
San Francisco 12/24/04
James George is a retired Canadian ambassador with a long-standing record of service concerning environmental issues. A founder of the Threshold Foundation and president of the Sadat Peace Foundation, he led the international mission to Kuwait and the Persian Gulf to assess post-war environmental damage.
I talked with James George and Barbara Wright in San Francisco at Barbara’s apartment a few weeks before their marriage.
Richard Whittaker: Let’s start with the here and now. You’re preparing to get married in a few days. So I wondered if you wanted to reflect on that and what’s right ahead of you.
James George: It is rather extraordinary at eighty-six to be looking ahead rather than behind. And that is entirely due to the fact that I’ve fallen in love. I’ve really found my partner, which is a miraculous thing at any age, but exceptional at my age! Or even at Barbara’s [Barbara Wright] somewhat more tender years. [laughs] That colors everything, doesn’t it? When you’re in love with somebody, you’re simultaneously in love with everyone and everything, aren’t you? I think it’s surprising that it happens like that. And yet, I think it’s quite real.
RW: That energy transforms one’s whole outlook.
JG: Yes. We live in such an obviously, or perhaps not so obviously, interdependent, interconnected world. Quantum mechanics is again discovering this after it was discovered thousands of years ago in the spiritual traditions. And where do we go with this interconnectedness? is it just a theory? Or is it right now, the sense between us that the words are trying to catch up with; the much more subtle reality that we’re sharing, a reality of feeling and intellect and body all at the same time; an awareness of presence, I suppose one could say.
RW: The part where you said, Maybe it’s not so obvious, this interconnectedness, I mean people don’t really feel this very often, do they?
JG: No. I don’t think they do, because it becomes intellectual, a theory for them, even if they’re the scientists who believe this is the case. I heard Hans Peter Durr, the director of the Max Planck institute, Heisenberg’s successor, really, speaking in San Francisco a few years ago, saying with a sort of missionary zeal, that there is nothing in the world, really, but relationship; energy patterns of relationship. Everything that appears to be solid is in fact almost entirely empty. It’s held together by these patterns of relationship, different densities and different levels, vibrations basically on different frequencies. Yet when we put it in those words, it doesn’t seem to correspond at all to the world our senses are perceiving, or which we are conditioned to think about when we wonder about the nature of reality and the meaning of it all.
RW: Let’s talk about relationship in a less abstract way and go back to your own career as a diplomat. One of the basic things about that, I assume, would be relationship. You would be meeting people and wouldn’t that aspect, relationship, be an essential aspect of it?
JG: Yes. I think that is one way, a good way of putting it. A less flattering way, as one of my former colleagues once expressed it, perhaps too graphically, was that a diplomat is one who makes a profession out of picking up the shit around the world.
RW: What did he mean by that?
JG: All the discord and violence and paranoia and fear that go into the relationships between cultures and peoples everywhere, and which surface in wars and disputes and litigation. All that make the world disharmonious, when it could be harmonious, disordered when it could be ordered. Continue Reading »