Scent
Scent
At the beginning of the pandemic we began to order our groceries to be delivered, rather than going to the market, an errand that previously gave my husband and I the simple pleasure of companionship in our elder years among the vast aisles of abundance that now had become aisles of scarcity. Consequently one morning I heard a small delivery car come down our long driveway and park. A heavyset middle-aged man with thick black hair and dark eyes brought four brown bags of groceries into our garage and carefully set them down in a neat row. When I hastily put on my mask and went out to thank him, he said happily but without smiling, his red mask hanging from one ear, “Oh this place, the scent of this place reminds me of my country that I came from so long ago! It’s the jasmine.”
I smiled though I realized he couldn’t know this unless he saw the smile in my eyes. “And where did you come from?”
“Algeria,” he said and then asked “do you mind if I take a small cutting? You know, you can trim just a short piece of the vine and put it in the ground or a pot and it will grow.” He demonstrated with his hands, miming the cutting and the planting.
“Of course, of course. We have so much jasmine. It grows everywhere as you can see. Here’s a good patch, take it from here,” I said pointing to a clump near him, forgetting for a moment to keep my distance because of the virus, then quickly backing away.
“Thank you, I don’t have a garden because I live in an apartment but I have a small balcony,” he said as he began to dig up a section of vine with his hands. “You know, in my country, every garden has jasmine. Every garden has three things.” He stood and held up three fingers, stopping what he was doing for a long moment as he said, “jasmine, a lemon tree and a rosebush. You can always smell one or the other as you walk down the street.” He waited before he resumed digging, as if retrieving some fragrant memory that held him in its grip.
For some reason when he said this, I saw them. The gardens of Algiers behind gleaming white walls on the coast of the blue-green Mediterranean Sea. And I could smell the heavy languorous scent of jasmine mingled with the sweet innocence of roses and the wonderful tang of lemon blossoms. I saw the dark-eyed man in one of those gardens clipping jasmine, and for some reason tears sprang to my eyes. Because now we were all in danger from Covid-19 and our sense of smell, our very breath was at risk. Because he was an immigrant who lived in a small apartment with a balcony. Because maybe delivering groceries was the only job he could find now. Because his melancholy was pungent. Because he’d delivered me a rare gift and now I could give him jasmine.
“May I take a little dirt with me as well?” He asked.
“Of course, here – I have a pot for you.” I went into the garage and found an empty terracotta pot that seemed just the right size, and placed it six feet or so away from him.
“You can always take jasmine from here if you like when you come,” I said.
“Oh I will always ask first, thank you,” he said politely , digging up the dirt with cupped hands and beginning to fill the pot.
“Wait a moment,” I said as I rummaged around in the garage for a broken terracotta shard to put over the drainage hole in the pot. “Here,” I said and handed him the shard.
He nodded his thanks and set it in the bottom of the pot.
“And, if you don’t mind, what is your name?” I asked.
“Jamel.”
“I’m Regina, and it’s very nice to meet you.”
“Thank you. Oh and one more thing. In my country, we always put a single jasmine blossom in our coffee. You should try it. Just a single blossom.” He put his forefinger and thumb together, covered now with small dark crumbs of soil, and dropped an imaginary blossom into an imaginary cup of coffee, that I imagined to be a white demitasse of very strong aromatic coffee.
“I’ll try it, thank you for the suggestion.”
He carried the pot of soil with a couple of jasmine vines to his trunk, got into his car and backed slowly all the way up our long steep driveway, a little bit of vine trailing from his trunk, as I stood still, removed my mask and breathed in the scent of jasmine.
Butterfly Effect
Butterfly Effect
Next September, find a view above an Appalachian
gap – the place where a ridge of rolling mountain tops
declines into a break, hillsides dipping and rising
on either side of a narrow trail made by paws and moccasins
and boots. Stand in the cold before sunrise where,
in the shadow of those hills, the leafy tops of oak
and poplar, ash and walnut seem feathered grey
and beige in misty air below. And wait.
Wait for the sun’s first gold to strike that canopy, transform
the mist into a thin vapor and warm the pale feathers
into orange opening wings, a hundred then a thousand
glowing spots fanning out into an auburn blanket
over every branch above the dew-soaked slopes’ dark
green rhododendron tangles. Stand sun-struck
as those new-lit wings begin to rise in twos and threes, more
and more bright sparks flickering into the blue
until they become silhouettes and gather
into a cloud that vanishes off into southern sky.
If a billion fewer Monarchs traverse the air’s
invisible road today than twenty years ago, what difference
can it make? Scientists say the flutter of just one butterfly’s wings
can change the weather days from now. They do not know
a way to calculate what that change will be
among the million possibilities; they call their study
chaos theory. While volcanic ash covers farms in the Pacific
and firestorms roar across the Australian Bush, those mathematicians
leave us here without a cause that can be named
to stand high on this ridge, transfixed by glowing flames
as they ascend into the sun.
The Two Faces of Digital Spirituality
The Two Faces of Digital Spirituality
Contrasting Motives for Digital Spirituality
My curiosity about digital spirituality is grounded in the view that technology, guided by the proper motivations, ethics, and knowledge, can contribute in meaningful ways to our individual and collective spiritual development. Depending upon how any technology is used, it can create either benefit or harm. History offers us many lessons about technology’s two-edged sword. For one, look to our uses of nuclear power. If digital spirituality is to do more good than harm, we must first understand our underlying motivations for exploring its role in our spiritual lives.
My research on the role of digital culture and technology (digitalism) in religion and spirituality offers a stark reminder that we need to choose wisely between two overall motivations for looking to technology as a tool for spiritual development. These two motivations represent the two faces of digital spirituality.
The first motivation says we should use digital technology to escape the human condition and its frailties, while the second motivation encourages us to look to digital technology to improve the human condition. Each tempts us in a different direction. The first is the choice to abandon humanity and its evolving spiritual foundation. The temptation here could be seen as “playing God,” or placing technology advancement over the advancement of the human spirit. The second is to use technology to consciously grow into our divine human nature, which I believe is the superior motivation. The second motivation invites us into a responsible co-creation relationship with the Divine, where we use digital technology to experience ourselves and our divinity in spiritually meaningful ways.
Digital spirituality is an emerging wave in many religions and spiritual traditions, where individuals and faith communities use digital culture and technology (digitalism) in a purposeful way to fulfill their religious and spiritual needs and aspirations. Very importantly, digital spirituality is about using technology with a spiritual intention
Brief Overview of the Religion-Technology Relationship
Technology and religion are no strangers to each other. Their relationship in the Western World can be traced back to the Middle Ages where the two emerged in the context of Christianity. Each has its roots in a form of transcendence. Religion and spirituality aim to transcend fallen human nature, illusion, and evil. Meanwhile, technology seeks to transcend nature, the human body’s frailties, and advance work and personal productivity. Throughout the history of religion, we see important roles played by technology. For example, the Gutenberg printing press, invented in 1440, gave the world the Gutenberg bible, which was instrumental to the Protestant Reformation in the 14th Century. In the 20th Century, radio and television extended the reach of religion across America and the world. In today’s world, we are witnessing the profound influence of the Internet and digital technology on religion and spirituality, which this article examines.
The Path of Digital Technology Through Religion and Spirituality
This article invites readers to look at the many forms and expressions of religion and spirituality across the world through the lens of digitalism, as it has increased its influence on religious and spiritual practice and belief, and how in the future it could transform our understanding of the human spirit and its afterlife.
Digital spirituality has emerged since the early 1990s as an unforeseen outcome of the use of digital tools and virtual environments by spiritual seekers and practitioners. In the past decade, we have made increasing use of mobile phone and tablet apps for spiritual practice and spiritual development, online places of worship (cyber-churches), virtual meditation and prayer groups, live-streaming of sermons and spiritual study groups, online baptisms, weddings, and funerals, virtual reality games and films about the spiritual afterlife, and many more things to come. Reliance on digital spirituality has grown markedly during the current COVID-19 Pandemic as physical places of worship were shuttered in many states to reduce the virus spread. My research indicates that an important, and to some people shocking, future use of artificial intelligence and virtual reality technologies will be to create cyberspaces enabling humans to experience and share their personal visions of the spiritual afterlife.
