All posts tagged Mother Earth

21 Questions for 2020: #18

18.  What is the message of Gaia’s call? Mother’s Day reflections, 2020.

The other day I read a lament on Facebook by a woman who was in despair over the horrendous state of life in 2020 America. If she didn’t have loving family and friends, she said, including her children and grandchildren, she would be seriously contemplating suicide.

As she worked through her complicated grief and horror, cathartically retelling the tragedy we are all living through, I heard the persistent pulse of Life beating through it all….Life, that impels us to endure and persist, to rise and do it all again under tomorrow’s Sun, no matter how difficult or impossible the way forward seems.

We humans thrive on Love; we wither and fade away in despair. We are fundamentally loving, social animals, though far too many humans have become pathologically twisted these days, seemingly incapable of the empathy and altruism that is our birthright.

Our loving nature is not just a matter of psychology; it is also biochemically wired into us, evident in the hormones that flood our body when we feel love, whether romantic love or the love of a mother for her baby. Every living being on the planet, whether or not it has an emotional nature, is similarly wired to thrive. 

This is especially easy to see in the plant kingdom: seeds crack and send tendrils up towards the Sun, while tiny roots are impelled to anchor themselves in the Earth. Figuratively, each of us begins life as just such a seed, reaching for love and light as instinctively as any other new growth.

Many cultures anthropomorphize Mother Earth and Father Sun as the lifegivers, to whom great gratitude is due. I don’t think we need to humanize our planet and our star to understand that they are our everything; each of us is just a small cell in the vast planetary body of the Earth, which itself exists as a speck in the unimaginably huge galaxy and cosmos. 

Each of us may be small, but we are far from insignificant. Just as every blob of algae and blade of grass has a role to play in creating the life-giving oxygen of our planet, every precious Gaian manifestation, from rock to raindrop, from earthworm to human, contributes to the overall vitality of the system as a whole.

Human beings, over the past 500 years or so, have been flourishing so well that we have been edging out the conditions of life for other species. We are, as I’ve noted before, Earth’s most successful invasive species. From the perspective of other life forms, we humans have been a deadly viral pandemic, relentlessly invading and destroying.

Humans have been on a suicidal path as a species, poisoning our own nest, and in the process rendering vast swaths of land and sea uninhabitable for other species as well. This cannot go on. Humans have over-populated ourselves by using up more than our share of Earth’s resources. This is unsustainable. 

Now, at the tipping point, we are faced with a truly momentous question: 

Will we use our tremendous intelligence to find ways to work with Mother Earth, to restabilize her life-support systems in a regenerative and sustainable way, understanding that we can only thrive in a thriving system? 

Mother Earth has her own ways of restoring balance to her life systems—for example, viruses and climate changes. Earth seeks to maintain the conditions most conducive for the thriving life of every Gaian. She does not play favorites, she loves all her creations equally. We humans are only just waking up to what such impartial mother-love truly means.

Mother Earth, on this Mother’s Day I give you honor and praise as the Life-giver of us all. You create the myriad beautiful forms into which Spirit pours. Each new baby that opens her eyes to meet the loving gaze of her mother repeats the miracle of life that you reanimate again and again. And at the end of life you receive each of us back again, in a ceaseless spiral dance of matter and energy. 

Mother Gaia, I know you are calling each of us to bring our strength, courage and intelligence to the task now at hand: restoring the balance of your systems so as to maximize the potential for Life to flourish. Not just human life; all life.

As we reach and grow towards conscious evolution, we humans are beginning to become aware of the harmonic dance of all beings, the great positive vibration of Life begetting Life, of Life flourishing. If we can tune in and calibrate our own beings to the great Hum of Mother Earth, we will find it impossible to do anything but join in that great swelling chorus—the choir of Angels (Spirit) singing in harmony with Gaia (Matter). 

Mother Gaia, my voice may be soft, I may be very small: but such as I am and such as I have, I offer to you. May I make the best use of the life you have gifted me. May my flourishing contribute to the vitality of all Life, in an endless reciprocal dance. 

Namaste, Mother Earth, and thank you. 

1 Comment
by Jennifer Browdy, Ph.D. on May 9, 2020  •  Permalink
Posted in 21 Questions for 2020, Gaia
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Posted by Jennifer Browdy, Ph.D. on May 9, 2020

https://bethechange2012.com/2020/05/09/21-questions-for-2020-18/

Mother Earth and the Art of the Deal: Doing Hope in Dark Times

On trade, as with immigration, the 45thAmerican president is not only an embarrassment, but a danger to world peace and prosperity. But we must take into account the deeper layers to both issues, which he understands only in the most superficial, self-serving way.

On the G7 and free trade: let’s admit candidly that globalized free trade of the NAFTA and TPP variety have been boons for corporations and Wall Street financiers, but disasters for most workers. The policy of freeing corporations to seek the lowest possible taxes and the cheapest, most compliant workers has resulted in unemployed, impoverished, unionless American workers and exploited, slave-like workers in places like Indonesia, China and India. The depression and rage of these screwed-over American workers is what propelled Trump into office, and he knows they will crow in glee as he shafts the ministers of free trade in the G7.

But of course they don’t realize, or refuse to see, that Trump is a wolf in sheep’s clothing (a corporate magnate in worker’s garb) when it comes to trade. All this talk of tariffs or no tariffs is just a smokescreen to throw his trading partners off guard and negotiate better deals for American corporations.

