Instead of being swept up in the urgency to attend to the world “before it’s too late,” let the way that we walk be slow. Let us listen to the pleas of our surrounding thirsts. Let us acknowledge the forgetting that drifted us onto this terrifying precipice. Let the grief of it all make its encounter with us through our remembering. And may beauty come alive then, under our feet.
As we learn to listen to our bodies and honour the intelligence of our feelings and dreams, we are contributing to the awakening of what some call Gaia Consciousness. Our personal embodiment practice reverberates at the level of the whole. The cues we are taking from our inner nature are the cues of our greater dreambody, calling us to make choices that result in collective harmony and sustainability.
We are remembering how to be an ecosystem. As sustainable living writer Vicki Robin suggests, “Treat everyone within fifty miles like you love them.” I would add that we include in our image of ‘everyone’ the standing people, the feathered people, the rock people, the water bodies, and so on. We must reconstitute the world through our many small contributions, collaborations, and togetherness.
As we work to protect the last stands of wilderness around and within us, creating beauty from loss and heartbreak, we will meet each other: those with no extraordinary power but the devotion to do what we know we must do—and look after each other. We include each other whenever we can by doing things in pairs or circles and groups, like work parties and generosity circles, clothing swaps and protests, practicing at the power of our belonging together. Because as times get tougher, we will need a strong, reciprocal web of skills and attributes to be called upon.
When I moved to the country, I was thrust into a sudden relationship with the sun and the moon, the stars and the landscape, where the most impressive thing on the horizon was trees. In a city, the greatest things on our horizon are towers made of glass and steel, man-made testaments to our dominance and virility. Only taller than trees are mountains. And only wider than mountains is the sky, and pastures spread out as far as the eye can see. It alters the psyche entirely to be in a place where nature prevails in that it relativizes our importance in the larger family of things.
Nobody knows if humans will survive this crossing, if we’ll leave anything habitable behind for future generations, but I believe our global catastrophe is a clarion call to our highest abilities. Whether we’ll be successful or not, we must give everything we have to doing what we believe is right. We are but disappearing comets who must summon the grace to accept our fate while working to leave an elegant and contributive streak behind us as we go.
Excerpted with the author’s permission from Belonging: Remembering Ourselves Home.