In addition, we are using the Internet increasingly to: 1) deliver degree and non-degree religious and spiritual education; 2) provide information and knowledge about religion and spirituality; 3) connect with others in virtual spiritual communities; 4) perform administrative functions related to church finances and membership support and development; and 5) market and distribute religious products and services to the global marketplace. In most cases, faith communities have borrowed and adapted these Internet uses from business, education, and government. It is important to mention that technology companies and entrepreneurs have played the major role in creating the digital technology products and services used by faith communities. Depending upon how far we are willing to take digital spirituality, these companies’ profits will either grow or plummet in the future.
Beyond the more routine administrative uses of digital technology, how might we visualize the emergence of digital spirituality in religions and spiritual traditions? Table 1 below provides a broad sketch of this emergence in two major related areas: 1) spiritual beliefs, practices, and communities; and 2) spiritual afterlife understanding.
Table 1: Emergence of Digital Spirituality in Selected World Religions and Spiritual Traditions1
Table 1 above includes a reference to symbolic immortality, which means that immortality is defined in terms of whether a deceased person is: 1) remembered; 2) the person’s beliefs and achievements live on; and 3) the person’s life continues to make a contribution beyond their lifespan. In other words, symbolic immortality is defined in terms of what a person cared about or was committed to in life. One example of symbolic immortality is making a large financial gift in the name of the donor to a religious group, arts organization, medical center, or educational institution. Literal immortality, on the other hand, suggests human beings escape death either by delaying it or by surviving the process of dying.2 Human longevity, as science tell us, hinges on genetics, lifestyle and standard of living, education, a clean environment, and other factors. The digital spiritual afterlife for now is seen as a form of symbolic immortality.
For now, the digital spiritual afterlife is a concept that suggests artificial intelligence and virtual reality technologies can be used in the future to create virtual environments allowing people to create, experience, and share their personal visions of the spiritual afterlife. It is seen as a tool that can be adapted for use in any religion or spiritual tradition with the intention of promoting spiritual awareness and growth. In time, the digital spiritual afterlife could include the development of digital replicas of human beings and their experiences and memories, including a digital soul or digital consciousness that inhabits the digital spiritual afterlife.
With this view of the path of digital spirituality through religions and spiritual traditions in mind, we turn to a vitally important question: Should we use advanced digital technologies with a spiritual development intention? For an answer, we return to the two central motivations for looking to technology for spiritual answers, which were discussed at the beginning of this article.
Where the First Face of Digital Spirituality Could Take Us
Should we use technology to consciously escape the human condition and its frailties, which could introduce the prospect that artificial intelligence (AI) agents could someday surpass humans in cognitive, emotional, and spiritual intelligence, attain literal immortality, and live forever in a digital after-world?
Transhumanism and its proponents, such as Ray Kurzweil, Max Moore, Nick Bostrom, and others, encourage us to consider the possibility that human beings may not represent the final stage of the evolutionary process.3 Several ethical issues and dilemmas are raised by this possibility, including major challenges to our long-held definition of personhood, or what it means to be a person. Personhood constitutes the union of the spiritual and the corporeal, which is considered to be the defining essence of human beings. Is our motivation to bring about personhood, including consciousness and spirit, to future AI agents? Most transhumanists seem to stop short of this recommendation. If we were to cross this line in giving consciousness and spiritual essence to AI agents, the mission of digital spirituality could shift in an alarming way to the cultivation of the spiritual life of AI agents, and cease to be about fostering human spiritual growth. This motivation did not underlie my recent book on digital spirituality.
The Second Face of Digital Spirituality: Prospects and Challenges
Having examined the potential frightening consequences of digital spirituality’s first face, let’s look at its second face, which keeps the focus of religion and spirituality in the virtual world on understanding and improving the human spiritual experience. In serving this worthy mission, digital spirituality will continue to evolve as its supporting technological foundation advances, and as the spiritual growth benefits of digital spirituality become better understood.
What are the challenges ahead? One challenge on the horizon is the integration of in-person (physical) and virtual spiritual beliefs and practices. A second challenge lies in using the digital world to advance our understanding of the spiritual afterlife in a way that prepares for better living in this world and readies us for our transition to the afterlife when our time comes. It is important that digital spirituality serves us by ensuring that whole-person spiritual development is cultivated in our virtual and physical worlds. Digital spirituality in this sense must deepen the human experience of spiritual oneness, and not add to our growing sense of isolation and fragmentation. Finally, it is important that our spiritual learning in the in-person and virtual worlds feed each other in a meaningful way with a focus on the mutual sustenance of the human spirit and Planet Earth.
References
[1] This table intends to provide a broad overview of beliefs and practices related to the spiritual afterlife. In reality, these beliefs and practices are quite diverse within religions and spiritual traditions.
[2] Iannone, Donald, T. Digital Spirituality, Its Rise and What It Means for Spiritual Identity, Belief, and Practice, Kindle Direct Publishing Company, Kendallville, Indiana, 2020.
[3] Transhumanism is a class of philosophies of life that seek the continuation and acceleration of the evolution of intelligent life beyond its currently human form and human limitations by means of science and technology, guided by life-promoting principles and values. Source: Moore, Max, “Transhumanism: Toward a Futurist Philosophy,” unpublished essay, 1990.
Scaffolding for a Thrivable Planet
Scaffolding for a Thrivable Planet
“This self to which I must be faithful is something that must be kept alive, it must constantly be renewed, and… that life, that renewal, has something to do with childhood.” – Edward Robinson in The Original Vision
In 1954, fourteen-year-old Jean Houston met priest-scientist Pierre Teilhard de Chardin in New York City. Unpublished and unknown outside of scientific circles, she knew him simply as “Mr. Tayer,” and they met regularly to walk in Central Park. It was thus that she found herself awakening ever more to the experience of life and her own life too, as Teilhard coaxed her in what, with hindsight, she describes as “God’s own party.” He did this both via his own manner of dwelling in childlike wonderment, gratitude, joy, and love; and by direct invitation to access her own inner child.
Houston describes Teilhard as seeming to have “absolutely no self-consciousness”; as “always being seized by wonder and astonishment over the simplest things”; and “constantly and literally falling into love…with everything.” He spoke to trees, stones, and even the wind as “dear friends, as beloved even.”
One particular time, the priest invited Jean to regard a tiny green caterpillar closely—both of them literally on their knees to contemplate it. He then asked her if she could feel herself to be a caterpillar, and then to think of her own metamorphosis by considering the question, “What is the butterfly of Jeanne?” She says she felt “primed to the depths” by the way “this infinitely beautiful man” would regard her with openness and love. She wonders, as an adult musing her memories, if it was her own “simplicity and innocence” then that enabled Teilhard to “reveal the fullness of his being” to her.
A child’s life in the beginning is like that of a poet—for a child ingests and engages with the whole self, utilizing every sense, driven to know and bond with all. Effectively a second womb, the world in all its aspects begins at once to both nurture and thwart the newborn’s access to the “mystery of the self.” Gabriel Marcel, in his Homo Viator: Introduction to a Metaphysic of Hope, observes that lack of proper nurturance often stifles access to the inner sanctum of the self, so that it gradually becomes “forbidden.” Writing poignantly of his own experience, Marcel further notes that this “unquestionably comes about in so far as the child that I used to be… dies a little more each day.”
The multiple and life-threatening crises of our times—the tipping point of centuries of humanity’s struggle to rise into its evolutionary capacity—might all wisely be resolved by mindfully awakening, or reawakening, the potentials of early childhood in ourselves. In fact, the child in every person remembers—still seeks to open the mysteries of the self through deep relationship with others and the natural world; and through activity that has its genesis in self-awareness, with what Maria Montessori referred to as the “inner teacher.”