Trump is not interested in the welfare of American workers. If he were, he wouldn’t be protesting so loudly about the Canadian dairy industry, which is a good case in point as to the value of socialized industry. The Canadian government protects its dairy farmers from competition with the American dairy farmers who have been gutted by the free market and have been going out of business and committing suicide in record numbers as a result. Canadians wisely realize the value of nurturing their farmers, and so far Justin Trudeau is refusing to cave to Trump’s bullying, though it’s worrisome that a Trump-lite politician just won high office in Ontario, Canada’s most populous state.

Canadians look south of the border and see a nightmare: civilians waving guns in the streets and at schools, politicians regularly going out in handcuffs, an addicted, depressed, unhealthy, scared-as-shit population too ignorant and distracted to understand when it’s being shafted.

Perhaps the G7 should become the G6 unless and until the United States pulls itself out of its current morass. Thanks to Trump and the Republicans America has become a rogue nation, led by a corrupt strongman who seems to have his opponents, including the Justice Department, by the balls.

Meanwhile, along the southern border with Mexico, Trump has also taken a wrecking ball to a long-established relationship. Free trade was also a terrible deal for ordinary Mexicans—to take one example, thanks to NAFTA their corn industry was totally swamped by dumped cheap corn from American farmers, a lose-lose for all the workers involved.

But of course, the welfare of ordinary people is not Trump’s motivation. If it were, instead of talking about building the next Great Wall (a boon for the construction industry) to keep desperate Mexican and Central American families out of the United States, we’d be talking about investigating and improving the conditions that are forcing families to leave their homes and make the dangerous trip up north. The U.S. destroyed the economies and societies of Central America during the 1970s Communist scare, NAFTA and CAFTA splayed them open to American exploitation, and ordinary people are still paying the price.

This is a “workers of the world, unite” kind of moment, particularly in the face of climate change, which can only be tackled by a unified global effort–but instead the Trumpites are sowing distrust and discord everywhere they go. Fox News and the rest of the rightwing media, not to mention Trump’s own Twitter feed, feeds his followers a steady diet of carefully calibrated misinformation designed to brainwash them into cheering for their own evisceration.

With Bolton at his side, Trump is on the road to undoing the post-World War II world order that has maintained peace and prosperity for the elitessince 1945. If Trump & Co. were of the Chairman Mao variety, we might be looking at a new kind of Cultural Revolution. But no—these men want their elite status to last and grow. They don’t care about the costs—to the planet, to people, to the future.

Instead, we are seeing the rise of a new oligarchy, with Putin its shadow leader and Pompeo its enforcer. The generals go along–war and terror are their stock in trade after all–and business follows the generals with their lucrative military contracts. Next we’ll see Dick Cheney raising his ugly pate out of the swamp looking to rebuild Syria and modernize North Korea.

The truth is that for most of the planet–from marine life to forests to insects, and including poor people everywhere—this is nothing new. Most of the world has been living through a nonstop crisis all during these so-called “boom years” after 1945. Ask an indigenous person in the Amazon rainforest how the past 70+ years have been. Ask the butterflies and bees how they’ve enjoyed the rise of Monsanto.

It’s just that the carrying capacity of the planet is now maxxed out, so in order to preserve and increase the wealth of the elites, they must find new people and places to exploit. The ruthlessness of those in power, which has always been used to bludgeon the rest of the world, is now being turned on our trading partners, as well as on ordinary Americans, who are nearly as weak and easy to screw over as the Central Americans. Witness the fracking rigs in school yards and neighborhoods; the gutting of fragile health care protections for the poor and the sick; the adunctification of the higher education industry; the undermining of unions of every stripe.

The constant stream of unbelievably bad news coming down the transom is like one of those overwritten movie thrillers where you leave the theater shaking your head, wondering why the writers felt they had to cram every single violent act they could think of into a shortest possible time. But something’s wrong with this picture.  Where is the resistance? Where are the plucky Luke Skywalker types who can take on the Dark Lord and his henchmen?

Although rarely visible in the mainstream media, it turns out that the indigenous people of the Americas, for whom this crisis is nothing new at all, are leading the way—slowly, painfully and without great success, but with absolutely rock-solid determination. Everyone who cares about this planet should be standing with them; we need a Standing Rock movement in every state and town, to demand the health and welfare of all living beings on the planet and to insist that protecting the web of life is our most sacred duty as humans on Earth.

Trade and immigration are important issues, but they’re not as important as preparing to deal with the ravages of climate change. The worst thing Trump has done was to thumb his nose at the Paris climate accord, and then to put another wolf in charge of deregulating industry via the so-called Environmental Protection Agency.

Pope Francis gets it; bless him for calling the big oil chiefs to the Vatican for a lecturing on the importance of transitioning to clean energy, and fast. We need more independent, clear-sighted leaders like the Pope to focus our collective attention on what’s really important, and everything that’s at stake in our actions now.

It would sure help if the super-rich like Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg would decide, like Tom Steyer, to throw some of their billions into climate change solutions—and I don’t mean inventing rockets to allow the elites to escape to Mars. They should be standing with First Nations leaders like Winona LaDuke, who has already successfully defeated one Midwestern oil pipeline, and is working to make her own reservation energy-independent and self-sufficient.

