Gaia

Dayle in Limoux – Day #32

August 6, 2022

BBC

‘The Notre-Dame Cathedral is on track to open its doors to worshippers and the public in 2024, says France’s culture minister.

The 13th Century Paris monument caught fire in April 2019, sparking a vast outpouring of emotion.

Since then, a huge restoration project has been carried out aiming to restore it to its previous design.’

Wonderful news! In time, too, for the Summer Olympics in Paris.

UN

Today, remembering the anniversary of Hiroshima, particularly poignant after the startling reminder from the UN chief that humanity is ‘one miscalculation away from nuclear annihilation.’

“It is totally unacceptable for states in possession of nuclear weapons to admit the possibility of a nuclear war,” António Guterres underscored early on Saturday in Japan at a ceremony marking the 77th anniversary of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima.

Land grabs, borders, and bored male leaders who are pained by their quest for power and greed and violence.

From Dorothy Day:

“Mr, Truman was jubilant. President Truman. True man; what a strange name, come to think of it. We refer to Jesus Christ as true God and true Man. Truman is a true man of his time in that he was jubilant. He was not a son of God, brother of Christ, brother of the Japanese, jubilating as he did. He went from table to table on the cruiser which was bringing him home from the Big Three conference, telling the great news; “jubilant” the newspapers said. Jubilate Deo. We have killed 318,000 Japanese.”

—Dorothy Day, editorial following Hiroshima bomb [Posted on social media by Robert Ellsberg, Orbis Books]

‘God is that which promotes life, evil is that which destroys it.’

-Albert Schweitzer [1875-1965]

‘Now I have become death, the destroyer of worlds.’ –Bhagavad Gita

D I V I N E   F E M I N I N E 🥀

‘There is no day on which I grow not

Finer and more pure,

For this world holds no nobler lady

Than she whom I do serve and I adore.

And these – the words I speak –

Come singing from an open heart.’

-Troubadour Arnaut Daniel, 1180-1200

(Translation by Henry Lincoln.]

‘Throughout history, the quest for beauty, loe and truth has struggled to survive amid the quest for dominance and greed. During the medieval era, the dominant powers of church and state burned the last Templars. They burned thousands of Cathars, and they burned Joan of Arc, who tried to liberate her people from foreign rule. They even tried to ban the poetry and songs of the troubadours. But the spirit of truth would not be silenced and rose again and again, from the dust and ashes, rising from the half remembered promise patterned in the blood, held in the heart. Always they return, with the flame of hope for a better world filled with compassion, beauty and a song of love returning to the land […] a new earth and return to Beauty.’

-Ani Williams, harpist and singer, who has recorded more than two dozen albums of original sacred music based on ancient spiritual traditions.

Bonne nuit.

🌙

Beautiful prompt.

March 17, 2022

How should we celebrate your day?

If today was a holiday in your honor, what would it be about?

If we had to examine everything about you, your work, your impact, your reputation–what would be the positive caricature we would draw? What sorts of slogans, banners and greetings would we use to celebrate you and your work?

It’s never accurate to boil down an organization or a person’s work to a simple sentence or two, but we do it anyway.

What’s yours?

-Seth Godin

https://seths.blog/

We can create this honor in any moment, and shift our lives to live that honor. What will your day be about? -dayle

Mother Teresa, 1985

“Make your life a little less difficult to another.”

A. Stoddard:

“Don’t quite before the finish line. Walking away from something that is bad for you is not quitting.”

Horace, ‘Never despair.’ Winston Churchill, ‘Never, never.’

Thomas Merton:

“The history of the world, with the material destruction of cities and nations and people, expressed the interior division that tyrannizes the souls of all men, and even of the saints.” -New Seeds of Contemplation

From Merton’s The Sigh of Jonas

“Sooner or later the world must burn, and all things in it…for by that time the last man in the universe will have discovered the bomb capable of destroying the universe, and will have been unable to resist the temptation to throw the thing and get it over with.

And here I sit writing a diary.

But l o v e laughs at the end of the world, because love is the door to eternity; and, before anything can happen, love will have drawn him over the sill and closed the door, and he won’t bother about the world burning because ehe will know nothing about love.”

