Hello Friends, I know I haven’t posted for a while. The reason is that I’ve been working on my new book—and now it is almost finished!
It’s called:
Belonging to the Future of the Earth: Wisdom Gathered from a Lifetime of Honoring the Sacred Land.
The teaser on the back says:
A Manual for Healing Ourselves and Building Resilient Communities While Seeding a Regenerative Future
I’m very pleased with it. It feels like my definitive contribution to planting seeds for a better future, one that we probably won’t ever see, but no less important for that. I feel more strongly every day that humanity is starting to proceed through a big door, to be routed through a grand hinge that will determine our own destiny as a species. So far, I haven’t given up on us humans arriving into a generous, life-affirming future, someday. This book is my offering to that hope.
A significant added bonus is that the book is beautifully illustrated. I found the perfect illustrator in Isabel Griffin, from Durham, North Carolina. She has created wonderful black-and-white line drawings for each chapter, and is now working on a full-color cover. I guarantee that you’ll be amazed at how congruent her drawings are with my ideas!
Here is the Introduction to the book. I hope you resonate with it! I’ll do another post after the book is in print, which will be by Winter Solstice, if not sooner. Right now, I invite you to anticipate this book with excitement, and to hopefully be part of its distribution to wherever it needs to go.
Introduction to Belonging to the Future of the Earth:
All the heartbreaking challenges we’re having on Earth—endless wars, cascading environmental crises, poverty, violence, addiction, pandemics—have as their original source, humans’ disconnection from the green world of Nature.
We may believe that only some of humanity’s problems have to do with this. But they all do.
Why is this? Because we are living within a global culture that denies the deepest part of who we really are. We belong to the Earth’s entire web of life. We’re not separate. We’re neither superior nor inferior. We’re simply, gloriously, part of it all, and natural heirs to our planet’s indwelling beauty, harmony, and life-giving powers. Until we wake up to this knowing, we have little chance of becoming fulfilled people living in a peaceful, sustainable world.
If you resonate with this way of looking at things, this book will affirm you and deepen your life, by showing you how to realize your own belonging.
Our path to awakening to our true self—the self that is interwoven with all of creation—unfolds through regeneration, the most powerful force on the planet. Regeneration is the green force of love and rebirth that lives everywhere, in the land and within each one of us. The Earth’s regenerative powers have brought life back into bare, blasted, freezing, baking, poisoned lands many times already, and it will keep on doing so, no matter how bad things get. Regeneration is the keystone for the physical and spiritual health of our biosphere and ourselves.
If this conviction is compelling to you, this book will guide you in studying the green force of regeneration, in invoking and celebrating it, attuning with it and joining its momentum, in all that you are and all that you do.
Humans were made to love the Earth. When we feel genuine kinship with the Earth’s creatures, plants and ecosystems, we also fully love ourselves and our fellow humans. As this love awakens within us, everything starts going in a good direction, toward a harmonious future. We don’t, and can’t, know exactly what this will look like. Nevertheless, our work becomes planting seeds for the beautiful future that will, inevitably, emerge.
If this idea excites your heart and calms your belly, this book will inspire you to manifest your own songs, prayers, gardens, poems, ideas, rituals, communities, and creative work and practices of all kinds, to offer on behalf of the hope-full, regenerative future to come.
This book charts a path of belonging to the sacred land and to ourselves; of working within the life-affirming rhythms of the Earth’s inherent renewing forces; and thereby letting our own uniqueness unfold, to seed the good future that will, certainly, someday, arrive. Let’s get started!