Dr. Montessori and practitioners of that pedagogy* have approached the child as few have done—tenderly and reverentially, with “a learner’s mind”— fully open to receiving and nurturing whatever the child would reveal. Being approached and responded to so mindfully, children soon disclosed their true nature.
Through self-chosen and meaningful activity, engaged as long as desired within a mixed-age community, the children became calm and careful, mindful of one another, and strikingly silent as they became absorbed in their chosen activities. Such silence arises spontaneously as the inner and outer selves establish “points of contact,” allowing for integration and emergence of the “whole child.” This is the natural contemplative state of a person of peace. Montessori was astonished when she observed this state arising in the very young. When, from birth, the child is allowed engagement with the world around him, participating in what he finds meaningful and desires to do, the link between volition and action, inspiration and work is established, and the fullness of human potential is served. Montessori noted…
“I did not invent a method of education,
…………………..I simply gave some little children the chance to live.”
Adults innately seek the same—what Barbara Marx Hubbard names “vocational arousal”—to engage one’s vital life force to serve in the world. This proceeds from the state of being love and being in love. The young child is recognized as the ambassador of love. How is this most desirable quality nurtured and encouraged forward into adult life?
Love is the primal desire to know and to be known, to see and to be seen. It is the force of attraction all the way up and down the evolutionary scale— engaged with intention in the human experience. It is nourished by the child’s propensity to wonderment, which is readily enkindled through direct engagement with the natural world. Mother Earth is clearly meant to serve as second womb, “Terra Placenta” for each of her newborn children. She welcomes each person as indigenous and at home here—to be nurtured, in right relationships, and contributing uniquely as part of the whole.
When wonderment is nurtured in this way, love expands while joy and gratitude flow. Later, the satiation is so great that a fountain of desire spills forth—in giving and sharing with others as the child grows.
“There is no one in the world like you, and I like you just the way you are.” Fred Rogers’ affirmation warms and encourages every child of every age. By internalizing this truth, the child’s potential is served to create community and co-create to regenerate the planet. This is the opportunity present within the very beginnings of human life.
*Notably Dr. Sofia Cavaletti and Gianna Gobbi, who focused on the child’s spiritual capacities.
From Godspeed: The Journey of Christ (1988)
Dr. Jean Houston is author and leader in the Human Potential Movement.
The Ecozoans
The Ecozoans
In this essay I will attempt to explore the essential qualities needed for ushering in an ecological civilization—a human presence organized not only for human benefit, but one given form with supreme consciousness of and responsibility for the sustained flourishing within Earth’s entire community of life. We refer to this new mode of presence as “the Ecozoic,” a term coined by cultural historian and “geologian” Thomas Berry to denote the promise of an era when most humans will have entered into a deep process of supportive reciprocity with each other, Earth, and all living beings. An Ecozoan is a person who is leaning in to the Ecozoic—open to an intimate presence to, and an integral and creative understanding of the natural world, and is moving into a new kind of wholeness, belonging, and exuberant participation seldom experienced in the modern period. The leadership of Ecozoans flows naturally from an unquenchable desire to explore the beauty, scientific intricacies, and profound spiritual experiences of intuition, imagination, and artistic expression.
This epochal transition into the Ecozoic will evoke the development of some familiar, but greatly expanded personal qualities, including curiosity, wonder, reverence, respect, tolerance, appreciation, a penchant for creativity, and a preference for relationship over achievement, material resources, or status. It is even possible to imagine the emergence of new economic, political, commercial, and cultural societies with values grounded in the arts, the new cosmic story of the universe, and common feelings and needs that celebrate the creative building and maintenance of infrastructures of care (Naomi Klein) for each other and all life.
I will examine the arising of the Ecozoic era and the qualities of an Ecozoan through the work and wisdom of several great contemporary thinkers, including Thomas Berry, Brian Thomas Swimme, Wes Jackson, Wendell Berry, Robin Wall Kimmerer, Clare W. Graves, Don Beck, Christopher Cowan, Rupert Sheldrake, Leonardo Boff, and Donella Meadows. All pertain to understandings of and engagement with a new eco-culture that has both the seeds and energy for creating a regenerative economy and culture, through a super-interdisciplinarity within the entire range of human-other than human-Earth-Cosmos relations.
Who/What is an Ecozoan?
Everyone who breathes air, drinks water, takes in nourishment from the land, marvels at the moon, sun, and stars, and is conscious of being energized by wondrous processes that evolved over billions of years is an Ecozoan.
In the words of one notable Ecozoan: “Everyone has Ecozoan written in their heart-minds; some self-consciously live as Ecozoans, and, of these, some are Ecozoic leaders.”1
It would be difficult to find or create a better articulation or description of an Ecozoan, than to begin with a collection of phrases from the “Epilogue” of The Universe Story by Thomas Berry and Brian Swimme. As a prelude, it could be said that an Ecozoan, or one in the making, is a person either naturally susceptible and attracted to, or on a path toward the allurement of the natural world, its beauty, its workings, its mysteries, and its secrets; the exploration of its stupendous diversity, its history, its structure and functioning, and its having brought forth an astonishing array of beings of varying degrees of consciousness.
We know of no other place in the universe with such gorgeous self-expression as exists on Earth. . . [this] exuberance of life . . . single, multiform, sequential, celebratory event . . . exaltation of larks . . . flight and song expressing delight in existence.
The pressing toward expanded modes of being . . . the grandeur of the entire cosmic process . . . [and] our own special role to enable this entire community to reflect on and to celebrate itself and its deepest mystery in a special mode of conscious self-awareness.
This capacity to celebrate in our music and our art . . . dance . . . poetry, . . . in our religious/spiritual rituals, . . . .has provided the highest forms of human fulfillment.2
The Ecozoic is profoundly integrative, and thus, it is critical to connect Ecozoans from all primary fields of knowledge, practice, and desire. Desire in this context, is the deep attraction to, and curiosity for knowledge, understanding, experience, and expression. At the end of The Universe Story, Brian Swimme and Thomas Berry, in an ecstatic yet sobering statement, wrote:
Once we begin to celebrate the story of the universe, we will understand the attraction that so draws our scientists to their work, why every detail of our scientific inquiry becomes so important. Without entrancement within this new context of existence it is unlikely that the human community will have the psychic energy needed for the renewal of the Earth.3
Desire, entrancement, are essential qualities for creating the energy necessary to usher in a new era of human-Earth relations. And in order to not leave out any field of knowledge or practice, it is also critical that the aspiring Ecozoan not resist fully developing both sides of the brain, the rational-analytical with the intuitive-imaginative-emotional self. In this sense, the desire for or necessity of specialization within a field needs to be secondary to an understanding of its interrelationships with all fields. “Nothing is itself, without everything else.”4
To set the stage for understanding the realms of consciousness needed for the Ecozoan, we need to envision the characteristics that define the flourishing dynamics of self-sustaining living systems. We are now in the closing phase of the Cenozoic era, a lyrical period in Earth’s history that began sixty-five million years ago following the death of the dinosaurs. This has been a period of stunning evolutionary creativity, from the building up of layers upon layers, nests within nests, of interdependent and emergent beings, phenomena, and ecosystems, to a period of cascading global catastrophes—new authoritarianisms, pandemics, ecological degradation, global warming, and the sixth great mass extinction. To move from the terminal Cenozoic to an Ecozoic era, will require nothing less than a reinvention of nearly every aspect of human self-understanding, behavior, and relationship within the Earth community of living beings and living and non-living systems.
In pursuit of the Good, the True, and the Beautiful—Ecozoans will unite spirituality— understood as the perceived, experienced, imagined, desired wholeness of inner and manifest being—with science, and art. Concepts, and expressions of beauty become unifying experiences that can hold all three together. Therefore, the Ecozoan will fully conceive, understand, feel, and embody a mutually enhancing relationship among all ways of knowing—scientific, literary, intuitive, and imaginative, and through traditional and Indigenous wisdoms.