“Today will be different. Today I will be present. Today, anyone I speak to, I will look them in the eye and listen deeply. […] Today I will take pride in my appearance. I’ll shower, get dressed i proper clothes, and change into yoga clothes only for yoga, which today I will actually attend. […] Today there will be an ease about me. My face will be relaxed, its resting place a smile. Today I will radiate calm. Kindest and self-control will abound. Today I will buy local. Today I will be my best self, the person I’m capable of being. Today will be different.”

“Mother Earth and culture, the mother of mothers, are both a state, even as reverence toward Pachamama is on the rise.”

[Pachamama is a goddess revered by the indigenous peoples of the Andes.]

“Let us apply Julian’s teachings on motherhood to Mother Earth. As we saw in chapter 4, Hildegard was explicitly in her language about Mother Earth, demanding that ‘the earth must not be destroyed.’ The destruction of the earth is the destruction of the feminine. Matricide is ecocide, and ecocide is matricide. Invasion of indigenous lands and destruction of their cultures, the spreading of viruses that killed millions of indigenous peoples…the outcomes were the same. History is filled with matricides of all kinds Genocides, too” (p. 95).

[…]

“The ancient Hindu sages, we are told, ‘predicts the age in which we are now living.’ For them Kali Yuga represents the collapse of every kind of inner and outer coherence and personal and institutional forms of compassion, concern, and justice” (p. 95).

Matthew Fox, ‘Julian of Norwich: Wisdom in a Time of Pandemic-and Beyond.’

COP26 🌏

November 6, 2021

‘Earth, isn’t this what you want: an invisible arising in us … what is your urgent command, if not transformation?’ -Rilke, Ninth Duino Elegy

For centuries we have been content to patch up holes temporarily (making ourselves feel benevolent) while in fact maintaining the institutional structures that created the holes to begin with (disempowering those on the margins). Now it has caught up with us. —Fr Richard Rohr, Center for Action & Contemplation

The cosmic common good provides a larger moral perspective, but it also exhorts us to “sink our roots deeper” into our native place and to work for the good of our place on Earth. —Daniel Scheid, theologian


Washington Post

“The bipartisan measure to improve the nation’s roads, bridges, ports and broadband connections won passage after liberals allowed the vote. The package, crafted by Democrats and Republicans, fulfills a major campaign promise for President Biden. It cleared the Senate on a bipartisan basis in August.”

The infrastructure plan costs $1.2 trillion over eight years, with $550 billion in new spending:

  • $110 billion for roads, bridges and other infrastructure fix-ups. Of that, $40 billion is new funding for bridge repair, replacement and rehab.
  • $73 billion for electric grid and power structures.
  • $66 billion for rail.
  • $65 billion for broadband.
  • $55 billion for water infrastructure.
  • $21 billion for environmental remediation.
  • $47 billion for flooding and coastal resiliency, as well as “climate resiliency,” including protections against fires.
  • $39 billion to modernize transit — the largest federal investment in public transit in history, according to the White House.
  • $7.5 billion for electric vehicles and EV charging … $2.5 billion for zero-emission buses … $2.5 billion for low-emission buses … $2.5 billion for ferries.

 

 

Cosmic Story

November 5, 2021

Science of Mind

“I open my self to this time and place made holy by my contemplation. I open my heart, my mind and my very being to be present to that vast and amazing cosmic story which is still being told, a conclusion that is not yet known but continues to reveal itself in all of its creation.

I contemplate this Living Presence, and I view this vase arc of goodness, truth and beauty that my eyes behold. My very being is filled with the wonder and awe of Its glory.

I am aware of that life, of that mind which in the mind of Christ Consciousness, I am aware that that life is my life and my mind now, and from this place, I speak my word. The word that I speak is peace. The peace that heals, restores and reconciles my life to all life. The peace that diffuses any perception of illusion of separation from myself or anyone or anything. I allow myself to be grounded in the experience of the peace, this beauty, this goodness that avails itself to each of us now.

