be spiritual and totally convinced of the necessity of class analysis and class struggle. Experiencing the spiritual does not have to mean embracing idealist notiions of history or societ of history or society! Perhaps most imporant, we can be spiritual and profoundly rational. Rationality is also a powerful gift -- it gives us benefits like microchips and satellites that permit us to communicate across vast distances, and it gives us powerful resources for understanding like historical materialism. But it is not the only gift there is, and we do not have to rely on it to the exclusion of all else. To do so is to fall into the sort of dualistic thinking that lies at the heart of patriarchal capitalist thought. Well, when I started I wanted to say something about the Third World, consumerism and pollution; about whether women are really more peaceful and nurturing than men (sad to say, we're not; just get close to the power struggles inside any feminist organization if you still have doubts); and also about how anybody can imagine that watching a cat torture a small rodent or crippled bird for hours before killing it is a "beautiful" experience, natural though it may be. And this from a lifelong cat lover! But I see I have gone way over the usual length for a post, and I need to stop. I guess I have a lot of pent up desire to communicate. best to all, Rachael Kamel [EMAIL PROTECTED]