Our attempts to explore and define the character and attributes of the Ecozoan cannot be pursued apart from imagining the evolving context within which this emergence has taken, is taking, and will take place, that of an emerging Ecozoic society or civilization.
To adequately address the questions of “What will a new Ecozoic society/civilization look like?” and “How can it emerge?” we cannot afford to only be in one of two camps: those focused on addressing climate change and other ecological crises or those imagining forward into the conceptual, structural, actualization of new societies in harmony with nature. However we conceive of moving into a viable human future, we must engage in this adventure of anticipatory emergent process, while seeking the leverage points in bio-cultural dynamics that can move our species quickly enough toward a balance of mutual reciprocity within the community of Earth’s life systems. In other words, we need both!
As a final, initial consideration, it is essential to think and imagine beyond establishing the reinvented human presence within the Earth community, to the understandings for maintaining an evolving and enduring integration with the natural world. The great cerebral cortex and strategic mind we have will always be vulnerable to the domination/duality paradigm. It is a tool too powerful for casual or careless use—will never cease to have the capacity to overwhelm or destroy delicately operating living systems—for it evolved extremely rapidly, but is undergirded and easily overwhelmed by reptilian and mammalian neuro-infrastructure that evolved over tens of millions of years for competitive survival.
It requires a mode of continuous, deep, highly complex, and creative intervention at the cultural level of values and meaning—a dedicated pattern and process of engagement of its capacity for both high technical, mechanical, mathematical, and rational scientific invention/investigation, and an extremely complex imaginative, artistic/symbolic, emotional, relational and creative capacity for art, music, loving relationship, compassion, celebration, dependent co-arising, and co-operation.
What cultural resources can possibly generate the power to absorb and integrate these stupendous potentialities into a community of living systems whose exquisitely balanced and intricately interwoven elements, capacities, and relationships have taken eons to evolve? There is insufficient room here to address this important question more fully, but the question’s traces will evoke insights from what has been said so far, and from what follows. It isn’t enough to bring about an Ecozoic civilization or society; our species needs a continuous immersion in a medium that, like a hormone or enzyme in the body, helps maintain and regulate the delicate balance with all living and non-living systems.
To explore the power of the poetry of science, through the wisdom and gifts of an Indigenous American, scientist, writer/poet, here is an offering to our growing portrait of the new Ecozoan, from conversations with Robin Wall Kimmerer and her book Braiding Sweetgrass, a tribute to her ancient culture of gift economy, generosity, reciprocity, and persistent celebration.
So how then can science, art, and story give us a new lens to understand the relationship that people made of corn represent? Someone once said that sometimes a fact alone is a poem—a beautiful poem, written in the language of chemistry.
Carbon dioxide plus water combined in the presence of light—and chlorophyll in the beautiful membrane-bound machinery of life yields sugar and oxygen.
Photosynthesis—Straw spun to gold, water turned to wine—the link between the inorganic realm and the living world—plants give us food and breath.
Sugar combined with oxygen in the beautiful membrane-bound machinery of life called the mitochondria yields us right back where we began—carbon dioxide and water.
Respiration—The breath of plants gives life to animals and the breath of animals give life to plants.
From Wes Jackson, a long-time friend of Wendell Berry, botanist, geneticist, leader in the international movement for sustainable agriculture, co-founder with Dana Lee Jackson of The Land Institute, and Life magazine’s “one of the most important Americans of the 20th century”—a selection of thoughts defining the membrane boundaries of Ecozoic orientations and organizing principles.
Hypothesis: “Since agriculture began, humans have produced no technological product or process—including our crops and livestock—without drawing down the earth’s capital stock and, thereby, reducing the overall net primary production of its ecosystems [that use] only contemporary sunlight. . . . We cannot do better than nature.
We need to become bookkeepers of [embodied energy]—students of boundaries—a necessity in both households and governments. But the boundary of consideration has been narrower than the boundary of causation. Deficit spending of ecological capital has been the rule—Embedded within civilization is scaffolding that we take for granted but that must be considered if we want to know the embodied energy of any human artifact and what it takes to repair it.
Ecosystems tend to accumulate ecological capital. Civilizations spend it, and the depreciation rate is huge.
The majority of solutions to both global and local problems must take place at the level of the expanded tribe, what civilization calls community.
We are unlikely to achieve anything close to sustainability (ecological perennial balance) in any area unless we work for the broader goal of becoming native in the modern world, and that means becoming native to our places in a coherent community that is in turn embedded in the ecological realities of its surrounding landscape.
The resettlement will be no small matter. It will have to be carried out by those who have a pioneering spirit, by those who see the necessity of such a dispersal (to gather dispersed sunlight in the form of chemical energy in a fossil-free world), by those intelligent enough and knowledgeable enough about its necessity that they will have the staying power.5
What human generated qualities must prevail in an Ecozoic society, to ensure its flourishing, and therefore must be imagined, understood, and cultivated in Ecozoans? To cultivate, educate for, and intentionally evolve the qualities and understandings Wes Jackson outlines, the emerging Ecozoan will need to develop a continued, growing sensitivity—attention—to what we may be overlooking in our own capacities; to evolve—to prioritize self-selection for mutual survival and quintessentially value harmony and beauty—pleasure, fulfillment, creativity, relationship, culturally and educationally turbocharged by the Project to Reinvent the Human—to deliberately select for cooperation and the afore-stated values.
There is also much to be learned from Spiral Dynamics (SD), a powerful conceptual system for understanding human cultural development. Its creator Clare W. Graves called it “The Emergent, Cyclical, Double-Helix Model of Adult Biopsychosocial Systems Development.” In brief, individuals and cultures flow in and through a spiral series of memes (what biochemical genes are to cellular DNA, memes are to cultural/psycho-social DNA), which cannot be skipped (they are time developmental), and reflect worldviews, valuing systems, levels of psychological existence, belief structures, organizing principles, ways of thinking and modes of adjustment and adaptation. The Spiral’s eight core landmark memes are represented by different colors, the final two being yellow, and turquoise.
The first six memes are the subsistence memes. The attributes of the second-tier or being memes, seven—Integrative (“yellow”) and eight—holistic (“turquoise”), that evolved in the latter part of the 20th century describe with great precision the developing qualities and consciousness of the maturing Ecozoan.
People living out of the second-tier memes constitute only a small percentage of the human family. A few descriptive segments from the second tier will further our understanding of and attraction to the emerging ecozoan.
How prescient are these words of Graves from decades ago: “We are crossing a number of major technological and environmental thresholds during this generation. Any one of these crossings possesses the potential to detonate an evolutionary bomb which could totally change the direction of our kind.”7
While yellow attempts to stitch together particles, people, functions, and nodes into networks and stratified levels, turquoise detects the energy fields that engulf, billow around, and flow throughout naturally. Yellow connects the dots while turquoise fleshes in the art of all the colors and hues, and the picture comes alive. Yellow gets its hands dirty dealing with the chaos. The turquoise collective system steps back and creates the next form of order.
Turquoise views a world of interlinked causes and effects, interacting fields of energy, and levels of bonding and communicating most of us have yet to uncover. The meme liberates a sense of living systems that mesh and blend, flowing in concert with each other. This is another order-seeking system, but the first one that searches for the macro view. “Seeing-everything-at-once” before doing anything specific dominates the thinking process. Collective imperatives and mutual interdependencies reign supreme.
Turquoise: Blending and harmonizing a strong collective of individuals; Focus on the good of all living entities as integrated systems; Expanded use of human brain/mind tools and competencies; Self is part of larger, conscious, spiritual whole that also serves self; Global networking seen as routine; Acts for minimalist living so less actually is more.
