Thoughts On Earth Day 2018

Earth Day 2018

The earth is our mother. Whatever befalls the earth befalls the sons and daughters of the earth. This we know. All things are connected like the blood which unites one family. All things are connected.

Whatever befalls the earth befalls the sons and daughters of the earth. We did not weave the web of life, we are merely strands in it. Whatever we do to the web we do to ourselves." 

Chief Seattle

EarthRise

This Sunday, April 22^nd, marks the 48^th Anniversary of Earth Day. 48 Years! Almost ½ a century. And yet still we continue to pollute our Home. We still are unweaving those webs of life. And we are doing it to ourselves. For Mother Earth was here in the beginning and She will outlast us until the end.

So who do we celebrate Earth Day for? Mother Earth or ourselves? 

 

We celebrate Earth Day to remind ourselves that we are part of that web of life. Here in Rhode Island, people will gather in parks and by the ocean to clean up the trash we leave behind, as if the home we all share is a giant trash can. Or people will go hiking or biking, fishing or camping to get out of the house and into Nature.

But Chief Joseph was talking about something more when he said that we are strands in the weave of life. It isn’t enough for us to go play and enjoy nature, just as it isn’t enough to try to ‘save’ our natural resources – although we need to do those things.

We have to figure out how to get back into alignment with Mother Earth and the rest of her children. We have to stop removing ourselves from this beautiful tapestry of life and weave ourselves back into it. 

 

The Earth has been communicating with us all along about the problems our consumer lifestyle causes her. But we haven’t been listening. Or else, we listen and choose to ignore her call. This American administration and global corporate interests are trying their hardest to ignore her call. They want to take us backwards and reverse the healing we’ve already accomplished since that first Earth Day in 1970. 

 

After 48 years, we’re at a tipping point, for the people of the world are finally acknowledging the fact that extreme climate change is a reality and it’s happening now. And if we are really still part of Mother Earth’s weaving, then perhaps the intense fires and hurricanes, the tornadoes and cold weather are outer examples of our inner feelings. Because just as Mother Earth is being raped and defiled, so are ‘we the people’ being killed by wars we don’t want, by diseases caused by the poisons and pollution our industries spew out into our air, food and waters, and by an old masculine culture of domination and violence that refuses to give up its power to those who want to work at healing, peace and cooperation.

So what can we do this 48^th Earth Day to change course? How do we really connect with Mother Earth and her tapestry of life?

Connecting to the Earth entails more than keeping our carbon emissions low and recycling, although these are ways we try to clean up the pollution generated by our modern life-style. Connecting to the Earth isn’t just going for a hike in the mountains or swimming in the ocean, although these are times when we can commune with nature. Connecting to the Earth is about connecting to the energies and life force of all of Earth’s other children. It’s about acknowledging that we are One with all of Nature.

First, connecting to the Earth demands that we become conscious of our bodies, our own private bit of Earth. That means we need to stop buying poisoned foods and being entranced by the psychic pollution of most movies and TV. Connecting to the Earth begins when we can feel reverence for our land, our air, our waters, when we can ‘love our neighbors/all our relations (including Earth) as ourselves’. Connecting to Mother Earth means connecting with our feminine nature and bringing our masculine nature into balance. That means letting the forces of connection and love become the basis of our reasoning and action. 

 

It also means listening to our bodies and therefore our feelings about what we see and experience in nature. How these feelings change us and open us to new possibilities. The Earth teaches us that life is passion and patience, stillness and motion, joy and sorrow, pain and pleasure. She helps us expand our consciousness and become more of who we are meant to be. 

 

Connecting to the Earth begins when we re-examine our beliefs about our place in Earth’s ecosystem. Can we really use the Earth’s resources however we want without consequences? Can we use up all Earth resources for our obsessive consumerism without thought for who might need those resources in the future?

Are humans just as much a part of Earth’s ecology as wind and fire and water? We need to discover what our relationship to the Earth is. Are we the stewards of the Earth or perhaps Earth’s consciousness itself? Unless we discover our place in the Earth’s living biosphere, we won’t know how to honor the Earth. 

 

Most ancient cultures that lived close to the Earth - the Celts, the Aborigines, the Native Americans, and Western culture itself until the sixteenth century - revered Earth as the Mother. They knew they were made from the dust of this Earth, that they shared this Earth with the other animals, the trees and plants, the rivers and seas. They knew that they were part of the Great Round of Nature, one with all the other works of the Mother. They knew that just as the animals gave up their lives to feed and nourish human beings, so too, human beings gave back their lives to the Great Mother when death took us. They understood the wisdom and necessity of the cyclic processes of Her mysteries, and they lived within that cycle of gestation and birth, growth and maturing, death and regeneration as in the protective circle of a mother's arms. 