Despite the shitstorm that surrounds Trump (he reminds me of the Peanuts character Pigpen, perpetually surrounded by his own filthy stench), there is still hope to be found. Do yourself, and our world, a favor: seek out, focus on and amplify every small ray of hope you can find.

It only feeds the dark side to constantly marinate yourself in bad news and share your outrage with others. Feed the light with all the hope, good will and visionary creativity you can muster, and seek out others who are doing this too. Do hope together, and watch it grow.

It may help to remember: Mother Earth is on our side, if by “our side” we mean the side of life, abundance and well-being. If we’re as smart as we like to believe we are, humans, we’ll work with her, not against her. For in the end, she won’t be trumped. She will win this deal, with us or without us.

1 Comment
by Jennifer Browdy, Ph.D. on June 10, 2018  •  Permalink
Posted in Activism, Environment, Environmental Activism, Fossil Fuels, Gaia, Leadership, Politics, Rights of Nature, Social change, Uncategorized
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Posted by Jennifer Browdy, Ph.D. on June 10, 2018

https://bethechange2012.com/2018/06/10/mother-earth-and-the-art-of-the-deal-doing-hope-in-dark-times/

My Mother, An Earth Mother: A Mother’s Day Tribute

I was blessed to have been born to an Earth Mother, a woman who loves nothing more than to get her hands in the earth. In honor of her, and in the spirit of Mother’s Day, I share a passage from the childhood section of my forthcoming memoir, about learning how to love the Earth through watching my mother in action.

“That first summer [in our new house], my mother began tending and shaping the land around the house, following her own instincts of landscaping and working almost entirely with hand tools. In front of the house, she raked out a big pile of topsoil and planted a small lawn. Beyond the lawn was an expansive swamp dogwood thicket, laced with black raspberries and bordered by a young maple forest on one side, and a few barely visible pine trees on the other, which had been planted as fingerlings by the previous owner of the property. Armed only with loppers, my mom began cutting down the thicket, a project that my brother and I joined in on when we were old enough to handle our own tools.

“Once the thicket was gone, and grass had been seeded in its place, it became apparent that the house had been sited next to a huge limestone ledge, part of which was visible as outcroppings. My mother set to work with her shovel, hand rake and trowel, determined to create a rock garden out of that long, sloping rock ledge. That project provided a focus for many long summers to come, summers which she spent with me and my brother in the country while my father went back to the city to work during the weeks.

“I can see her standing, sweaty and red-faced at the end of a hot morning’s work, with a fine layer of black earth coating her bare shoulders, drinking iced tea out of a tall green glass and surveying the ledge with a squinted sculptor’s eye. She would be quietly exultant as her shovel and trowel gradually revealed new curves or deep, smooth walls of rock, a small, determined woman with a strong back and great patience, tracing out the rock with hand tools and as much love as if she were carving out the sweet, benevolent face and voluptuous body of the Earth Mother herself.

“With the help of her parents, my Grandma Mildred and Grandpa Vic, my mom also dug out a vegetable garden, in which she planted her morning coffee grounds and eggshells. The garden yielded crunchy sugar snap peas, big shiny zucchinis, and a tangle of tomato plants loaded down with plum, cherry and huge oxheart tomatoes. She also helped me create my own garden, a shady woodland garden under my climbing tree, Cricket, which I planted with columbine, ferns, may-apple and wild geranium, all carefully transplanted from the dappled woods around our property.

“In time, every contour of the ten acres or so around the houses had felt the gentle touch of my mother’s hands and yielded to the influence of her spades and trowels. Every young maple or oak grew there because she had judiciously allowed it to advance past sapling-hood. What had once been a rocky, harum-scarum cow pasture became, over the course of many years, an orderly oasis of verdant green lawns, perennial flower beds and raised vegetable gardens, with the long ridge of the rock garden sloping down through the middle of it all to the elegantly landscaped pool. This transformation formed one of the most intimate and persistent narratives of my childhood.”

IMG_2513

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by Jennifer Browdy, Ph.D. on May 8, 2016  •  Permalink
Posted in love, Spiritual Ecology, Uncategorized
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Posted by Jennifer Browdy, Ph.D. on May 8, 2016

https://bethechange2012.com/2016/05/08/my-mother-an-earth-mother-a-mothers-day-tribute/

New Year’s Resolution 2015: Re-entering Sacred Communion with Gaia

What would the world be like if the majority of us humans began to align our personal and political values with the ecological ethos of our Mother Earth?

Gaia believes in abundance. When she is in balance, each living being has its niche, and lives out its life in grace, receiving all the sustenance it needs, and taking no more than it requires to be healthy and fulfilled.

Gaia believes in equality. Every single aspect of the planet, from the needles on the fir tree to the whales in the sea, is essential and valuable. The rocks and the water and the bacteria in the soil are all equally beloved, and equally tended.

Gaia believes in synergy. Each element of the planet is seamlessly wound in to the whole, the web of life that functions simply and elegantly, nothing wasted, nothing forgotten, nothing in excess.

Gaia believes in communion. She lives in the present moment, eon after eon, entirely immersed in the creative beauty which she expresses in her every pore. She doesn’t live for the future, ambitiously, or dwell in the past, nostalgically. She focuses on the present and knows that in walking a path of balance and harmony now, she is unfurling a solid, loving bridge to the future for all time.

How hard could it be to bring our personal and political modes of being into alignment with the vast, pulsating beauty of Gaia’s model?

