These images are from ABC, illustrating how the oil spill metastasized in just three days. The CEO of British Petroleum has said that stopping the leak is “like performing open heart surgery at 5,000 feet.”
Fishing has been banned in the gulf. The oil spill is now predicted to be worse than the Valdez.Within a day, the spill is supposed to enter the Loop Current – think of this as the gulf stream’s conveyor belt – and eventually it will enter the Florida Keys and enter the Gulf stream along the east coast of the U.S.
If you saw the head honcho of BP on the news at any point today – May 3 – then you undoubtedly heard him say that even though the company wasn’t responsible for the spill, they will pay for the cleanup. Huh? They aren’t responsible? Then who is?
Rush Limbaugh said that the “ecology would self-regulate.” Huh? Isn’t this what the experts claimed about the free market and derivatives?
Representative Gene Taylor, a Democrat from Mississippi, compared the massive oil slick to “chocolate milk” and said it would break up naturally. Huh? Doesn’t that sound a lot like Rush’s “self-regulation”?
House Minority Leader John Boehner (R-Ohio) has a novel approach to the problem: keep drilling.
Senator Mary Landrieu (D-Louisiana!) is demanding that the U.S. not “retreat” from further offshore drilling.
Governor Rick Perry of Texas attributed the spill to “an act of God” and hopes that it won’t deter us from drilling in the gulf.
Meanwhile, California’s Republican governor Schwarzenegger has withdrawn his support of gulf drilling, Florida’s Governor Crist says to forget it. You would think that “forgetting it” would be obvious, right? I mean, really, does the message get any louder than this?
Today, I went to our local Publix to buy fish for dinner. The guy behind the counter, who definitely knows his fish and his customers, informed me that tuna would be on sale tomorrow. Then he said, “At least tuna won’t be in short supply soon, but just about everything else will be.”
The oil spill has become what Seth (Jane Roberts) would call a mass event. It has entered the collective consciousness. So for the last few days, I’ve been paging through The Individual and the Nature of Mass Events, one of the books Jane Roberts channeled for Seth, searching for something relevant to this catastrophe. The book was published in 1981, long before these kinds of disasters. The closest analogy is the Three Mile Island horror, man-made, like this one, but Seth doesn’t go into it in any depth. I ran across some other treasures, though, that we might apply generally.
“There is nothing more stimulating, more worthy of actualization, than the desire to change the world for the better. That is indeed each person’s mission. You begin by working in that area of activity that is your own unique one, with your own life and activities. You begin in the corner of an office, or on the assembly line, or in the advertising agency, or in the kitchen. You begin where you are.”
Always, according to Seth and many other metaphysical teachers, our point of power lies in the present.
So perhaps, collectively,we should imagine the spill gone. Poof. Blue waters. Ecosystems flourishing. Dolphins, turtles, birds, fish, jellyfish, everyone is doing fine out there. Turn off the news for a few days. Maintain the image of a flourishing ocean, a happy planet. Maybe this practice is delusional. But hey, suppose it isn’t? Maybe it’s the same energy that operates when a group of people pray for the healing of a loved one.Can’t hurt to try.

