A new version of spirituality. Standing in awe of the cosmic order, the creative forces that exist from the Big Bang to the smallest molecule. Life experiences show that one can never know or understand all things. With this acceptance comes wonder, awe, reverence, humility, unity, and a refreshed value for simplicity . . . reality can be experienced, but never known. Contemplation, then re-enters refreshed with new perspective.8
A final prescient thought from Graves: “The present moment finds our society attempting to negotiate the most difficult, but at the same time the most exciting, transition the human race has faced to date. It is not merely a transition to a new level of existence but the start of a new movement in the symphony of human history.”9
As conclusion to our exploration of the evolution and emergence of a new human for a new era, perhaps the most important consideration remains unexamined, though mentioned earlier as “the two camps”—those focused on the wounded patient, and those imagining and creating new and thriving conditions if our Earth community survives. Some in each camp, in their concentrated intentions seem unaware of the other. It is understandable that those attending the emergency be 100% attentive, for if the patient dies, all efforts of the others to bring forth a new and beautiful world are in vain. Yet, the work of helping bring forth the new is equally important and understanding that there are leverage points for transformation (see below), is critical for Ecozoans in their role as mentors in ushering in an Ecozoic era while it is still possible.
The work of Donella Meadows and others on systems theory offer powerful insights into the art of sensing or knowing the right action, at the right time, in the right place. “Leverage points are places to intervene in a system where a small shift can lead to fundamental changes in the system as a whole.”10 David Abson and his co-authors stated, “We propose a research agenda inspired by systems thinking that focuses on transformational sustainability interventions, centered on three realms of leverage: reconnecting people to nature, restructuring institutions, and rethinking how knowledge is created and used in pursuit of sustainability.”11
The following excerpts taken from the Tao of Liberation by Leonardo Boff and Mark Hathaway are inspiring entry concepts for exploration of how transformation may occur:
Could humanity with surprising suddenness and radicality—shift to new habits, perhaps even on a planetary level? What might it take to provoke such a shift?
Given the right conditions, radical change can happen in a very short period of time . . . the power to transform is not determined by brute force, but rather by sensitive intuition of timing and place.
A system is often most sensitive in those places where it is subjected to the greatest pressures. Just as new species often appear where an ecosystem is under stress—in regions . . . on the margins—so too may it be in human societies; we should therefore seek our creativity on the periphery of our social, economic, and cultural systems, . . . precisely in those regions where structures and paradigms are breaking through with creativity into new forms.
New fields start off as insights, intuitive leaps, guesses, hypotheses, or conjectures. They are like mental mutations . . . coming into being suddenly. (Rupert Sheldrake).
The more complex the system . . . the more sensitive to change—External stresses lead to sudden jumps—often with surprising rapidity—through a phenomenon called “punctuated evolution.”12
It would be difficult to imagine a system more complex than an Earth-scale matrix of subatomic particles to geosphere, hydrosphere, atmosphere, ecosphere, noosphere (culture-mind-infosphere) evolved over 13.8 billion years of diversification, autopoiesis, sympoiesis, and interrelationship!
Throughout cosmic history many thresholds of complexification, newly emergent structures, processes, and relationships have been crossed suddenly. Some have occurred through processes of internal complexification leading to the appearance of completely new phenomena; others have been triggered by events that suddenly push galactic systems or ecosystems into new structures or relationships. Two familiar examples: an asteroid striking Earth 65 million years ago triggered the end of over 200 million years of the age of dinosaurs and suddenly created conditions for an explosion of mammals, trees, flowers, and us; and just months ago an invisible virus (COVID-19) has entirely changed the cultural dynamics of Earth’s most powerful species.
We are living in a quintessentially punctuated, evolutionary moment, in which not only human civilization, but planetary life itself are threatened. Ecozoans have emerged at this time precisely in response to these dramatic conditions, and are called to understand themselves, their connections, and their roles and purposes to help trigger within our community of life systems, an evolutionary immune response. Ecozoans can further display what Wes Jackson calls “the virtues of ignorance,” a reorientation to what Wendell Berry, Jackson, and Bill Vitek call an “ignorance based worldview,” that recognizes “knowledge alone is not adequate to run the world,” and to foster immense humility, respect, care, and restraint in all scientific, agricultural, entrepreneurial, and other human interventions within the natural world.13
Ecozoans will fully develop an intuitive alignment with the time-developmental rhythm of the cosmos, while helping the business community redefine itself—in a contribution of beauty, meaning, and relationship enhancement where job creation is truly creative, all jobs have a creative component, and where agency and participation are maximized. We will remember what it is like to be a child, and will know, as if for the first time, that children in large measure are Ecozoans. Beauty will increasingly be understood as trans-aesthetic—as the experience of many levels of established or unfolding order, in living and non-living beings, structures, relationships, processes, leading to an elevation of perception—a flow of apprehension—an expansion of attention and participation . . . and then a contraction or transcending of attention into pure experience.
We will find ourselves in a vastly different world, thinking in a very different way than now—more than a new way of being, but a celebration of continuous becoming.
There is a now distant music . . . sounding on the horizon of a new era.
A note on the art to the right: Thomas Berry invented the word ‘inscendence’, which appears only once (I think) in Dream of the Earth. A deep dive into the idea is explored in an essay by Bill Plotkin: “Inscendence – The Key to the Great Work of Our Time: A Soulcentric View of Thomas Berry’s Work”, in this book and here in this edition of Kosmos.
Art by Cami Davis
Bhramari Pranayama I (Bee Breath) and Memorial Magnolia are part of the series titled A Question of Inscendence. The painting practice offers a framework for making sense of a perceived immersion within the presence of a living world and universe. Transcendence, though felt, can pull us out of the sensuous. Inscendence explores the notion that the sacred is right here throughout the Earthly human and more-than-human experience.
References
[1] Herman Greene.
[2] Thomas Berry and Brian Thomas Swimme, The Universe Story, 263-67 (1992).
[3] Ibid., 268.
[4] Ibid. (italics added).
[5] Wes Jackson, Becoming Native to This Place (1996); and from personal conversations.
[6] Don Edward Beck and Christopher C. Cowan, Spiral Dynamics: Mastering Values, Leadership and Change 4 (1996).
[7] Clare W. Graves. The Futurist (April 1974)
[8] Don Edward Beck and Christopher C. Cowan, Spiral Dynamics (1996), 319.
[9] Ibid.
[10] Donella Meadows, “Leverage Points: Places to Intervene in a System” (1999), 1, https://web.archive.org/web/20131008160618/http://www.sustainabilityinstitute.org/pubs/Leverage_Points.pdf (accessed July 24, 2020).
[11] David Abson, et al, ”Leverage Points for Sustainability Transformation,” 30 Ambio (Feb. 2017), 46(1).
[12] Mark Hathaway and Leonardo Boff, The Tao of Liberation: Exploring the Ecology of Transformation (2009).
[13] Bill Vitek and Wes Jackson, eds., The Virtues of Ignorance: Complexity, Sustainability, and the Limits of Knowledge (2010).
Unexpected Grace | Love Poem with Accolades
Unexpected Grace | Love Poem with Accolades
Unexpected Grace
The flash of tail lights ahead, our line of vehicles slows.
Soon we grind to a halt, mobile mess to parking lot.
Lights flash as an ambulance creeps down the shoulder.
I crane my head, see nothing, so far back in the pack my view
is a wall of cars and trucks. Time ticks, the radio plays rock
and I sit and wait. After 20 minutes I shut the car off.
Another 10 and I roll down the window, early morning sun
heating glass and leather. One by one vehicles around me
ping from idle to stop. We’re here for the long haul.
Off the shoulder, a barbed-wire fence, beyond that a copse
of trees and man-made pond. Cows graze a gentle slope.
Overhead, a hawk soars and spirals the currents. Folding wings,
it stoops and dives into the pasture. Minutes pass as I watch,
rapt. The bird struggles aloft, carrying dangling prey,
flapping for home and hungry mouths to stuff full. Air wafts—
exhaust and dirt, the tang of faded rain. Black cows amble
in a long line to the pond to drink and I catch a two-tone low
from a straggler as a meadowlark bursts into song.