 

For them, the Earth was animate and divine; She set the rhythms of life for all Her children. She was the Divine Nourisher and Sustainer, giving humans beautiful children and plentiful harvests; She was also the Divine Destroyer, taking back Her own. She was, and is, the bedrock and foundation of all that draw their life from Her. The Greeks saw her this way:

The Mother of us all

the oldest of all

hard,

splendid as rock

Whatever there is that is of

the land

it is she

who nourishes it,

It is the Earth I sing.

Before humanity looked to the heavens for their gods, we looked to Mother Earth as the supreme Goddess of life. We were Earth’s children, just as the animals, land, plants and waters were hers. As we face the results of our own misuse and abuse of the Earth, we have to admit we haven’t treated our mother very well. Who among us would rape, degrade and pillage a beloved mother and nurturer in this way? And yet we do, because our forefathers told us that the Earth was dead matter and we were special, meant to rule the Earth, not care for it. And so we kill off species without a thought. Unfortunately, as we kill the animals and rape the land, we are killing ourselves.

We have come a long way from our origins, and today, our consumer-driven consciousness is such that we have forgotten this generous and dangerous Mother. While Western religions have tried to strengthened our individual sense of morals and values (although if we look at some fundamentalists we can see they haven’t), for the most part these beliefs separated us from a positive relationship with the Earth. They all saw this ancient Goddess as evil, and later condemned all things of the Earth as illusionary and sinful. They all came to believe that a ‘better life’ awaited us in some imagined heaven, rather than making this Earth a paradise. 

 

Since the Industrial Revolution, our scientific rational world view taught us that Earth was only inanimate matter. Rejecting her divinity, and even her aliveness, we felt safe defiling, raping and poisoning the Earth. Leaving science to investigate the complexities of life, people no longer honored Earth's mysteries of life, and so we forget that we are also a part of the Great Round of Life. 

 

As we learned to control and use the Earth, we found that we could also control our instinctual nature, and the mind and the ideal of pure spirit became more important than the body and its experience of soul. We removed ourselves from living contact with our Mother Earth: by covering the land over with our cities and roads; by explaining Her mysteries as scientific facts and nothing more; by living in our heads rather than in our hearts and bodies. We substituted a one-dimensional observing of life for the wisdom of the experience of life.

Whether we acknowledge it or not, we are held and sustained within the arms of Mother Earth. Just as surely, the life of Planet Earth is now in our hands. Earth is the only home we have. How could we have gotten so separated from our home that we would come close to destroying it with our poisons and our waste, our wars and our unsustainable economy and population? We are faced with the stark truth of climate change disrupting our weather patterns, warming and melting the glaciers at alarming rates and heating up the Atlantic Gulf Stream, which is slowing down to a 1,000 year low.

The radiation from Fukushima has contaminated 1/3 of the Earth’s oceans, while the rest of our waters are polluted by plastic and antibiotics and other medicines that we piss away into our water tables. By allowing our governments to ignore these signs of global warming, we are taking away our children’s future. I am proud to say that it is by far women who remember our relationship with our mother Earth, and who have become spokeswomen for her Sovereignty. We have a choice to remember our responsibility to our children’s children for seven generations. 

 

So this Earth Day, make a pledge to connect in a different way with Mother Earth. Connect through your heart, through your imagination and through your spiritual vision. Join the Dance – Earth’s Dance – and know that you and She and We are all connected.

In Praise of the Earth
by John O’Donohue

Let us bless
The imagination of the Earth,
That knew early the patience
To harness the mind of time,
Waited for the seas to warm,
Ready to welcome the emergence
Of things dreaming of voyaging
Among the stillness of land.

And how light knew to nurse
The growth until the face of the Earth
Brightened beneath a vision of color.

When the ages of ice came
And sealed the Earth inside
An endless coma of cold,
The heart of the Earth held hope,
Storing fragments of memory,
Ready for the return of the sun.

Let us thank the Earth
That offers ground for home
And holds our feet firm
To walk in space open
To infinite galaxies.

Let us salute the silence
And certainty of mountains:
Their sublime stillness,
Their dream-filled hearts.

The wonder of a garden
Trusting the first warmth of spring
Until its black infinity of cells
Becomes charged with dream;
Then the silent, slow nurture
Of the seed’s self, coaxing it
To trust the act of death.

The humility of the Earth
That transfigures all
That has fallen
Of outlived growth.

The kindness of the Earth,
Opening to receive
Our worn forms
Into the final stillness.

Let us ask forgiveness of the Earth
For all our sins against her:
For our violence and poisonings
Of her beauty.

Let us remember within us
The ancient clay,
Holding the memory of seasons,
The passion of the wind,
The fluency of water,
The warmth of fire,
The quiver-touch of the sun
And shadowed sureness of the moon.

That we may awaken,
To live to the full
The dream of the Earth
Who chose us to emerge
And incarnate its hidden night
In mind, spirit, and light.

To Bless the Space Between Us: A Book of Blessings by John O’Donohue

© 2018 - Cathy Pagano All Rights Reserved Excepts from Wisdom’sDaughters: How Women Can Change the World.

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