I am aware that we are all a center of divine consciousness in this act whole. I know that each of us is family to our home —our mother, the Earth.[Gaia] I know this Presence was there at the beginning of all things. It is the Presence that sustains all things. It is the Presence that makes all things new. It is the Christ consciousness that incarnates in all creation.

This presence, the Christ consciousness, calls forth in each of us that which is good and noble. It is this Presence that invites each of us to co-create a world that is just, equitable and sustainable of all life, a world that words for all creation.

And so even now, as light gives way to darkness, I know that once again light is born from darkness. And so I am filled with gratefulness for light that gives us warmth, that guides us and renews us. Naming it good, I call it forth by saying may it be so.”


Daniel P. Scheid

The cosmic common good provides a larger moral perspective, but it also exhorts us to “sink our roots deeper” into our native place and to work for the good of our place on Earth. The cosmic common good enjoins us to adopt and intensify the many Earth-oriented personal daily choices and movements for structural change with which we are already familiar, for example reducing consumption and energy use, eating less or no meat, minimizing our dependence on automobiles. . . .

Sinking our roots in our native place on this fertile Earth, but with the larger perspective of the cosmic common good, may we become like the righteous, “like a tree planted near streams of water, that yields its fruit in season,” whose “leaves never wither,” and that “whatever [we do] prospers” (Psalm 1:3–4). May the larger perspective of the cosmic common good inspire us to live and to work for the good of all members of this vast and wondrous cosmos:

for the poor, the vulnerable, and all those imperiled;
for the contexts in which creatures flourish, and for the greater wholes of
      which they are a part;
for the order in creatures, by which they glorify the Creator;
for the good that creatures provide to other creatures;
for the good of the order of creatures, by which the cosmos is sustained;
for the emergent universe and the communion of subjects;
for the solidarity that binds us to all creatures;
for the promotion of justice for all creatures;
for the sacred that lies in the innermost being in all creatures;
for greater nonviolence and peace;
for the interdependence that shines like a jewel within all creatures;
for all of our relations above, below, and around us;
and for the land and this plot of Earth by which creatures come to discover
       ​the cosmos at home. 

Daniel P. Scheid, The Cosmic Common Good: Religious Grounds for Ecological Ethics(Oxford University Press: 2016), 181–182. 

The purity of peace.

October 9, 2021

Bridge pose, Setu Bandha Sarvangasana.

This asana is often used as a transitional pose to realign the spine. Practice Bride with the shoulders flat on the mat, and press the feet into the mat as the hips are gently lifted. Relax your glutei, and notice that the the strength of the grounded shoulders and feet allows the heart energy to rise, bridging love. -Cindy Senarighi & Heidi Green

“Love is the bridge between you and everything.” -Rumi

Meditation on 

P

E

A

C

E

Jewish, Muslim, Hindu, B’ahi, Green Orthodox, Christian: The path of peace as we should all live. Let peace begin with us, on our mats, in our homes, on the job, and in the world. The way of peace taught by the prophet Jesus and Mary Magdalene. Be reminded as to our own role in bringing peace to this world, out of the ditches and onto the bridge of love.

☮️

Spirit & Money

September 19, 2021

Fr Richard Rohr, Center for Action & Contemplation:

I’m convinced that money and soul are united on a deep level.

Money and soul have never been separate in our unconscious because they are both about human exchanges, and therefore, divine exchange, too.

From my perspective, when money and soul are separated, religion is the major loser. Without a vision of wholeness that puts money in its soulful place, religion “sells out.”

Commerce uses the metaphors of religion far more than it realizes: we purchase bonds and trusts, enter into covenants, forgive debts, are granted grace periods for repayment, enjoy indemnity, reconcile accounts, and redeem coupons.

All four Gospels in some form speak of “turning over the tables” of buying and selling. [2] Even with this forceful gospel teaching, our faith became transactional instead of transformational, calculating instead of consoling.

[2] See Matthew 21:12–13, Mark 11:15–18, Luke 19:45–46, John 2:13–17.

Lynne Twist, The Soul of Money Institute

“Our relationship with money can become a place where, day in and day out, we can engage in this meaningful spiritual practice.”

Gaia & Independence

July 4, 2021

Another beautiful creation from Jennifer Rose.

Happy 4th.