If we could rise above the narrow confines of the political and personal labyrinths in which we’re habituated to spend our time, we would see, with the sudden clarity of a lightening flash on a dark night, how simple and obvious it is. The Earth is our Mother, and she is showing us the way every second of every day. All we have to do is pay attention.

This New Year’s, I resolve to listen to my Mother and do my best to heed her call and follow her example.

This will not be work; it’s as natural as breathing. I just need to re-learn what I knew as a baby: that my primary relationship with my Mother is paramount. There is nothing more important than the sacred, reciprocal communion of our love.

New Year's Day 2015 Nova Scotia Photo J. Browdy

New Year’s Day 2015
Nova Scotia
Photo J. Browdy

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by Jennifer Browdy, Ph.D. on January 1, 2015  •  Permalink
Posted in Alternative Futures, Environment, New stories
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Posted by Jennifer Browdy, Ph.D. on January 1, 2015

https://bethechange2012.com/2015/01/01/new-years-resolution-2015-re-entering-sacred-communion-with-gaia/

Envisioning a Cosmic Religion, Rooted in Mother Earth: Homage to Thich Nhat Hanh

It must have something to do with reaching midlife. The beat of elders moving on out of this lifetime has picked up for me, and it’s so hard to let them go, knowing that as each life ends, those of us remaining are called ever more strongly to step into their shoes and become the elders leading our society.

Thich Nhat Hanh

Thich Nhat Hanh

Few people alive today could step easily into the humble, powerful shoes of Thich Nhat Hanh. Like the Dalai Lama, he is a Buddhist monk who has been so generous and warm in inviting others into his orbit. Whether or not you practice Buddhism, whether or not you follow any religious tradition at all, there is so much wisdom and guidance in Thich Nhat Hanh’s writings, so much to learn and gain from listening to him.

I regret that I never had the chance to be physically in his presence, but as with so many of the other great leaders I admire, I know him through the writings he has shared and through his public persona and the good works he has accomplished.

At 88 years old, Thich Nhat Hanh is in the hospital with a brain hemorrhage from which he may still recover. He is still with us today but even after he is gone, I know his spirit will be showering us with the lovingkindness he knows we need to overcome the negativity that besets so many of us as individuals and as societies.

Today, in homage to Thay (as his students call him lovingly), I want to quote at some length from one of his last books, the beautiful Love Letter to the Earth. I urge you to buy a copy of this small bright gem of a book, and use it as a guide and inspiration—maybe you will be moved to write some love letters of your own to our dear battered planet.

“Dear Mother Earth,

“The human species is but one of your many children. Unfortunately, many of us have been blinded by greed, pride, and delusion, and only a few of us have been able to recognize you as our Mother. Not realizing this, we have done you great harm, compromising both your health and your beauty. Our deluded minds push us to exploit you and create more and more discord, putting you and all your forms of life under stress and strain. Looking deeply, we also recognize that you have enough patience, endurance and energy to embrace and transform all the damage we have caused, even if it takes you hundreds of millions of years.

“When greed and pride overtake our basic survival needs, the result is always violence and unnecessary devastation. We know that whenever one species develops too rapidly, exceeding its natural limit, there is great loss and damage, and the lives of other species are endangered. For equilibrium to be restored, causes and conditions naturally arise to bring about the destruction and annihilation of that species. Often these causes and conditions originate from within the destructive species itself. We have learned that when we perpetrate violence toward our own and other species, we are violent toward ourselves. When we know how to protect all beings, we are protecting ourselves.

“We understand that all things are impermanent and without a separate self-nature. You and Father Sun, like everything else in the cosmos, are constantly changing, and you are only made of non-you elements. That is why we know that, in the ultimate dimension, you transcend birth and death, being and nonbeing. Nonetheless, we need to protect you and restore balance, so that you can continue for a long time in this beautiful and precious form, not just for our children and their children but for five hundred million years and beyond. We want to protect you so you can remain a glorious jewel within our solar system for eons to come.

Northern lights, photographed from space

Northern lights, photographed from space

We know that you want us to live in such a way that in each moment of our daily lives we can cherish life and generate the energies of mindfulness, peace, solidity, compassion and love. We vow to fulfill your wish and respond to your love. We have the deep conviction that generating these wholesome energies, we will help reduce the suffering on Earth and contribute to alleviating the suffering caused by violence, war, hunger and illness. In alleviating our suffering, we alleviate yours.

“Dear Mother, there have been times when we suffered greatly as a result of natural disasters. We know that whenever we suffer, you suffer through us. The floods, tornadoes, earthquakes and tsunamis aren’t punishments or manifestations of your anger, but are phenomena that must occur on occasion, so that balance can be restored. The same is true of a shooting star. For balance in nature to be achieved, at times some species have to endure loss. In those moments, we have turned to you, dear Mother, and asked whether or not we could count on you, on your stability and compassion. You didn’t answer us right away. Then, beholding us with great compassion, you replied, “Yes, of course you can count on your Mother. I will always be here for you.” But then you said, “Dear children, you must ask yourselves, can your Mother Earth count on you?”

“Dear Mother, today we offer you our solemn reply, “Yes, Mother, you can count on us.””

