The Shape of Reality Is Open: Walking Together Through the Polycrisis
Shodo Spring
What Makes This Book Unique—and Uniquely Valuable
The Shape of Reality Is Open: Walking Together Through the Polycrisis speaks to the world behind and beneath our daily collective trauma. It offers inspiration and support for anyone involved with (or interested in) environmental regeneration, peace with justice, and/or spiritual healing. It also offers hope—and practical strategies and guidance—for anyone fearful about our future.
This title opens possibilities for creating a shared, flexible culture that knows the natural world both as family and as a working partner. It also offers a uniquely energizing narrative based on history, anthropology, archaeology, and human connection.
About Shodo Spring
Shodo Spring is a Zen teacher, the founder of Mountains and Waters Alliance (mountainsandwatersalliance.org), the author of Take Up Your Life: Making Spirituality Work in the Real World (Tuttle, 1996), and the editor for Shohaku Okumura’s Mountains and Waters Sutra: A Practitioner’s Guide (Wisdom Publications, 2018). She is a licensed clinical social worker who practices psychotherapy for a living.
Shodo also leads an online Zen community and is a longtime community organizer. She led the 2013 Compassionate Earth Walk along the KXL Great Plains route. She cofounded an early shelter for battered women, has worked with AIDS patients in Cambodia, and has a master’s degree in social work, a bachelor’s degree in physics, and a certificate in Permaculture design. She lives on a small farm outside Minneapolis.
Major Endorsements for The Shape of Reality Is Open
This brave and important book has found its way into our hands and our hearts just in time. Please read. We need the wisdom of Shodo’s deep practice and insight in the times we are facing. A must read today. —Roshi Joan Halifax, Abbot, Upaya Zen Center and the author of many books, including Standing at the Edge, Being with Dying, and The Fruitful Darkness
Shodo Spring invites us to reshape reality—not by deploying AI and carbon nanofibers, but by nurturing our deep roots in nature and Indigenous wisdom. This book can help us awaken from the nightmare that is modern industrial life; every chapter is a not-so-gentle nudge. —Richard Heinberg, author of Power: Limits and Prospects for Human Survival, The End of Growth, and other books
This is a book about possibility and hope—so much needed—as we go forward uniting humanity to survive, while learning to live in harmony with ourselves and Nature, our life-supporting environment in a holistic world. —Allan Savory, ecologist and President, Savory Institute and Savory Global
How might we use our emotions more productively for a life of joy and life-giving interconnectivity? Zen priest Shodo Spring, in communion with non-human and human beings, interprets the wisdom of the beings and the ages for those of us who have forgotten that we know how to live peaceably with Earth’s inhabitants. —Pamela Ayo Yetunde, author of Casting Indra’s Net: Fostering Spiritual Kinship and Community
The Shape of Reality offers a credible antidote to the despair that deflates our creative powers and disconnects us from each other. It reminds us of who humans are, have been, and can be again, and imagines a respectful loving and working relationship with the other beings who share this earth. —Kritee Kanko, Zen teacher, environmental scientist, and cofounder of Boundless in Motion
The Shape of Reality is Open offers us an open-hearted and unflinching challenge: get into right relationship with everything. Somehow this book looks backwards, forwards, and directly at the present all at once. It is a warm invitation into the hope, practice, and possibility of radical ecological transformation. —Ben Connelly, Zen priest and author of Inside the Grass Hut, Mindfulness and Intimacy, and other books
This book of beautiful, contemplative reflections offers keen insights into the deep, underlying roots of the convoluted network of crises we face both as individuals and as members of a single global community. The path out of our impasse, out of this overwhelming “polycrisis,” Shodo argues, does not lie in more sophisticated technologies or more finely tuned policies but in a recognition of our kinship with—indeed, our identity with—the totality of life on this planet and the entire ever-unfolding mystery of the cosmos. She proposes not only theoretical principles to guide us, but also practical exercises to literally return us to our senses. —Ven. Bhikkhu Bodhi, Buddhist scholar and the author and translator of many books
The gift of the author’s beautifully articulated vision and guiding voice helps us to imagine, understand, and remember—even in this techno- industrial age—how we may take our place together with all living things, so that life’s joyful and miraculous way may be maintained. Unwrap this gift, open it up, and see. —Peter Levitt, author, translator, and editor of many books, including Fingerpainting on the Moon, Yin Mountain, and The Essential Dogen
