Co-dependencies may be understood, broadly speaking, as an unhelpful condition, a condition lacking balance—since they seem to require one party to be “unwell” as a condition of the connection. This may be so. It is certainly observable in human relationships which define the term.
It is fundamentally not possible for us to be co-dependent with the planet, not literally, but the image is instructive. We are not asserting the planet itself is capable of acting relationally with us. What we are suggesting is that we are incapable of being here-- without trying to master a profound urge to relate to the world, which includes the people in it.
A current television commercial sponsored by General Electric on health care, shows a new born child and the voice- over says, “Welcome to the Earth”. See?
The urge to relate is powerful, and for many of us, recurring. The specifics of our life experiences aside, the resiliency of our imagination, our symbols and metaphors— not our reality per se—compel us to drink deeply from a fountain of hopefulness leading to other pleasures, joy being first among them.
We admit it. Valerie and I are recovering realists having come to view this call of mind, “to be real”, an addiction, not unlike so many addictions which claim great displays of human loyalty. And like addicts everywhere, for us to be in recovery is to acknowledge that the object of the addiction, to be fully realistic and human, is unachievable. How else might we accommodate the resignation one feels when we consider how what we know, and what we do, so often go wanting for a connection? Denial comes to mind.
And denial is always present wherever addictions flourish. Denial is requisite to co-dependence. The planet with which we are co-dependent is remarkable. It operates on a scale which dwarfs people. Only our denial allows us to believe we may be capable of taming Nature expressed as our watery planet. The blue whale may be built to scale, but no other living beings come to mind. We are small, capable of keen observation, with great capacity for denial to manage through the random setbacks which visit us from time to time, by Nature. The setbacks which are of human inventing, and are legendary, derive from the dysfunction we have internalized, first from a nurturing and, occasionally heartless, planet destiny. More to follow.