Love Letter to the Earth concludes on a vision of a new kind of spirituality, a new kind of religion, founded on the Buddhist principle of interbeing—which, like deep ecology, understands that every form of life on earth, and indeed every element of our planetary biosphere is profoundly interconnected and interdependent, not in a hierarchy but in a rhizomatic web. Every strand in that web must be honored and tended, and this is the work that human beings, especially, are called upon to take up.

If Thich Nhat Hanh’s vision of a new religion for the 21st century could be realized, what a wonderful world it could be. Listen:

“We can build a deep spiritual practice based not on dogmas or beliefs in things we can’t verify, but entirely on evidence. To say that the Earth is a great being is not just an idea; each of us can see this for ourselves. Each of us can see that the Earth has the qualities of endurance, stability and inclusiveness. We can observe the Earth embracing everyone and everything without discrimination. When we say that the Earth has given birth to many great beings, including buddhas, bodhisattvas and saints, we are not exaggerating. The Buddha, Jesus Christ, Moses and Mohammed are all children of the Earth. How can we describe the Earth as mere matter when she has given birth to so many great beings?

“When we say the Earth has created life, we know it’s only possible because she contains within herself the whole cosmos. Just as the Earth is not only the Earth, so too are we not only humans. We have the Earth and the whole cosmos within us. We are made of the sun. We are made of stars. Touching the true nature of reality, we can transcend the dualistic view that the cosmos is something greater than ourselves or different from ourselves. Getting deeply in touch with the phenomenal realm, the historical dimension, we can realize our true nature of no-birth and no-death. We can transcend all fear and touch eternity.

Orionid-shooting-star

“Every advance in our understanding of ourselves, our nature and our place in the cosmos deepens our reverence and love. To understand and to love are fundamental desires. Understanding has some kind of connection with love. Understanding can take us in the direction of love. When we understand and become aware of the great harmony, elegance and beauty of the cosmos, we may feel great admiration and love. This is the most basic kind of religious feeling: it is based on evidence and our own experience. Humanity needs a kind of spirituality that we can all practice together.

“Dogmatism and fanaticism have been the cause of great separation and war. Misunderstanding and irreverence have been the cause of enormous injustice and destruction. In the twenty-first century it should be possible for us to come together and offer ourselves the kind of religion that can help unite all peoples and all nations, and remove all separation and discrimination. If existing religions and philosophies, as well as science, can make an effort to go in this direction, it will be possible to establish a cosmic religion based not on myth, belief or dogma, but on evidence and the insights of interbeing. And that would be a giant leap for humankind.”

Amen, Thay. Go lightly.  We will carry on.

Quotes from Thich Nhat Hanh, Love Letter to the Earth

Parallax Press, 2013

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by Jennifer Browdy, Ph.D. on November 15, 2014  •  Permalink
Posted in Activism, Alternative Futures, Community, Environment, Leadership, love
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Posted by Jennifer Browdy, Ph.D. on November 15, 2014

https://bethechange2012.com/2014/11/15/envisioning-a-cosmic-religion-rooted-in-mother-earth-homage-to-thich-nhat-hanh/

Warriors for the Planet

Another summer, another war. I wonder how many summers there have been in the last 5,000 years when human beings were not occupied with killing each other?

Correction: not “human beings,” “men.”

Let’s be frank: even though there may be women in the armed forces of many countries now, war still remains a masculine activity and preoccupation. The women who serve as soldiers must adhere to the masculine warrior code and become honorary “bros,” for whom the worst insult is still be called a “girl” or a “pussy.”

AnneBaring_A_lgI have been reading Anne Baring’s magisterial book The Dream of the Cosmos, in which she gives a detailed account of the shift, around the time of Gilgamesh, from the ancient, goddess- and nature-worshipping “lunar cultures” to the contemporary era of solar, monotheistic, warrior-worshipping cultures.

In her elaboration of this shift, I read the tragedy of our time, enacted over and over again all over the planet, and not just by humans against humans, but also by humans against the other living beings with whom we share our world. I quote at length from Baring’s remarkable book:

Gilgamesh-187x300“The archetype of the solar hero as warrior still exerts immense unconscious influence on the modern male psyche, in the battlefield of politics as well as that of corporate business and even the world of science and academia: the primary aim of the male is to achieve, to win and, if necessary, to defeat other males. The ideal of the warrior has become an unconscious part of every man’s identity from the time he is a small child.

“With the mythic theme of the cosmic battle between good and evil and the indoctrination of the warrior went the focus on war and territorial conquest. War has been endemic throughout the 4000 years of the solar era. The glorification of war and conquest and the exaltation of the warrior is a major theme of the solar era—still with us today in George W. Bush’s words in 2005: ‘We will accept no outcome except victory.’ This call to victory echoes down the centuries, ensuring that hecatombs of young warriors were sacrificed to the god of war, countless millions led into captivity and slavery, countless women raped and widows left destitute. It has sanctioned an ethos that strives for victory at no matter what cost in human lives and even today glorifies war and admires the warrior leader. This archaic model of tribal dominance and conquest has inflicted untold suffering on humanity and now threatens our very survival as a species.

2014-06-15-Mission

“The cosmic battle between light and darkness was increasingly projected into the world and a fascination with territorial conquest gripped the imagination and led to the creation of vast empires. It is as if the heroic human ego, identified with the solar hero, had to seek out new territories to conquer, had to embody the myth in a literal sense and as it did so, channel the primitive territorial drives of the psyche into a Dionysian orgy of unbridled conquest, slaughter and destruction. We hear very little about the suffering generated by these conquests: the weeping widows, the mothers who lost sons, the orphaned children and the crops and patterns of sowing and harvesting devastated and disrupted by the foraging armies passing over them, the exquisite works of art pillaged and looted….The long chronicle of conquest and human sacrifice, of exultation in power and the subjugation of enemies might truly be named the dark shadow of the solar age” (118;124).