Remembering this Independence Day post 2020 the United States wasn’t united on the foundation of isolationism or nationalism. Leaders and patriots fought and sacrificed for independence with France who provided the money, troops, armament, military leadership, and naval support that tipped the balance of military power in favor of the United States and paved the way for the Continental Army’s ultimate victory. Spain and the Netherlands helped, too.

And now, as the planet burns, Gaia needs our help. She’s trying. We are not. We must reach across borders and metaphorical walls to pave the way for preservation.

 

📿

June 21, 2021

Prime Minister of Bhutan:

“Happy to be observing a day that reinforces importance of health and replenishes our spirit during such stressful times. It reminds me of Shri Narendra Modi whose passion pushed him to propose this ancient tradition on the calendar.”

Change leads to disappointment if it is not sustained. Transformation is sustained change, and it is achieved through practice.”

-B.K.S. Iyengar

“A sustained yoga lifestyle is one that doesn’t fluctuate with the latest trends but is informed by the historic yoga philosophies of peace, no harm, discipline, and contentment.

We need to choose practices that are life affirming rather than draining in order for them to be transformative the practices we choose need to benefit not only our personal lives but our relationship with Gaia and with each other.”

-Cindy Senarighi and Heidi Green

If one knows what the particular disease is there is the possibility of curing it. To know the particular limitation, bondage or hindrance of the mind, and to understand it, one must not condemn it, one must not say it is right or wrong. One must observe it without having an opinion, a prejudice about it, which is extraordinarily difficult because we are brought up to condemn.

-J. Krishnamurti

“What would it mean to simply acknowledge our behavior without judgment, without denial, without hedging? Right now, in this moment, can you control your habitual responses to experience? Can any of us not be afraid?

As we observe other individuals, companies, political parties, and nations, we tend to bring the same kinds of judgments to bear, expecting different results.”

-Rolf Gates and Katrina Kenison

Go to the mat. -dayle

ℒℴve

…and remember.

April 29, 2021

Never let the fear of this world distract you from the immense beauty, infinite mystery & deep love all around you.

-Jennifer Rose

I

N

H

L

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🌱

April 20, 2021

Our Planet. 🌱

April 3, 2021

How can we not do everything in our power to keep her safe?

G

A

I

A

 

[200-year-old Wisteria in Japan.]

‘…under her sky.’

January 16, 2021

Washington National Cathedral is hosting a new art exhibit showcasing thousands of paper doves suspended from the Cathedral’s vaulted, 100-foot-high ceiling through May 2021. The “Les Colombes” exhibit is by German artist Michael Pendry, who has created similar works at Cathedrals around the world, and symbolizes the Biblical theme of hope and optimism heading into the new year after a very challenging 2020.

Every moment and every event of every woman’s life on earth plants something in her soul. -Thomas Merton [changes to gender, mine.]

More from Merton:

Prayer is freedom and affirmation growing out of nothingness into love. It is the elevation of our limited freedom into the infinite freedom of the divine spirit and of the divine love. Prayer is an emergence into this area of infinite freedom.

~

Keep your eyes clean your ears quiet and your mind serene. Breathe Gaia’s air. Work, if you can, under her sky.


Dear Friends,

I’ve always called myself a lover of language and of the limits of language. But this week I take no pleasure in how tongue-tied I feel, standing before the disarray and fragility of our life together. It’s hard to put words out into the world right now for so many reasons. That they’re not big enough. That they never tell the whole truth. That we live in a moment so on edge and reactive that someone will take offense, or be wounded by my words, and that feels harder than ever before to risk and to bear.

There is an insanity to our life together right now that is directly related to the tenuous hold on sanity so many of us feel after surviving this past year.  

That does not justify hatred or violence.

It does mean that we’re called to be as gentle with ourselves and others as we can possibly, reasonably muster. That sounds like such a modest contribution to the tumult all around and on our screens, but it is not.

I keep coming back in memory, and feeling in my body, to my experience of election night 2020. I observed it as someone who sees our political life together as a reflection of the human condition in all its complexity, contradiction, and mess. But I was also watching as a person who grew up in one of the “reddest” states, who now lives in one of the “bluest.” I felt a panicked sadness — this has remained my primary emotion through everything that has followed — as the cameras zoomed in and out on those maps of our country.