It’s pleasant to sit, ignore being late to work,
ignore anything but the scene in my passenger
window, framed in blue, how it plays out whether
I’m stopped or driving, never asking for my attention,
not noticing the calm thrum of my contentment.
Love Poem with Accolades
It’s hell growing old. You age out of flattery.
No one tells you you’re pretty anymore.
The athletes you watch play ball could be your grandchildren.
Somehow, young waitresses now call you honey,
and dear, and sweetie, and point you to the senior special.
In my head I’m twenty-five, no more than thirty-two.
My body has a different perception, but it strives to do all I ask.
And then there is us. We’ve been together far too long.
You don’t say hey beautiful anymore, nor do you notice the
increasing silver strands in my dark hair.
Yesterday you bought me a new lamp with LED bulbs
bright enough to knit black yarn by.
Maybe you saw me struggle to count my stitches. Maybe you hate
the heavy cheater glasses I need to wear. Either way, it’s beautiful,
what you did, and I have to remember to tell you so.
Each day together is a compliment.
How Quickly the Light Changes | Before You Set Your Table
How Quickly the Light Changes | Before You Set Your Table
How Quickly the Light Changes
The moment we step
into morning dusk,
co-mingled muskiness
lingering on our skin,
it all slides slips shifts
to Aurora’s bright dawn.
A near-full moon dips below
the western edge. As we walk
steam-engine puffs of breath
mark our way.
This cold late-winter morning,
so temporary in its grasp,
mirrors other beginnings,
other openings to holiness.
Sharp air on my tongue.
I want to kneel as I receive it,
whisper thanks for this breath
and the next and the next.
I grasp your gloved hand
as proof we are in this together.
Before You Set Your Table
The small oranges on the counter are wrinkled.
You cut one into eighths, toss it outside
beneath the bird feeder.
You wait, but no one comes.
It has been below zero all week.
You read about chickadees,
how they run hot, stay warm, masters of survival.
They are why you offered black oil sunflower seeds
in the feeder yesterday when it was ten below.
You believe the chickadees know you.
Sometimes you think the crows do, too.
They ate all the leftover stuffing one morning
when you scattered it around the back yard.
The oranges are for the cardinals.
You heard them earlier, recognized that whistle they have
when it’s time to start this year’s family.
They’ll need whatever sustenance you can offer.
When you look out the window again,
a few orange pieces are gone.
You wonder if the squirrels got there first.
It doesn’t matter. You’re here
to fill any empty stomach,
hear the hunger beneath every song.
The Age of Freedom
The Age of Freedom
“The real problem of humanity is the following: we have Paleolithic emotions, medieval institutions, and god-like technology.” – Biologist E.O. Wilson
“Yesterday I was clever, so I wanted to change the world. Today I am wise, so I am changing myself.” – Rumi
Our cleverness has far outstripped our wisdom. We now have the ability to render entire species extinct and genetically engineer new ones. We can destroy whole ecosystems and kill millions at the push of the button. As evolutionary philosopher Daniel Schmactenberger points out, “When you have the power of Gods you need the wisdom and love of Gods in order to steward that power.”
And yet wisdom is not the silver bullet it is made out to be. Wisdom might help us live more harmoniously with one another, but it cannot crack clean hydrogen fuel.
At present humanity is passing through an evolutionary bottleneck, and on the other side lies two divergent attractor points: a planetary civilisation with a new collective intelligence and shared identity, or a new dark ages and a 6th mass extinction.
I believe humanity is going to need cleverness and wisdom if we are to make the transition and usher in The Century of Awakening.
A new book published by thinktank RethinkX argues that in the coming decade, five key sector disruptions will converge to unleash “the fastest, deepest, most consequential transformation of human civilization in history.” The five sectors are: information, food, energy, transportation and materials. The authors predict that the costs of these five sectors will fall 10x, using 90% less natural resources with between 10x-100x less waste.1
We will shift from a model of extraction to a model of creation. In the food sector for example, rather than killing animals and plants and breaking them down into food, precision fermentation technologies will allow us build our foods from molecules and cells up. Environmental journalist George Monbiot visited one of these labs in Helsinki and ate a pancake grown from bacteria taken from the soil. “It tasted,” he writes, “just like a pancake.”2
With small tweaks these bacteria can be made to produce the protein needed for lab-grown meat, milk, and eggs, that are not only tastier but healthier. Think of the vast tracts of land that could be freed up for rewilding, the countless billions of tortured farm animals who will be spared, the rainforests that could remain rainforests because we no longer need to extract palm oil.
In the energy sector the cost of batteries and solar panels will plummet and the rare earth minerals needed to produce them will eventually be built from the molecular structure upwards, rather than mined. Cheap green electricity will be produced, stored, and provided locally.
In the transportation sector, electric driverless Uber-style taxis will cut costs by a factor of ten. At that price few people will need or want to own a car. Can you smell the clean air? Can you see the endless miles of car parking spaces turned into green parks?
We will be able to meet the needs of the entire population of planet earth, at a fraction of the environmental cost. We are talking about true abundance.
Of course, just because these heights are within sight, it does not mean that we will scale them. For every good technology there are just as many terrifying ones: from cyber-attacks powered by machine learning, to biometric data harvesting and invasive surveillance technologies, to gene-editing, any of which in the wrong hands, foreshadow equal and opposite dystopian nightmares.
And it’s not only those with bad intentions who form the most likely hurdles. It is not out of spite that natural farming advocates delayed the roll out of Golden Rice in Bangladesh and Indonesia over the past twenty years, potentially costing millions of lives and leaving millions of children blind.3 Nor will it be out of malice when livestock farmers and environmental campaigners team up to delay the development of lab-grown meat, thereby condemning billions more animals to unnecessary suffering and slaughter.
Technology alone will not lead to the transformation of our civilisation, because these technologies render the very basis of our scarcity-based economic, political and social operating systems obsolete.
Transitions of this magnitude call us to rethink the very ideas which underpin our civilisation. Arguments that have been going on for 60 years suddenly become an irrelevant distraction from the real work that needs to take place. I’m talking about some of our most deeply held and cherished ideals: the individual self, left vs right, religion vs humanism, free-market capitalism vs socialism, even democracy in its current form—all these have become false idols and dinosaurs, and the more closely we cling to them the harder it becomes to create space for a new civilisation to emerge.
In the Century of Awakening we are going to have to be supremely adaptable, while staying acutely vigilant.
Yes, there will be resistance from incumbent businesses, political powers and industrial age institutions, but in time they will be steamrolled by mounting evolutionary pressure, brute economic logic and decentralisation. The more formidable hurdle comes from incumbent mindsets within all of us. We lack the cognitive complexity to understand the transformations which are underway, the cultural sensitivity to co-exist peacefully with eight billion other people4, the psychological security to let go of our obsolete ideologies, and the imagination to envisage the bright future which awaits us. We are in a word, underdeveloped.5
And that’s where wisdom comes in.
In this context, personal growth, be it cognitive, cultural or spiritual, becomes a revolutionary act. Your personal evolution is intimately tied up with the evolution of our entire civilisation.
We are battered, bruised, alienated and confused, but we are not done here. Not by a long way.
References
[1] https://www.rethinkx.com/humanity
[2] https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/jan/08/lab-grown-food-destroy-farming-save-planet
[3] https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/oct/26/gm-golden-rice-delay-cost-millions-of-lives-child-blindness
[4] And I don’t just mean Amazonian Tribes. I mean people you disagree with politically as well.
[5] For more on individual development in these four dimensions read Hanzi Freinacht’s brilliant The Listening Society.
Prayers in the Dark
Prayers in the Dark
What is sacred lived in the church. I remember colored light—red, blue, yellow—streaming from above, depicting Jesus pierced by a lance wound, nailed to the cross, bleeding. I remember incense rising in clouds and prayers sung by the priest. As a young child in Catholic school, I remember the hypnotic repetition of mass, people sitting, standing, kneeling.