Like Baring, I see our time as a critical era in the long history of homo sapiens on the planet. There is still hope that enough of us will be able to detach ourselves from the pressures and busyness of our lives—will become conscious of what is happening to the planet and human civilization writ large—will understand that there are other ways to relate to each other and to the Earth, ways that will seem increasingly possible and obvious once we focus on them and begin to put our energies into manifesting our visions of a creative, collaborative, respectful mode of being.

Baring ends her disturbing chapter on the ascendancy of the solar warrior culture with a hopeful quote from The Passion of the Western Mind by Richard Tarnas, from which she springs into her own positive vision of the potential of our time.

“’We stand at the threshold of a revelation of the nature of reality that could shatter our most established beliefs about ourselves and the world. The very constriction we are experiencing is part of the dynamic of our imminent release. For the deepest passion of the Western mind has been to reunite with the ground of its being. The driving impulse of the West’s masculine consciousness has been its quest not only to realize itself, to forge its own autonomy, but also, finally, to recover its connection with the whole, to come to terms with the great feminine principle in life; to differentiate itself from but then rediscover and reunite with the feminine, with the mystery of life, of nature, of soul. And that reunion can now occur on a new and profoundly different level from that of the primordial unconscious unity, for the long evolution of human consciousness has prepared it to be capable at last of embracing the ground and matrix of its own being freely and consciously.’

“As this deep soul-impulse gathers momentum, the ‘marriage’ of the re-emerging lunar consciousness with the dominant solar one is beginning to change our perception of reality. This gives us hope for the future. If we can recover the values intrinsic to the ancient participatory way of knowing without losing the priceless evolutionary attainment of a strong and focused ego, together with all the discoveries we have made and the skills we have developed, we could heal both the fissure in our soul and our raped and vandalized planet” (130-131).

My heart aches for the suffering of the innocent civilians trapped in the crossfire in Gaza this summer, and for the grieving families of the passenger plane heinously shot down by warriors who were either poorly trained or just plain evil.

I am heartsick when I think about the holocaust that is overtaking living beings on every quadrant of our planet as humans continue to ravage the forests and seas, to melt the poles with our greenhouse gases, and to poison the aquifers and soil with our chemicals.

The last Polar Bear

This is where the solar cultures, with their “great” warrior kings, have led us. And yet, as Baring says, they have also presided over the most amazing advances in science and technology that humans have ever known in our long history on the planet.

We don’t need or want to go back to the simple innocence of ancient lunar societies. We don’t have to bomb ourselves back into the Stone Age.

What we need is to go forward, wisely and joyously, into a new phase of consciousness, in which the masculine warrior spirit is used for protection and stewardship rather than destruction, and the Earth is honored as the Mother of all that she is.

Never let anyone tell you it can’t be done. It is already happening.

6 Comments
by Jennifer Browdy, Ph.D. on August 3, 2014  •  Permalink
Posted in Alternative Futures, Education, Environment, Human Rights, Politics of Gender, Social change, Spiritual Ecology, Spiritual growth, War
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Posted by Jennifer Browdy, Ph.D. on August 3, 2014

https://bethechange2012.com/2014/08/03/warriors-for-the-planet/

With Starhawk: Dreaming the Dark and the Light

The night I returned home from an intense weekend workshop at Rowe with Starhawk, I had a disturbing dream.

A little girl, dressed in a pink jumper, was crying that she was lost, she had to find her father. So I took her by the hand and we started looking for her father in an urban landscape—first on the street, then in an apartment hallway with many doors. I said to her, do you remember what the floor of your home looked like? Was it wooden? Black and white tile? We stopped at several doors but they weren’t the right one. Then we came to the one with the blue-green patterned tiles, and her father was in the doorway.

As soon as I saw him I was afraid…he seemed like a devil, a mean, cruel man, although he smiled (leered, more like) as he came forward in the doorway to receive her. And she went to him, whimpering. There were people gathered in the apartment behind him, all dressed creepily in black, watching something on a screen in a darkened room. He thanked me for bringing her back, and I turned away, with a sick feeling, thinking she was going to be hurt or punished for “running away.”

As I turned away I heard her whimpering turn to full-out crying, a terrible keening sound, and I felt paralyzed—what should I do? Should I call Child Protective Services? Clearly this little child needed my help, but I was afraid that if I called the police or other authorities, the “father” would know who called and would come after me.

So I did what any dreamer does when paralyzed by fear—I woke up.

I haven’t been able to stop thinking about this dream, especially as it seems to be a kind of psychological bridge between Starhawk’s remarkable rituals honoring Mother Earth, and my own upcoming writing workshop on “purposeful memoir,” which uses the elements as a way to frame and explore parts of one’s life journey.

I feel sure that I was both the small child in the dream, and the adult who was trying to help her find her way “home.” The problem was that “home” was a dangerous, confusing, love-and-hate kind of place, ruled over by a “father” who was punitive, frightening and loving in a controlling kind of way. The adults sitting in the dark background passively watching the screen are human society writ large, especially our Western, technology-obsessed society. The little child with her bright pink outfit and fearful, wanting-to-trust eyes, stood out here as a wholly other kind of being, but one which would, in the pinching hands of her “father,” be formed and molded into just another one of these pale, eerie, zombified adults.

