Greetings Everyone,
Warning... this is a rant of sorts which I have posted on my website blog
Like so many who are navigating these unknown and sometimes dark waters, I'm having trouble staying on course. Staying afloat. Keeping connected to what matters. What needs to be done. Mainly because there is a dissonance between what this artificial, built-society says I must do and what the Natural World is saying, whisper soft, to my heart that we now must do if this world as we know and love it, is to survive.
Sometimes it's as if I'm sailing thru the mists, hand on a slack tiller, no wind to fill all the sails I try to raise to find a breath to get me moving once more. But the mists are thick. The stillness relentless. The uncertainty and fear rising up in my gut seems to be the only things that are moving. I know the safe passage is out there, I just can't find it in this fog that now envelopes much of our collective.
To be a creative person right now is more challenging than ever. To be a creative person who deals in the art of sweetness and light while (much of ) the world is plunged into murky gloom seems a Herculean effort at times. To be a creative person who relies on moss and green and flowers in a literal drought that has seen the hottest summer on record dehydrate the familiar places in the beloved forest to a crackling brown... nearly did me in this year.
I work with the spirits of the place, the Elementals and Energy Beings of the landscape and I'm here to say that they are suffering too....but mostly we are so caught up in our own dramas that we cannot hear their soft voices in our din. The Earth is in great need. GREAT need. This I believe is what "The Great Pause" (as some have called this past 9 months) has been about. I do not pretend to know how these things work, but the message for this pivotal time for our humanity and for the glorious garden we call Earth, our only home, is that we must make different choices. Now. We must stop thinking we are helpless victims, small ants in a relentless machine that knows only how to grind us up. For money. To line the pockets and bank accounts of the rich and powerful. Unable to stop our own destruction.
This is the one truth we all spend a great deal of effort and time denying: we have only one Earth. We all arrived here full of the purity and innocence that blesses each new life. A fresh start. A clean slate. What have we done with our greatest gift? We've fallen under the hypnotic spell of the economic machinery that sucks resources out of everything (our own souls included) and converts those resources into this thing we call money. The purpose of the machine is to convert everything into money. Trees, fish, minerals, animals, view-scapes, creativity, your own children and time itself. The Machine will convert it all into money and money-making. It's what our society is hell-bent on doing and it tells us relentlessly that we must comply, we must participate, we must play by it's rules or we are losers. We will be a failure, a reject, a nobody if we don't play along and do our part to make money for the machine.
This myth has been driving our collective for hundreds perhaps thousands of years. Certainly it took a big leap forward with the rise of the Industrial revolution when the machine got hold of our great-great-grandparents bodies and took them off the land and put them to work in the factories. That was the beginning of the Great unrooting, when we began to lose our vital linkage with the Earth, our home. We started to think that our little buildings and towns and cities were "home" and we called them that, forgetting that ALL of it, everything that we make or manufacture comes from Mother Earth. We fell under the spell of the machine mind and began to equate money with happiness.
"If only you had more money, then you'd be happy/safe/secure and loved" became the drumbeat of the machine and we listened....oh how we listened. And we became believers - big time.
We now stand at the most pivotal crossroads of our human experiment. We now are so many and so inculcated into the machine mind that science can confirm that we alone, the human beings on this planet are killing the very home we need to survive. If we were the only thing that relied upon this earth that might be a just ending to our little story, but the real crime here is that we are not alone. Millions upon millions of other creatures, from fungi to great Blue Whales also call this place home and we are killing them too.
I believe that Nature Herself has given us this moment, this virus to stop us in our tracks and give us a space, a pause to reflect and realize that we can chose a different path from this point forward. Many in Europe have embraced this moment and are making real, honest and deeply meaningful changes in how they live their lives so that they generate less waste and pollution than they did before. They understand that if we live in democracies then we must chose better representatives and leaders who will work for the planet, for our values of mutual justice and equality. We stand poised at the cross-roads, especially here in America.
In one month Americans will chose down which path we want to go. The choice is simple and clear. One path will be towards our own oblivion having capitulated to the powers of the righteous individualists who think they are above the laws of karma and Justice-for-all. They are cult followers of the Machine Mind and they believe their destination of power and wealth over all others is what their patriarchal god has ordained for them. The other path, though quite imperfect, has the glimmer of hope twinkling in the distance, enticing us forward into a new reality, one where we confront the machine mind and start to dismantle it at every opportunity.
I believe in the inherent goodness of the human heart. I believe that we all come here wanting to make this a better place. I believe that we all want to give and receive love, security, respect, justice, and meaningful purpose to our lives. I believe we all come into this earth loving our fellow creatures and that we are living our best lives when we are living in harmony with the natural rhythms and laws of Nature. I believe we are all hearing this calling now that we have been temporarily stilled by the virus that has stopped our entire built world in it's tracks.
What will you do to answer this call? What will you do to bring the world back into balance - your own world and the greater one we all live within? For Americans, we have a pivotal choice to make in the coming days. Who will we elect to speak for us? For the Earth? For our future?
To quote the great spoken word poet Shane Koyczan from his piece titled "A Tomorrow" ( which I invite you to hear by clicking on this link HERE ) listen when he says:
… “This is just a reminder that depression is a self-loading gun
we all have to keep checking the safety on
because when indifference has drawn
a chalk outline around our compassion
it means the next thing we lose
is each other.” ….
Chose wisely my friends. Chose as if your life depends on it, for it does. Chose as if the lives of your grand-children depend on your choice now, for they do. Chose now to believe the science, that the Earth is in great need and we can turn this trajectory around if we all work together and be our best selves. We can.
We have but one home. It is beautiful. It is magical. We must do better to respect and protect it. We start now.