Each day, a student was chosen to go inside the convent, where God lived, to pick up a snack for their class—a bag of pretzels. I relished walking those thirty feet. Slowly and attentively, I looked and listened for God. I imagined myself married to Him like the nuns. I wished for this, except I didn’t want to wear a black habit. Once I asked to be an “altar person,” but the priest said, “That’s only for boys.”
Today I am aware that the Catholic Church is “an empire of misogyny,” as former president of Ireland, Mary McAleese, stated.1 But while the church is corrupt, what is sacred is alive. Free from the confines of church walls or the distant heavenly realm of a monotheistic God, what is sacred lives in the natural world, within and all around us, connecting Earth and Mystery. When I guide in the wilderness, I invite people to have a direct relationship with what is holy—to hear the song of the planet, listen to the images arising in their dreams, and discover the unique, mythic purpose of their soul.
Nature was Saint Francis’ church. Mountains, prairies, canyons, and birds live a prayer all the time. Rain offers itself to the grasses. Rivers carry their waters to the sea. Lightning brightens the sky. Like a forest ecosystem, we are interdependent. Our connection with nature strengthens and inspires us. Wind dances with trees. Thunderstorms crackle. Coyotes howl. Crickets play music for the night.
Humans have communicated with nature since the beginning of time. Most nature-based and indigenous cultures around the world feel the holy in all they do—eating, hunting, art. The Doctrine of Christian Discovery instructed Christians to kill these “lost souls” and capture their lands.2 But we can choose to listen to the wisdom of indigenous elders and remember our own ancestors who once lived close to the Earth.
Our capacity to take in a personal encounter with the mystical can be restored. Children imagine, touching the existence of unknown realms. We, too, can learn to attend to nature by re-attuning our sensing, feeling, and imagination. Our eyes and sense organs can rediscover the sentience of bear and ocean, buffalo and tree. We can experience the universal consciousness that animates everything.
When my six-year-old heart first heard about the crucifixion of Jesus, I could not understand why humans would torture and kill the son of God—just as I can’t comprehend why industrial civilization is making the Earth uninhabitable for humans and most species. The Earth is sacred. To destroy it is to desecrate God. Spirit and Earth are inseparable forces, abiding in all living things and sustaining life.
Jesus’ lacerated body can be likened to the perpetual assaults upon our planet. In Catholic school, I was taught that Jesus died to save us from our sins. I later wondered if he was the scapegoat of a morally and spiritually bankrupt culture. A healthy culture would honor and protect what matters most. What do we tell ourselves now to justify the brutal exploitation of nature—clear-cut forests, drained wetlands, dying oceans?
Forests are under worldwide assault. The equivalent of thirty soccer fields disappear every minute.3 Hundreds of species go extinct every day.4 Ninety percent of large fish, fifty percent of coral reefs, and forty percent of plankton have been wiped out.5 One-hundred-eighty million tons of hazardous mine waste is dumped into rivers, lakes, and oceans worldwide each year.6 Dams kill fish, strangle streams, and harm entire ecosystems.7 Agriculture uses eighty to ninety percent of freshwater and is a leading cause of U.S. pollution—creating algal blooms, dead zones, acidification, heavy metal contamination, elevated nitrate levels, and pathogen contamination.8
Since the dawn of civilization, humanity has caused the loss of eighty-three percent of wild mammals and fifty percent of plants. Of all the mammals now on Earth, ninety-six percent are livestock and humans—only four percent are wild mammals.9 Stealing from future generations of all species, we are killing ourselves.
“What if we allow this to break our hearts, evoke our fear, incite our rage, and call forth a prayer that longs for and acts on behalf of what seems impossible?” I ask those who participate in the programs I guide.
“The Earth will be fine,” a woman says. “Human survival should be our main concern.”
“What about our planet home?” I ask. “If our families were harmed, it wouldn’t be okay. Nonhumans are relatives too. Our children will not be able to breathe without trees.”10
“I do my part,” a man says. “I live simply. Off-grid with a garden.” Others nod.
“That’s a great start,” I say, “but personal change alone won’t stop global empire. It is built on ecocide.”11
“We will switch from fossil fuels to solar and wind,” a man says.
“Have you read Bright Green Lies?”12 I ask. “Those require a lot of mining. We won’t survive continued industrial expansion and consumption.”13
“Green technology will come up with something,” a woman says.
“I wouldn’t count on it,” I say. “Have you seen Metropolis, a 1927 film predicting where worshipping the machine would lead us?”14
Harming the Earth is our least acknowledged injustice. In the wake of global ecocide, a Christian axiom still claims that “nature has no reason for existence save to serve man.”15 To survive, we must restore a balance that reveres the sanctity of all life. Yet our culture doesn’t get it.
Change begins with opening to the tremendous sorrow of our failure to protect oceans, forests, rivers, and animals. We may feel hopeless. Our grief may weigh on us so heavily we feel like we can’t breathe. Our despair may usher us beneath the water’s turbulent surface into the calm depths of the underworld, a mythic cauldron holding all we do not know.
Ninety-five percent of our universe is darkness, confirming the existence of Mystery. Less than five percent is explainable by science.16 Possibilities lay hidden in the dark. Amidst the breathtaking beauty and immense suffering, we can descend into the chthonic realm of the mysterious unknown. Visions can arise in the dark that feed and seed the mythic sinew of future humans and the Earth.
Born of the womb, we return to the dream stream every night to be infused with myths, symbols, images, and stories. Our eyes can’t see in the dark, so our imagination, a powerful and intuitive strategy to listen, grows stronger. Extraordinary occurrences emerge in waking life too—a tree growing above tree line, the star that began our solar system, a starling murmuration, erupting geyser bubbles. Surprising potentialities can arise from our prayers in the dark, too.
“This isn’t yours,” a woman places her forehead and hands on the red soil of the desert, her voice fierce and mournful. “This belongs to all of us.” She says it again and again, her voice growing more intense.
We are engaged in a ceremony to express our feelings about what is happening to the planet. Another woman opens her mouth and lets out a bloodcurdling scream.
“I grew up in Minnesota and have always loved the Boundary Waters,” a man says. “The Trump administration has granted leases to build a mine there. The wildlife, water, and soil will be poisoned.”
Another man is shaking and crying. “I can’t speak,” he manages to say. “It’s too sad.”
After an hour, I guide people to close their eyes and root themselves in the Earth and their deep imagination. Like a waking dream, I invite them to imagine they are liquifying in a cocoon or hibernating in a cave.
“Perhaps share your grief about the planet and see what images emerge,” I suggest. I guide them to look, listen, and feel in the dark. I direct them to attend to both the personal and the planetary.
“Track any glimmers or clues that could be about your personal mission or destiny,” I suggest, “and seek visions or images about how we humans could collectively address and confront the challenges of our times.”
My soul’s creativity arises from dark waters. Lost in blackness, I long for a vision to restore forests, birds, oceans, and justice. Tears flow. I long for a world we may never inhabit. For rivers to run clear and be full of salmon. Flocks of birds to darken the sky. Ancient trees to cover the land. Oceans to teem with whales, dolphins, and coral.
I long for cement, metal, and tin to melt back into the natural world, restoring it with a new energy. For machines that mine coal, oil, and trees to be dismantled. For people to stop extracting and start honoring. For Earth to breathe herself back alive.
Longing is prayer. Not a passive wish list or a quest for enlightenment, prayer is receptive and active, a conversation. We listen and speak, surrender and serve. Praying for a vision, we await the mystery. Responses may arise from our depths through images, words, or sensations. Prayer is what we become, what we live.
We can ask the Holy Earth what she wants, and she can dream through us. We can listen for how to offer our truest gifts. Once we receive a response, we embody what the dream asks. Then, more is offered. We may be dismembered or regenerated. Directed towards the actions that matter most, we are guided in a life of creative service. This listening informs my existence, how I guide and write.
Most people want to avoid the dark. What we fear lives there—inner monsters, wounds, vulnerabilities—even the possibility of death. Yet potent revelations arise near death. It preys on us, bringing us to our knees in humility, evoking us to pray and listen.