We talked a lot last weekend about how frightening it is that we Westernized humans have become so very disconnected from the natural world. As Starhawk gathered us in circles to ritually salute the four elements and the four directions (Earth/North, Fire/South, Water/West, Air/East), as well as the Center/Spirit, it seemed like a dream of an older way of being that I dimly remembered, from a time before I had taken my seat among all the other adults sitting before screens in darkened rooms.

After the last circle

After the last circle

We listened to the birds singing and the wind blowing through the new spring leaves; marveled at how the veins of the leaves mirrored the veins in our own bodies and the bigger veins of river waters on the body of the Earth; and let our combined voices, chanting around a sparking fire in praise of the elemental unity of all Life, blur together into a wordless ringing sound that cast our intention to be of service to Mother Earth high up into the starry sky.

Following Starhawk along a labyrinth made of stones lined with vivid purple violets, I thought about my desire to help others explore their own lives in elemental terms, looking back at where we’ve come from in order to see more clearly who we are and who we wish to become. In writing my own memoir, the elemental structure emerged organically from the trajectory of my life: Earth the childhood ground of my being; Water the stream of culture I’d been sucked into as an adolescent and young adult; Fire the years of adulthood, being tested on many fronts; and Air running through it all as reflections from my current perch, back on the Earth of middle age, trying to recover my grounding in order to move more intentionally into the next stage of my life.

A rainbow halo around the sun, right over our circle

A rainbow halo around the sun, right over our circle

My dream, in which I was both the crying little girl who felt compelled to find her way back “home” and the concerned adult who could see just how damaging and hostile that “home” was, seems to represent my awareness these past few years of how destructive our American “home culture” is to the sweet, sensitive Earth-centered children who are born into this harsh, techno-dominated world and cleave to it with innocent fidelity.

We are instinctively loyal to our families and our birth cultures, even when on some level we are aware that they are not always healthy for us. And the adult “me” in my dream, anguished about handing over the child to this destructive “father” figure, was like any bystander in a negative scenario, desperately choosing to remain silent out of fear of retribution, fear of bringing the hostility down on myself.

In my memoir workshop next week, I want to guide others to explore how thinking about our lives in elemental terms can help us make sense of our past, and give us a firm footing from which to overcome our conditioning and our fears and take the full measure of our life’s purpose.

Three generations

Three generations

We all came into this life wide-eyed and open-hearted, looking for love and warmth. It’s fascinating to explore what happens as we are received by our families and our home cultures, and swept along into the fast-moving currents of life, heading towards the fires of adulthood.

But what really matters is what comes next. What will we do with our one precious life, as Mary Oliver put it so poignantly? Can we step back from our loyalties and conditioning and figure out what it is we care about enough to stand up for and give our lives to?

Starhawk on the path

Starhawk on the path

Starhawk has moved in the past decade or so from a focus on a largely metaphorical, feminine-inflected Earth-based spirituality to a much more grounded practice in permaculture, “a multi-disciplinary art form, drawing from the physical sciences, architecture, nutrition, the healing arts, traditional ecological knowledge, and spirituality. The ethical underpinnings that guide permaculture are simple yet powerful: take care of earth, take care of the people, and share the surplus.”

In her Earth Activist Trainings, she seeks to help us reimagine a new kind of culture, one in which nature and human society are seamlessly intertwined. “EAT is practical earth healing with a magical base of ritual and nature awareness, teaching you to integrate mind and heart, with lots of hands-on practice and plenty of time to laugh,” she says on her website.

We need to create a new kind of culture that will comfort and nourish both the caring adult and the crying child in my dream. Our culture has to be supported by a sustainable relationship to our Mother Earth, a relationship in which we give back as much as we take, in an endlessly regenerative circle of life.

mossy rockAs I look ahead purposefully in my life, I hope that the adult I want to become would not leave the innocent child I was in the treacherous hands of a culture that has forgotten how to love. If I could replay that dream, I would guide that small, pink-clad child away from her malevolent “father” and his techno-obsessed tribe. I would take her away from that urban landscape, out into the warm green gloom of the forest, where we would sit together on a mossy rock and listen to the wind in the leaves and the birds in the sky. Together we would look up to see Starhawk approaching along the path, roots sprouting from her feet and branches from the top of her head.

We would sing together, in the words of poet Kristin Knowles, with whom I shared the Starhawk weekend:

Our mother,

in art and nature,

passionate burns thy flame.

Thy strength is one

with moon and sun

on Earth as up in the heavens.

Teach us the way to lightly tread

And relieve us our distress as

we receive those who would prefer our silence.

And lead us not into frustration

but deliver us from ill will.

For thine is the freedom, power and glory,

her story,

now and forever.

Blessed be.

6 Comments
by Jennifer Browdy, Ph.D. on June 3, 2014  •  Permalink
Posted in Alternative Futures, Community, Environment, Mentoring, New stories, Spiritual Ecology, Uncategorized
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Posted by Jennifer Browdy, Ph.D. on June 3, 2014

https://bethechange2012.com/2014/06/03/with-starhawk-dreaming-the-dark-and-the-light/

A Prayer to Mother Earth

Amazon rain forest

Amazon rain forest

In an emotional speech this week, the President Rafael Correa of Ecuador announced that he would be opening more of the country’s pristine Amazon rain forest to oil drilling, cancelling an earlier initiative to have wealthy countries fund the maintenance of a huge natural reserve.

