Shareholders of the Earth

The reverberations of the Gulf spill are showing up as grief, despair and futility. What can we do with an issue so immense? How can any individual have an effect when the people in power are scratching their heads and hoping at this phase?

I think we should get past whether we will destroy the Earth. While I do believe we are damaging our environment, I really think it’s the human species that is in great danger of destroying itself before it completely destroys the Earth. I feel the guilt of belonging to a species collective that seems to be repeating blunders of the past, such as when Native tribes lost their vision and started driving whole herds of buffalo over a cliff to have their hearts.

Now to modern times and how we are currently rampantly opportunistic as a species. If we don’t re-envision ourselves more as a collective, then I feel we will fold into the 99% of other species experiments that no longer exist on the planet. I could even wax philosophical about this except for one thing, I believe if we blindly destroy our ability to live on this planet, then we have really missed the point of owning our divinity, of seeing the magnitude of our individual, let alone the collective synergy of greatness that we could enjoy if we were to switch from all these power play win~lose scenario games that we’re addicted to and find out what it is to play well together and see what could happen as a result.

Heyoka Merrifield is a visionary artist, writer and Crow medicine man. He once made the comment that he feels that something happened in our history as a human species and after the last Ice Age, something was triggered in our collective consciousness that remembers lack and believes in it. Underneath all these power games is a sense that there will never be enough to go around and some people are more driven by this coding than others who still do their best to share and expand to embrace more of a collective expansion. For me, experiencing the volume of green life offered each spring by the planet is enough to believe that there is a foundation of abundance here for us all.

The resurging community garden movement is one of the most transformative events of this era in the U.S. because people are having an experience of the fertile power of the planet and learning to develop a relationship with the great Mother again. Through it there is more collective community developing around the real currency that is important in our lives, learning to relate in harmonious ways and developing a sense of esteem about what we are capable of while with the Earth. Its a win~win scenario and its no wonder that it is spreading through schools to change learning patterns through better nutrition and interaction. It is having a positive effect in economically challenged communities to address major health issues that people don’t have funds to alter. Yet here is the Earth, providing us the opportunity for sustenance and learning much deeper respect for its innate intelligence in offering us all a place to call home.

When we are disconnected from the Earth, from our very life source, we often begin to live quite anxiously. We’re so used to doing this as a group that we don’t often stop ourselves to notice that we’re living in our heads and not very grounded. As Valerie Andrews wrote in her wonderful book, A Passion for the Earth, the cure for this “as for all other woes attendant on material life, is to sink one’s flesh back into the flesh of the Universal Mother.” Re-connecting to the Earth is the way to remember what it is like to be supported and sustained.

So to begin my series on ‘Caring for a Change,’ and come back to the serious ecological challenges that we are in the midst of, whether we’re close to the Gulf or any other area currently bleeding from reckless and careless activities, I suggest that we allow current science to inform mystical activism. Quite simply we should allow that as we practice being in our hearts wherever we are, we consciously realize that we can send this resonance wherever it is needed. As we act with enlightened compassion and care in our locale, that we are waking up to realize more unity on the great globe that we all inhabit and all have a stake in.

Last week I was reading a dreary and despairing piece on how an economic advisor would, if asked, suggest that BP officials consider bankruptcy proceedings because after all, their responsibility was not to anyone but their shareholders. I took these words as my own call to a revolutionary tea party for the Earth. It’s time that we all realized that whether we want to be or not, we’re ALL Shareholders of the Earth, we all have a big vested interest in keeping this planet as a place that we can live and thrive and learning, through using our imagination and intelligence, that there are far more interesting things to do than using our life force recklessly to destroy other forms of life.

So I invite you now to join me, and many others with many different approaches, yet with the theme that we can do something and there is a collective energy that we’re working to meet, to find that synergistic threshold where we have a big gestalt together. Trust me, it will be a big party that we’ll all enjoy to join together and create something that we can enjoy participating in.

I have people that bring a smile to me now, even if a day feels bleak, I know these others being points of light around the globe. As well, I feel kinship with the flowers that bloom with abandon, showing their beauty for a short time. They are for me, the fondest reminders of what we’re really here for, to express our divine majesty in life.

It is time to join in, to have the courage to show heart and trust without knowing. When you express your own form of caring for a change, I hope you will smile, knowing that someone in another part of the world is stepping up, as you are, to champion life through compassion and care and expanding awareness. As we do, we can expect wonderful surprises from spirit. Enjoy the collective evolutionary expansion, it’s what we’re really here for.

Months of Magnitude; More Wake Up Events

A line from John Lennon’s song is circling in my brain as waves of overwhelm wash over. Inside I hear “Nobody told me there would be days like these….” I watch pictures of the BP spill devastation—what it has done to maim and kill marine wildlife in its home, the ocean known as the Gulf of Mexico. Life has been spawned from the ocean water of the Earth and it should be considered sacred—it is truly the Mother Water of Life. With destruction levels causing increasing dead zones over larger and larger swathes of Earth’s global girth, the level of shock that is registering across the planet is its own agenda to attend to.