Our dominant culture denies its impending death, while killing everything else to keep itself alive. In initiation ceremonies into adulthood, cultures of indigenous and nature-based peoples let go into a liminal unknown. Our culture does not encourage individuals to grow or face death. Perhaps this is one reason why it has become an Earth-devouring machine, consuming life.
A part of the seasons and cycles of nature, death initiates us into the mysteries of life. At twenty-one years old, a rapidly growing cancer, non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, created a tumor in the two lymph nodes in front of my heart. The prescription was chemotherapy and radiation, with only a thirty-three percent chance they would cure me.
Not knowing how long I would live brought my attention to morning birdsong, the blossoming of new buds, and the sun shimmering on the lake. After my diagnosis, I felt something mysterious—a sacred, holy, divine presence—holding and loving me. Being with it evoked a surprising joy, ease, and curiosity. I began moving slowly enough to notice beauty. Suddenly, I could feel what had always been true—life is precious.
Steeping ourselves in the uncertainty of these times, I pray we foster our innate visionary skills and a strong devotion within our hearts to serve what is truly sacred, our planet home. May this catalyze us to act both mythically and directly, to re-inhabit our animal nature, listen to the dream of the Holy Earth, resist our dominant culture, and court the mysterious potentialities that live in darkness.
Guiding in the Colorado high country, my co-guide smudges with sage, and I play the drum. Twelve people, young and old, will fast alone for three nights on the land to pray and listen for a vision. Standing in a meadow at the edge of a portal made of sticks, pine cones, and flowers, quaking aspen, lupine and blue bell surround us. A deer peers out from behind a ponderosa tree. Each person reads their prayer before walking across the threshold.
May we step through the portal now and pray in the dark—to live again in a world where the Holy is blended with all we do, to partner with the dream of Earth, and live in service to her and future generations.
References
[1] https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-43330026
[2] https://theconversation.com/why-the-pope-has-yet-to-overturn-the-churchs-colonial-legacy-39622
[3] https://www.bcg.com/publications/2020/the-staggering-value-of-forests-and-how-to-save-them.aspx
[4] https://dgrnewsservice.org/civilization/ecocide/habitat-loss/extinction-rate-for-north-american-freshwater-fishes-877-times-normal-could-double-by-2050/
[5] https://dgrnewsservice.org/civilization/ecocide/extraction/they-want-to-mine-the-deep-sea/
[6] https://science.howstuffworks.com/engineering/structural/abandoned-mine.htm
[7] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_dams_and_reservoirs_in_the_United_States
[8] https://foodprint.org/issues/how-industrial-agriculture-affects-our-water/
[9] https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/may/21/human-race-just-001-of-all-life-but-has-destroyed-over-80-of-wild-mammals-study
[10] https://www.theconsciouschallenge.org/ecologicalfootprintbibleoverview/oxygen-deforestation
[11] https://dgrnewsservice.org/civilization/the-everyday-violence-of-modern-culture/
[12] https://www.monkfishpublishing.com/products-page-2/environmentalism/bright-green-lies/
[13] https://dgrnewsservice.org/civilization/ecocide/planet-of-the-humans-why-technology-wont-save-us/
[14] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AvtWDIZtrAE
[15] http://iscast.org/node/103
[16] https://science.nasa.gov/astrophysics/focus-areas/what-is-dark-energy
Living Communally
Living Communally
Homo Sapiens were tribal hunter-gatherers on the African plains, not so long ago in evolutionary terms. We lived that way for hundreds of millennia up to the beginning of so-called civilisation about 10,000 years ago when we saw the first domestication of plants and animals, leading to the demise of nomadic hunter-gathering and the first settlements. It was at that point that our uniquely evolved intelligence diverted the evolutionary arc of our species away from its integral place within the balanced ecosystem that was the thriving, living planet.
After domestication came the specialisation of tasks and division of labour, then the rise of hierarchy, political control, abuse of power, oppression of the weak by the strong, and so on. Ever since, we have been a dysfunctional species with a distorted worldview—separated from, and exploitative of, nature and each other. Yet, we mostly continued to live interdependently in villages and towns, even cities, right up until the industrial revolution some 300 years ago. I believe that the pervading malaise of alienation and maladjustment that afflicts humans today is primarily due to the demise of that very thing—interdependency. Our essential nature as humans is still tribal yet all semblance of that level of mutuality has been lost.
Of course, we can never go back to how it was before, except perhaps in remnant indigenous tribes, of which the Maasai are a good example. In the film, Down to Earth, Mokompo Ole Simel, a tribal elder from the Loita Hills, Kenya says, “We don’t carry fear. As a people, we are happy, despite having few material things. We are happy because of our relationships, our close social ties, and our unity. Love binds us together.” For those of the rest of us who recognise the need, gathering in neo-tribes, a word coined by Maffesoli (1995), is an obvious alternative to individualistic mainstream lifestyle options. Professor Helen Jarvis of Newcastle University sees renewed interest in communalism as one expression of neo-tribalism. She notes “a groundswell of common yearning for connectedness and for a sort of radical alternative,” and a “recognition that lifestyles of the past are permanently broken.”
Preeminent types of contemporary neo-tribe include co-housing neighborhoods and ecovillages. Both are intentional communities, i.e., groupings of like-minded souls who reside together for some shared purpose or intention. In the case of co-housing, the purpose is mostly to build close relationships of mutuality and social support. Many also strive to achieve low-carbon lifestyles. Ecovillages seek the same, but with the added aspiration to establish integrated sustainable settlements. Due to their different objectives, these community types tend to choose different locations—the former favour urban environments and the latter, rural settings.
I have lived in the ecovillage of Findhorn, North Scotland, for 15 years. I relocated here from subtropical Australia in order to participate in what has been recognised as one of the most successful such projects anywhere in the world. We are also well known as a spiritual community, which marries well with our ecological aspirations, our spirituality being based on intimate co-creation with nature. The ecovillage proper comprises some 250 residents living in what was once a humble caravan park. Now almost 60 years old, The Park has become a cutting edge example of a (mostly) self-sufficient, full-featured ecological settlement. A wider community of some 400 members live in the surrounding region and participate fully in the social, cultural, and spiritual life of the community. Currently of course, community life is curtailed due to Covid-19 related constraints. And yet, the bonds of love and mutuality are being keenly maintained via Zoom and other innovative means.
What this means for me personally, apart from appreciating being part of such an inspiring project, is that it enables me to live a zero-carbon life, at least while I remain on site. (If I travel, that is a different story, of course.) And since I hardly ever need to go off site, that brings me tremendous joy and peace of mind. Living in Findhorn enables closer alignment between my environmentalist values and my lifestyle, which for me, is crucial to my well-being.
As a long-time communal dweller, I know in my bones, mind, and heart, that a nurturing extended family of mostly unrelated individuals is the ideal social grouping for the human species. Shared living offers our best chance of fulfilling individual and collective potential for creativity, intelligence, compassion, and love—all those wonderful human attributes that sadly, for the most part, remain unfulfilled. Furthermore, a socially cohesive such group has the potential to be a profound milieu for the socialisation of both children and adults. And an appropriately sized group, thus socialised, has the opportunity to create a truly civil society, one that nurtures grassroots action around shared interests, purpose, and values.
Marx decreed, “From each according to their ability, to each according to their needs,” referring to an individual’s role in the collective and the fair distribution of goods, services, and capital. To me, the phrase also carries a deeper meaning—that at some fundamental level, we are all equal as human beings and deserve to be treated with the same dignity, respect, and natural justice. And this is where politics comes in. The role of government at all levels, I believe, should simply be to restore what I see as the natural order of things, i.e., that every individual and every species occupies its rightful place and fulfills its integral role in a viable, sustainable (eco)system of systems. Given that our society has become so out of whack, redressing the situation can only be slow and incremental. But redress it we must, else things will continue to unravel, and we will steadily decline as a species until we eventually wipe ourselves out.