The money simply did not come through, and Correa felt he had no other choice but to start selling oil drilling permits to the highest bidder, to keep his small country afloat.

This is terrible news for the planet.

Once again, short-term gain is being put over longterm health.

My mind immediately leaps to all the animals and people who live in that green and glowing forest, who will soon be hearing the whine of the chain saw and the roar of the bulldozer, and smelling the bitter odor of ancient oil fouling land and water.

Species we have not even met yet will perish.

Of course, this is happening every day, all over the planet.  But when you hear about yet another safety wall being breached, opening up a brand new, as-yet-untouched area to drilling, you have to stop and say a silent prayer.

A prayer to what, to whom?  What power can stop the relentless spread of our destructive species over this globe?

To me it seems clear that only Gaia herself can do it, by her usual methods—fire, flood, famine, great shaking of land and sea.  Epidemics of viruses and bacteria.  It has happened before and it will—it must—happen again.

I know I sound apocalyptic here, but apocalypse is in the air.

I don’t believe in a conventional form of afterlife, but I do believe that when we die our bodies return to the earth, and our spirits return to the energetic field of the planet.

We will return to the great dance of life in this biosphere.  Time is different there—fluid, stretched, endlessly long.  Our little human lifetimes are no more than brief flashes, like the shooting of stars against the August night sky.

Human beings do represent a great leap from the last dominant species on the planet, the dinosaurs.  But unlike the dinosaurs, when we perish it will be by our own hands—by our drills, our combustion engines and our inability to curb our own numbers.

My prayer is to our great Mother Earth, that she welcome us back into her bosom when we fall, and bring us back into the fold of endless regeneration.  If some of us humans survive the cataclysms that await, I pray we become wiser in our use of our tremendous, tragic intelligence.

5 Comments
by Jennifer Browdy, Ph.D. on August 17, 2013  •  Permalink
Posted in Activism, Alternative Futures, Environment, Resilience
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Posted by Jennifer Browdy, Ph.D. on August 17, 2013

https://bethechange2012.com/2013/08/17/a-prayer-to-mother-earth/

A “Be the Change” Manifesto for the 21st Century

On New Year’s Day, 2012, I reaffirm my commitment to dedicate my talents and energies towards shifting our destructive global human society in a direction that values the ecological health of the entire web of life on Earth over the short-term gains of a minority of human beings.

I invite you to join me, and you would cheer me very much if you expressed your solidarity by responding to this post, if only with a “like.”

Manifesto for a Sustainable Future

Whereas human beings have acted in a dominating fashion towards each other and towards other living species on this planet, using the excuse of difference to justify aggressive and destructive behavior;

Whereas competition has been used as a rationale for economic systems based on hierarchical systems of power;

Whereas social exclusion and systematic discrimination has been seen as the normative right of dominant groups;

Whereas privileged groups have felt entitled to take more than their fair share from the environmental commons, and to deprive less powerful groups, whether human or of other species, of the resources necessary for well-being;

Whereas it is quickly becoming apparent, in the age of climate change, that the dominant paradigm of capitalist patriarchal social relations is resulting in the dangerous destabilization of the entire natural ecosystem;

The time has come to take action to change this paradigm in the following ways:

1. Move from a top-down hierarchical system to a horizontal, egalitarian model of social relations based on inclusivity across all of the traditional boundaries used to keep different groups apart, and also opening up the possibility for cross-species collaboration based on respect and stewardship;

2. Shift the worldwide economic system to a model of global cooperation and collaboration, with the focus of human industry and government on providing a baseline of well-being for all life forms on this planet, regardless of geographic origin or antiquated ideas of relative importance (ie, who is to say that a human being is more important than a songbird, or a sardine?);

3. Tailor the education system to teaching the history of the destructive cultural practices of homo sapiens up to the 21st century, and opening up constructive conversations across disciplines, where alternatives to these traditions can be envisioned and developed;

4. Model egalitarian, collaborative, respectful social relations in the private sphere of the family as well as the public spheres of education, the profession, government and law;

5. Shift from a violent conflict and punishment model of resolving disagreements to a peaceful persuasive model, with the goal always being the well-being of the community as a whole first, and secondly each member of it.

6. Destroy all weapons of mass destruction, as well as all bio and chemical weapons, and their blueprints.

7. Disallow any one person’s or minority group’s interests (with rich people and businesses or industries rightly being considered minorities)  to take precedence over the interests of the majority, including the non-human majority on this planet.

8. Develop an appropriate representative global governing council to administer these principles.

In the name of Mother Earth and ALL of her children, I call on the peoples of the world to act without delay to become the stewards of the planet and the collaborative, respectful individuals we were always meant to be.

7 Comments
by Jennifer Browdy, Ph.D. on January 1, 2012  •  Permalink
Posted in Activism, Alternative Futures, Community, Environment, Human Rights, Politics, Social change
Tagged , , ,

Posted by Jennifer Browdy, Ph.D. on January 1, 2012

https://bethechange2012.com/2012/01/01/a-be-the-change-manifesto-for-the-21st-century/

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