I saw visually what I know in life as it is lived: those maps marked up with definitive reds and blues don’t tell the truth of our alienation and its unsustainable intimacy. The fractures that actually define our nation right now do not run state to state or county to county, but neighborhood to neighborhood, family to family. They run through our dreams for our children on every side. They run through our hearts, and through our lives.

I am so grateful to have received, as I was struggling to write this, an email from Whitney Kimball Coe of the Rural Assembly and the Center for Rural Strategies. There is a whole epic story of our time in what is being gathered and created in the world she’s part of. It is in no way described or contained in a red-blue demographic lens of the “urban-rural divide.” She gave me permission to share this part of her email with you:

“I’m at home nursing my youngest, Susannah, who had a scary fall on Monday night and is now recuperating from surgery. She’s going to be fine, but my goodness, 2021 came in hard. Stream of consciousness moment:You know, our hospital experience put us directly in the path of so many wonderful East Tennesseans. Nurses and technicians and doctors, the other parents waiting in the ER, the parking attendant, the security guard. I’m sure many of them didn’t vote as I did in the last election and probably believe the events of Jan 6 were mere protests, but they responded to our trauma with their full humanity. I’d forgotten what it feels like to really see people beyond their tribe/ideology. It broke something open in me. I’ve been living in a castle of isolation these many months and it’s rotted and blotted my insides. I’m aware of contempt, anger, and maybe even paranoia coursing through my veins, and I wonder if that’s just a snippet of where we are as a nation.

Why is our righteous indignation and disgust so much easier to flame than our compassion?

It makes me realize that there is no substitute for coming into the presence of one another. No meme nor Twitter post nor op-ed nor breaking news nor TED talk can soften and strengthen our hearts like actually tending to one another. We don’t have to ignore/excuse the darkness we all carry, but we have to keep showing up so we don’t lose ourselves to bitterness.”

We cannot conjure up something so aspirational as “unity” by wishing it, and we are in fact impoverished when it comes to “common ground” between our societal trenches. 

But if I’ve heard one thing most insistently, with an infinite variety of circumstance and struggle, from absolutely every beautiful and wise human I’ve ever met, it is this: We are creatures made, again and again, by what would break us. Yet only if we open to the fullness of the reality of what goes wrong for us, and walk ourselves with and through it, are we able to integrate it into a new kind of wholeness on the other side.

Our collective need for a new kind of wholeness might be the only aspiration we can share across all of our chasms right now.

Longings, too, can be common ground. A shared desire not to be lost to bitterness. A clear-eyed commitment that what divides us now does not have to define what can become possible between us. Questions, honestly asked, about how to make that real.

-Krista

[Krista Tippett is a Peabody Award-winning broadcaster, a National Humanities Medalist, a New York Times bestselling author, and founder of On Being.]

Krista Tippett

COVID, CLIMATE & COMPASSION

January 2, 2021

We need to focus and fix all three.

From Eric Holthaus:

Original art for The Phoenix is by Laila Arêde.

Our time here on this beautiful planet is so temporary.

If there’s anything that 2020 taught us, it’s that while time is fleeting for everyone,

it’s the way society is structured

that determines how fleeting it is, and for whom. The overlapping tragedies of Covid-19, police brutality, and the climate emergency don’t fall equally on everyone, and

it’s up to us to change that system

to ensure everyone here gets the chance to thrive that they deserve.

That’s the heart of climate justice.

Our window for revolutionary repair of our planet’s atmosphere and biosphere – caused by centuries of excesses brought by capitalism, patriarchy, misogyny, imperialism, and racism – is bound by physics. We can (and should!) argue about the best ways to get to a zero-carbon world as quickly as possible, but we can’t argue with the fact that current global policies will deliver a planet that’s incompatible with a safe future for billions of people who did the least to cause the climate emergency.

This is what we’re fighting for: Indigenous sovereignty, regenerative care of the land, shelter, equity, joy. All the basics that people need to live a good life. A vision for a bread and roses future for everyone.