At the 911 event, we had human hatred aimed at one of the most concentrated zones of habitation and economic exchange in the West. In the wake of this chaos, lives were irrevocably changed from the ripple effect of shock waves moving out from Ground Zero in New York.

The British Petroleum Gulf Debacle is another marker of magnitude on the scale of human invoked devastation through carelessness. On April 20, 2010, corruption and greed converged to set up a system failure of unprecedented proportions, and tidal waves of oil began to plume out from deep within the Earth, despoiling the ocean and engulfing systems in ‘crude’ and toxic oil. While the eleven lives lost in the human realm compared to 911 is smaller in scale, this mistake is one of the most costly oversights recorded in modern history. This is a point of reaching a new Ground Zero, for this is an Earth Environmental Zero Point. Do we really need any bigger wake up calls as a human species than this?

The news is doing its best to tabulate the economic cost of mediating the mess, but it is the environmental cost of remediation that needs to be addressed most significantly at the present moment. We need these questions to move to the forefront of public exchange; “How much poison will we allow in our lives and the planet that is our home? How much more barrage of chemical toxicity can we withstand?” “Are we really going to stand by and watch the decimation of the ocean habitat for countless species of life on this planet due to the corporate drive to profit without responsibility? The Gulf already has one dead zone, now there are two. Why don’t we see this as an uncaring act of terrorism to blindly wipe out ecosystems, lives of many species and livelihoods?

The intelligent operating system that maintains a bandwidth to sustain life is disappearing in our lifetime. As well, our human immune systems are crumbling as evidenced by increasing heart disease and cancer rates that have become epidemic. Around the world we have systems collapse, with species die off from environmental and climate changes that are a result of the rampant and ruthless initiatives to exploit the Earth for whatever short term economic gain can be achieved without thought for any circle of life reciprocity and care.

In America, we are in deep fear of terrorism from foreign infidels. The root meaning of this word derives from terre, a word denoting earth. It is time to re-define ‘terrorism’ to be concerned with any life endangerment to the foundation of life—the Earth, including the other creatures that have inhabited this planet long before we stood upright as a species and began to wield new tools of power. We need to mobilize our collective focus on identifying actions that are destructive to life on the planet and putting our creative vision and passion to changing the direction of these sabotaging forces wherever they hail from.

We are moving toward a ground zero shift through this all. The status quo seeks to maintain its privilege at the expense of other forms of life—human and other members of creation that inhabit this beautiful blue-green globe. Amidst all that is opportunistically seeking to destroy anything in its path for greed and power, we have virtue in action where mercy meets misery. There are networks of activity that are acting like the immune system at its best, mobilizing in favor of life and engaging in an expression of compassion in action. These networks of light may not be holding sway in the news, but they are part of the quantum momentum that is expressing and building its own new paradigm. Those that are joining to act in favor of life, whether as an ‘everyday champion’ as some are being called, or quietly minding the networks of prayer and meditation like tiny diamond dew drops sparkling around the planet, all these actions express the virtues of soul nature, and are participating in the wave of light that is increasing to change the way of life in the direction of expanded evolution, interspecies cooperation and bringing peace to our planet.

While the tension of the opposites is reaching untold levels of pressure, new pathways are emerging even as life as we know it is continuing to dissolve before our eyes. It is time to forge in new directions and to awaken to the intelligent systems of design already inherent in our orb of life on this planet. It is time for the human species to recognize we are not alone, and we are not meant to be so near-sighted about our species or a very small number of those privileged with money and status to think any group can survive without preserving the very foundation of life support systems. It is time to remember these words in our democracy, “We the people…” It is time for those in positions of power to fulfill their oaths of responsibility to act in favor of life in a broader context than the very narrow interests that too many are enmeshed with. It is time to remember as well, ‘we’ as a collective are the planet, each and everyone of us is part of the grid that is meant to support and sustain life, not just take from it. Each one of us has a destiny to fulfill that comes from the soul. As humans, if we are made in the likeness of God, then we need to stand more upright in fulfilling our responsibility, and showing the true strength, vision and courage that we are capable of.

At its core, the Gulf crisis is about systems that have lost their focus on any substance and are operating from interests so narrow as to lack the ability to sustain life. It is time to move our attention to acting in favor of life through care and compassion. Through involvement in demonstrating our true nature, we will tap into untold forms of spiritual synergy that can transform any crisis into an opportunity for lasting change. The enduring power of creation to renew itself already exists, and it is time for us to learn to call upon these qualities in our lives and work with this deep sustaining power on the planet.

In the coming weeks I will highlight where there is ‘caring for a change’ in action, where people of the planet are fostering a sustainable way of living that embraces other species as having rights to live and flourish, not just a privileged few humans who would be willing to destroy anything for their addiction to power.

As Lennon said, “all we are saying, is give peace a chance…” This blogger would say that a fairly substantial number are fervently acting in some manner to give life a chance to be nurtured and flourish so that we really embrace the grace we are meant to know as a divine gift.

