The Freshness of Life!
March 14, 2019 Kosmos Community News
Dear Reader,
We greet the coming Spring with joy! Nature brings us countless reminders of Life’s beauty and freshness. The quality of freshness is something we all can cultivate. Every moment provides an opportunity for a fresh start. Yet, we often act as though all the feelings and ideas we have are fixed – burdens we can’t set down. Hanging on to negative stories about ourselves and others, or what we think must happen, adds to our collective suffering.
The freshness of Spring reminds us to lighten our hearts and offer our sweetness to others. Like the morning dew, or the tenderest shoots and buds slowly peeking out, we can allow a smile to sit lightly on our lips. Like flowers, each of us is a beautiful expression of our creative, living Earth. Offering your freshness to another being is a beautiful gift!
The Spring Quarterly | Rising Earth Awareness | Coming March 20th
What a wonderful edition we have for you! The new edition of Kosmos Quarterly includes collaborative features with Findhorn Community in Scotland as they prepare for their global climate conference in April. Joanna Macy, Margaret Elphinstone, Kosha Joubert and conference convener, Stephanie Mines are key contributors.
We also feature Robin Wall Kimmerer, Michael Lerner, Br. David Steindl-Rast, and Llewellyn Vaughan Lee in this very special edition. Subscriptions begin as low as $5!
Explore the Table of Contents
Excerpts | What Our Spring Authors Are Saying
“And gratitude is humbling, an antidote to the arrogance of our time. It reminds us that we are just one member of the democracy of species. It reminds us that the earth does not belong to us. Indigenous story traditions are full of cautionary tales about the failure of gratitude. When people forget to honor the gift, the consequences are always material as well as spiritual. The spring dries up, the corn doesn’t grow, the animals do not return to the ones who neglected gratitude. The western story-telling tradition is strangely silent on this matter and so we find ourselves in an era when we are rightly afraid of the climate we have created.” – Robin Wall Kimmerer, Author
“The lingua franca of resilience is emergency planning. Emergency planning is something everyone understands. As future shocks deepen around the world, people naturally expand the list of contingencies they want to be prepared for. In Northern California, for example, we’ve had enough devastating fires so that most people who live in fire territory have given real thought to what they carry in their vehicles at all times, what they are prepared to grab at home and run, and where they will find shelter in the fire next time…Emergency planning brings people together across political, cultural, sectarian and ethnic lines. It works to blend concepts like resilient communities, transition towns, or other metaphors for organizing together. We are unlikely to resolve the human predicament, but we can work to make future shocks more survivable.” – Michael Lerner, President of Commonweal
“This reality we are moving into has many hidden twists and turns. It is full of surprises. Dare to enjoy the growth it ignites and embody how that translates into activism. We are all newcomers to what Thomas Berry called the Ecozoic Era when humans would recover their creative orientation to the world.” – Stephanie Mines, Neuropsychologist
“In this present moment, facing this unrepeatable challenge of climate chaos, we can feel we are being joined by both those who have gone before and those who will come after. Our ancestors have brought us to the Great Turning and future generations are here as well by virtue of their utter dependence upon our response. Their presence expands the community that opens to us now and invites us into deep time. It’s the sweetest thing that we don’t even have to know how all the gifts, seeded by our ancestors and evoked by the future ones, can pour through us. These gifts are not our personal property, nor meant for the separate self. They come through now for the sake of life itself.” – Joanna Macy, Buddhist Teacher
Call to Service | Please Download the Kosmos Summit Poster and Share
A Conscious Conversation, in Kosmos Quarterly
with Judy Rodgers, Gayatri Naraine, and Rhonda Fabian
Judy Rodgers | So this notion of transformation—what we’re really talking about is an inner shift. We’re not talking about more blankets delivered, or more water, fewer diseases, more vaccines. That’s not the metric anymore. You’re talking about the inner shift that allows for so many other things to happen. That’s really what we were trying to do with that conversation, and I think that’s what you’re trying to do with this issue on global citizenship. I think it’s to find new ground. Because as long as we’re only about social actions, we’re just really rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic. We’re not getting at anything that’s substantially going to shift anything.
By Ruth Gordon, for Kosmos
Probably everyone who is working for peace today knows both the power of belief and the crippling force of doubt. Without the belief that what we are doing makes sense, that we really can change something for the better, it’s easy to fall into a pit of despair, overwhelmed by the horror of the mess that faces us in the world today.