Getting started with that journey isn’t hard.

The point is only that you show up.

We need everyone to be a part of this transformation in their own way.

At the same time, becoming a Climate Person isn’t easy. But it’s some of the most important work in the history of the world. You don’t get to give up, but you do get to ask for help.

If living your best life includes making the world more life-sustaining for every creature we share this beautiful planet with, the rest of this post will help you get started.

Meteorologist and climate journalist Eric Holthaus describes himself as “a meteorologist who strives to foster understanding of humanity’s connection to the atmosphere.” Here he delivers a monologue on climate change and his mission to remind everyone that we are all in this fight together. Eric wants to change the narrative of climate change from being “one of inevitable disaster to one of possibility.”


Author Allysha Lavino and a thought for 2021:

And what do we want to bring with us?

Courage? 

Wisdom?

Tenacity? 

This is the year we feather our nests – it’s time to take care of ourSelves, our families, our communities, and our environments.

Be us guardians and caretakers.

December 12, 2020

‘This was the road which Xerxes took, and it was hereabouts that he came across 

a plane-tree of

such beauty that he was moved

to decorate it

with golden ornaments and

to appoint a guardian for it

in perpetuity.’

~Herodotus, The Histories

440 BC


We know poetry to be a critical pillar of public life. It rises up when official language fails us. And it gives voice to what is human and what is true, how we connect and what questions we hold.

Poetry has moved to the heart of what we offer on the radio and in podcasts, which is why we’re excited to have partnered with talented illustrators, animators, and directors to reimagine poetry in visual, dynamic ways.

“This is what was bequeathed us” by Gregory Orr is part of our “Visualizing Poetry” series, which features animated interpretations of beloved poems from our archive.

This poem was originally read in the On Being episode with Gregorry Orr, “Shaping Grief With Language.”

-The Onbeing Project

onbeing.org

 

Gaia

December 4, 2020

She is so beautiful. We are we still wounding? We know what we’re doing. We must change our collective behaviors. Now. We can do this. We don’t have much time.

YANGZHOU, CHINA – DECEMBER 01: Aerial view of Metasequoia Trees (aka Dawn Redwood) at Baoyinghu National Wetland Park on December 1, 2020 in Yangzhou, Jiangsu Province of China. (Photo by Meng Delong/VCG via Getty Images)

Jennifer Rose

November 28, 2020

‘Tune into the trees, the waters, the birds flying by … There’s so much more peace, beauty & love than what’s being broadcasted. Real life is where you are.’

Sacred star stuff.

November 10, 2020

‘‘The cosmos is within us, we’re made of star stuff. We are a way for the cosmos to know itself’.
Carl Sagan 

︶⁀°• •° ⁀︶

Everything is sacred. For at the depths of all is the essence of life that backs all things. Therefore, nothing falls outside the scope of the all-encompassing. There is not a place we go, not a person we talk to, not an event that occurs that is void of this divine energy.

All is sacred, yet as I reflect on my experience I realize how few things I view as sacred: that ignorant statement made by a politician, the destruction of sacred indigenous lands, the clear-cutting of forests, the racial inequities that swirl across the globe, even the person who cut me off in traffic.

Perhaps spiritual understanding is not bypassing these real experiences and covering them with a blanket of oneness. Perhaps instead it’s about seeing and realizing that collectively we can align with something deeper to alleviate the real suffering in the lives of billions of our and sisters and brothers on the planet.

Perhaps it is a deep understand that Mother Earth…GAIA…is the greatest temple there is, our bodies are products of this temple, and how we honor the sacred ground beneath us and the holy temple we move on each day is a gift we bestow to the creator. If Mother Earth…GAIA…connects us and the Sacred Spirit unites us, then what I do to myself, to the Earth or to another, I do unto all.

Maybe it is not about seeing sacredness everywhere but living my life every day in a sacred way.

-Jeffon Seely, author and international speaker

[Seely is committed to dissolving barriers and dedicated to helping individuals break down internal barriers, reaching their potential. -Science of Mind]

“Everywhere is the center of the world. Everything is sacred.