Cultivating New Ways to Enrich our Lives and the Earth

We are in a time of transition, a place of flux between outmoded ways of life and another’s fresh emergence. Collectively, we are beginning to adopt green as a paradigm for living, a new design map for how to make daily choices on sustainability, ways of being and behavior that honor the balance of living systems within both natural and human social communities. In sensing the new emergence, it is an opportunity to think more ‘resourcefully’ and to re-envision our lives and make the world anew, to join with others and with nature, and find the common ground of enduring bonds of mutuality.

Changing the paradigm to one of green sustainability underscores one of the most urgent issues of our time for we humans to accept that creative expression is our true nature. It is a major challenge of our times to use our creative faculties for the good of human life, and other forms of life on the planet as well. Our true nature is expressed as an urge to grow and become more fuller and refined versions of ourselves; in much the way a seed fulfills its own blueprint and becomes the inviting sun-infused lushness of fruit, the unforgettable fragrance of a flower or the stately majesty of a towering tree. We are all local sites of ‘creation.’ As sparks of the divine, we are all ‘works in progress’ with purposeful urgency to become true to our pattern integrity and to grow to our own full stature.

Visionary astrologer Robert Wilkinson has a term for hunkering down into what he calls a ‘narrow destiny.’ A narrow destiny might feel safe, but it won’t stop feeling cramped, nor will it ultimately satisfy, as it creates a penchant to live in a compensatory manner, rather than the satisfaction of doing what’s in us, and offering our real value to the world.

In a world undergoing vast metamorphosis at all levels and among all groups, we need to take our understanding of creativity out of its narrow designation as something an artist does and is, and begin to embrace a more fully faceted awareness of our authenticity in daily life. In the unfolding era we are entering, we should be identifying all the aspects of our creative faculties as a human group, and become fully engaged in realizing what is this true nature. As a testimony to the importance of developing this capacity in the current time, Orange County real estate developer of green and recycled centers Shaheen Sadeghi made a comment recently that “Creativity is as important as literacy” in the future that is unfolding.

Two facets of creativity that we need to readily employ include the ability to adapt to changing conditions in a way that is germane as our sensing informs us, and to think outside the box, in order to leave stale ways of seeing the world behind. As with any creative process, the greater the ability to be resilient enough to shift perspective, an aspect of design mind, is an indication of an openness to allows more possibilities to emerge.

While moving into the unknown can bring a degree of uncertainty and edginess, it also offers a fresh juiciness and an ability to claim our true citizenship as activists in authenticity. Like all artists in life, we are being called to engage with passion and purpose, meeting challenges of our times as creative opportunities to show the potency of being authentic in meeting the moment. We have the capacity to renew the world that we inhabit through the greening power of our creative faculties of imagination, ingenuity, curiosity, synthesis, innovation and intelligence. Although the times are precarious, there is also a promise of a new beginning, as we step into finding both the individual and group genius of being our best.

Here in the United States, we had a time during the challenge of World War I to plant Liberty Gardens. During World War II, it was important to plant Victory Gardens. We now have an opportunity to cultivate another form of victorious garden; one of free expression; by planting the seeds of our own individual and collective greatness. The greening power of expressing our pattern integrity has enormous capacity to transform our lives in ways we don’t expect and that can open new vistas of perception.

Like the flowers, it is time to bloom where we are planted, to join in the celebration of a world that we glimpse through participating in a garden form of life and developing more sensitivity and sensibility. A garden is common ground where interdependence among different species, a degree of harmony and beneficial relations may thrive. As flourishing members of the garden way of life, flowers can show us that we should unfurl our authentic nature, showing off the uniqueness and beauty that is ours to share for a while as we travel through form.

A piece from nineteenth century gardener and writer Celia Thaxter, who wrote a book called The Island Garden, expresses her profuse loving awareness of the plants inhabiting the garden. She shares her adoration of poppies:

To stand by the beds at sunrise and see the flowers awake is heavenly delight. As the first long, low rays of sun strike the buds, you know they feel the signal! A light air stirs among them; you lift your eyes, perhaps to look at a rosy cloud or follow the flight of a caroling bird, and when you look back again, lo! the calyx has fallen from the largest bud and lies on the ground, two half transparent, light green shells, leaving the flower petals wrinkled in a thousand folds, just released from their close pressure. A moment more and they are unclosing before your eyes. They flutter out on the gentle breeze like silken banners to the sun, and such color! (pgs. 83-4)

The flowering plants have been on the planet for more than 100 million years. They hold an enormous volume of evolutionary understanding that we may access as we engage more fully in realizing they are part of the community of life as much as we are.

Through exercising our capacity for imagination and synthesizing intelligence, while showing interest in developing new ways of perceiving the diverse natural forms of life, we are greening our current awareness and simultaneously seeding a future with more colorful possibilities inherent in widening our perception. As we acknowledge and honor the intelligence and beauty that we enjoy as citizens of Earth, we are cultivating a harvest of understanding to enrich and expand the kinship circle of life on the planet.