Shodo Spring’s The Shape of Reality is Open invites the reader to respond internally and through relationships to the unraveling of civilization and its unsustainable complexities. Hopeful and deeply pragmatic, she shares insights from her Zen practice as an ordained priest, from her community activism, and from the land which sustains her. —Peter Bane, founder/publisher of Permaculture Design magazine, author of The Permaculture Handbook: Garden Farming for Town and Country, and Executive Director of the Permaculture Institute of North America
We are in a crisis—a polycrisis. Shodo’s thoughtful reflections offer compassion and friendship on our shared journey through it. —David Loy, author of Ecodharma: Buddhist Teachings for the Ecological Crisis and many other books
True practice is not work, not even seeking enlightenment, but playing freely. Shodo’s book brings this essential teaching into the reality of today’s world, using history and stories to help us change our own framework from work to play, even in crisis. —Shohaku Okumura, author, translator, and editor of many books, including Living by Vow and The Mountains and Waters Sutra
With spare and simple language, Shodo Spring addresses the fact that “something is waking up in us.” Shodo’s easy prose acknowledges the generational traumas of civilization’s genocides for perpetrators and victims alike. Refraining from blame and shame, The Shape of Reality gathers together tools from Buddhist, Indigenous, and scientific practice to ask new questions about old problems. —Courtney Work, Associate Professor of Ethnology, National Chengchi University, and author of Tides of Empire
This is not a toolbox for protecting life – others are doing that well elsewhere – but nourishment for those who take up the tools and do the work, throwing our lives into the uncertainty and creating the future.
Polycrisis (noun):
· A confluence of multiple, interacting, dangerous trends or events.
· A time of great disagreement, confusion, or suffering caused by multiple problems happening at the same time, which together have profound effects.
The Shape of Reality Is Open: Walking Together Through the Polycrisis
Prologue: All Living Things Speak Us Into Existence
It is common to confuse the end of modern civilization with the end of human life, to think it’s too late to stop the many crises we face, to forget the lives of other beings. Here, now, we remember those other beings, and consider that something may be more powerful than our own creations.
Our bodies are water, moving with the ocean tides. Our bodies are matter, hungering for the feel of the earth underfoot. Each is a cousin of the microbes in the soil and a relative of the burr oaks up the hill.
I write not about the sixty percent of the human body composed of molecules of water, but of water that moves in the air, flows in and out, rises and swells like ocean tides, flows from high places to low, bubbles over rocks, thunders down from the sky, carves a new path through the soft earth and even through rock. That water is our birth, our home.
Humans have known forever that we are small in a large universe. Only modern humans have imagined ourselves as gods, all-powerful. And only with this fantasy have humans come to the edge of destroying life on earth. Yet we call this the only way to live.
I walk on the morning grass, dew cool against my bare feet, drops hanging on pine needles brushing against my face. My thirsty mouth takes in water from those needles one drop at a time; from a glass it swallows huge gulps of water, cooling, relieving desiccated tissues.
What if there were another way to live, embedded in a world of living, conscious, sacred beings? What if that were the way to save ourselves?
Each body is multitudes. Thirty-nine trillion microbes among thirty trillion cells:[1] that alone must give pause to any dream of independence. More: my body is the frog perching under the leaves of the yellow bean plant. The fly buzzing my head, and my immediate annoyance. The spider thin and graceful in a corner of the bedroom, the other thick and black on the wall of the hallway, moving too fast for me to take it outdoors.
What if, by recovering the deep knowing of our ancestors, we could heal the trauma that we call normal life? What if we could save ourselves, our grandchildren, millions of children and adults right now from starvation, wildfire, drowning, enslavement, from becoming refugees in a barren world?
Once during a days-long meditation retreat, hot and sweating, mind wandering, I found myself grateful for small flies walking across my face, crawling into my ears, bringing me back to now. It was a moment of grace.
It’s too much to imagine. Yet, without imagining it, we hurtle ever faster toward disaster.
This body is earth. That actually means vast reaches of space with electrons, atoms, molecules spinning and somehow held together, the mystery of solid matter that is merely bits of energy. I mean to speak of earth, minerals, substance, gravity – what we recognize as home.
What have we got to lose? Well, yes, the entire life that we know; yes, safety, convenience, familiarity. What else? What if we could lose the violence of poverty, end our fear of strangers, stop the epidemic of depression, walk away from addiction, leave behind the utter loneliness of trusting no one?
This body belongs here. The winds blow through, the tides move, the earth holds, and some spark of awareness makes its home in this one body called mine, in these bodies we call ours.
Seeing each other, we create each other. We are no more separate than left hand from right.