-Black Elk

Advance or Destruct

October 11, 2020

Photo: Oct. 10th, Sun Valley, Idaho

We have to instill dignity and reverence in everyday life. -A. Stoddard

Photograph by Justin Sullivan / Getty

The New Yorker

Dave Eggers:

What are we doing here? When the air is red and the street lights are on at noon, we ask this question. When there are twenty-three major fires burning at once throughout California, and seventeen thousand firefighters battling them, we ask this question. When a firefighter dies in a blaze begun during a gender-reveal party, we ask this question. We ponder these questions on a smoke-tinged Friday, and on Saturday the sky is clear and we’re at the beach again. This is life in 2020 California.

[…]

It’s not right, any of this. The fact that it gets harder every year, that fires get more frequent, bigger, deadlier. The fact that we have to count on volunteers, and firefighters from Colorado, Texas, Mexico, Australia. The exorbitant expense.

There aren’t enough people, there aren’t enough planes and bulldozers and trucks.

There’s too much fire. We can’t keep living like this. More than anything, we can’t expect firefighters to live like this.

 

‘…make of us a garland.’

August 30, 2020

And if our earth needed to
She could weave us together like roses
And make of us a garland.

-Rilke

✿`*•✿ ✿`*•✿

Gaia will be fine. She will rejuvenate and make new. Humanity…our species…must decide now if we are to survive. Gaia wants to make us a garland. And we continue destruction…politically, socially, economically.

~

How many times does a person have to lie before you stop listening to them?

If he is given, or steals, another election, greater karmic forces are at play beyond what we know.

We have so much to atone.

 

Renewal & Reordering

August 26, 2020

Image credit: Garden of Wish Fulfilment (detail), Arshile Gorki, 1944, Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, Lisbon Portugal.

Fr Richard Rohr, Center for Action & Contemplation

  • Order
  • Disorder
  • Reorder

In times of Disorder and deconstruction, we long for Reorder on a personal level—to be made new and whole again. But the Scriptures tell us that restoration will also happen on a communal, planetary, and even universal level! Jim Antal, a climate justice leader with the United Church of Christ, reminds us of our ability and responsibility to participate with God…Gaia…in the renewal and reordering of the earth.

“How can you know all these facts [about climate change] and still have hope?” For me, faith and hope are rooted in the conviction that, regardless of how bad things may be, a new story is waiting to take hold—something we have not yet seen or felt or experienced. . . . God…Gaia…is calling us—as individuals and congregations—to work with God and others to champion that new story.

For the vast majority in our society, that new story remains unseen. Wresting our future from the grip of fossil fuel seems impossible—our addiction is too strong, affordable options are too few, and the powers that defend the status quo are mighty, indeed. . . . We cannot be freed by chipping away at this millstone.

We must begin to live into a new story by changing the human prospect [of destruction] and restoring creation’s viability.

That’s what the Water Protectors of Standing Rock have done. Their courageous, unflinching discipline inspired thousands to join them and millions to imagine with them the new world that is waiting to be born. They prepared themselves through prayer and ritual to face down sheriffs, paramilitary contractors, attack dogs, rubber bullets, pepper spray, and high-pressure water cannons in subzero temperatures. They were fueled by hope, hope for a revolution rooted in love—love for God’s great gift of creation. . . .

We can’t accept God’s…Gaia’s…invitation to help create a new story unless we are willing to take action. We become partners with God when we act in unfamiliar, untested ways. Those new actions will be guided by a preferred future that embraces:

  • resilience in place of growth
  • collaboration in place of consumption
  • wisdom in place of progress
  • balance in place of addiction
  • moderation in place of excess
  • vision in place of convenience
  • accountability in place of disregard
  • self-giving love in place of self-centered fear . . .

As broken-hearted as God…Gaia…must be over what we have done to the gift of creation, God still has a dream. . . . God dreams that humans seek spiritual rather than material progress. God’s dream envisions a just world at peace because gratitude has dissolved anxiety and generosity has eclipsed greed. God dreams of a time when love and mutual respect will bind humanity together, and the profound beauty of creation will be treasured. Let us embrace God’s…Gaia’s…dream as our own. Suddenly, the horizon of our hope comes nearer. 


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