Gaia's Blog

Celebrating Earth's Wholeness and Our Own.

Belonging to the Future of the Earth

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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. [Read more…] about Belonging to the Future of the Earth

Peace Depends on Our Connection with the Land

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Sitting at my altar the other day, contemplating the wars that are escalating all over the world, I realized, yet again, that peace can only be found through the land. This is true because peace can only be found when we completely inhabit our full, real self—the self who is part of everything and not separate from anything.

I’m understanding lately that each of us has an etheric thread that goes from our belly down into the depths of the earth. I see this thread as a rich, red-purple color. It connects us to the deep pulse of the land that irresistibly courses through nature and all beings, including ourselves. When our thread is linked up this way, we are held within the land’s peace.

We can feel this peace when we’re calmly meditating. Equally, we can feel it when we’re delighting in the morning songs of the birds, or even shrieking as we splash in a cold mountain stream. We are not required to hold ourselves composed and aloof. Instead, we are called to participate with the green world of nature, moment to moment. Our peace is founded upon our enduring link with the sacred land and all of our human and non-human companions, through our red-purple thread. [Read more…] about Peace Depends on Our Connection with the Land

Creating the Future We Yearn For

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When speaking of these parlous times we’re living in, the late, revered activist and teacher Joanna Macy often said: “Don’t let anyone tell you it’s all going to be all right. And don’t let anyone tell you it’s not.”

It certainly seems that the near future won’t be a very beneficent one. Indeed, it’s starting to look like an unavoidable dystopia, with escalating climate chaos and pollution; worsening wars, massacres, genocide, and ecocide worldwide; social and political life becoming increasingly impoverished, boorish and cruel; screen-distracted people feeling ever more alienated and resentful; and a tiny cadre of power-hungry autocrats and ungenerous billionaires controlling almost everything. With all of this looming, it’s hard to conclude that anything will be “all right.”

We know that most human beings everywhere yearn for a future without war, destruction, or deprivation; a future of connection, harmony, and genuine abundance, among humans and on the land. The problem is that we don’t know how to get there from here. [Read more…] about Creating the Future We Yearn For

You and I Can Feel Radically Optimistic!

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Climate breakdown. Endless wars. Pervasive misogyny. Grotesque income inequality. Widespread extinctions. And political and corporate leaders worldwide who seem to be committed to perpetuating this dystopian vision.

How do we—you and I—meet all this without either immobilizing despair, or rage and bitterness?

To keep going, and to be useful to the earth, ourselves, and our larger communities, we must tap into a place of optimism. Not false bravado or masky cheerfulness. Real optimism. Real trust that a better future beckons and that we can go in that direction right now. We can do this by affirming the reality of Regeneration. [Read more…] about You and I Can Feel Radically Optimistic!

How We Can Truly Honor Our Ancestors

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(December 2024. Last month we celebrated the festival of Samhain, a time of remembering and honoring our ancestors of blood, spirit and place. Since then, I continued to ponder how we might best honor our ancestors. This post is the result.)

The ancestors of everyone on the planet lived nature-centered lives for many, many thousands of years.

My late deep ecology teacher, Dolores LaChapelle, used to say that humans were hunter-gatherers for 100,000 generations, agriculturists for 500 generations, have been industrialized for 10 generations, and computerized for 1 generation. (By now we’ve added a couple of generations to the latter two.) While we don’t know exactly how those 100,000 generations of hunter-gatherers went about their lives, it’s certain that they were completely attuned to the rhythms of the land for their very survival.

Callanish stonesThis is confirmed by both the world’s remaining indigenous peoples, and by researchers in archaeology and anthropology. Our hunter-gatherer ancestors, and the early agriculturists too, had to be observant, attentive, and patient. We can also surmise that those primal peoples felt grateful, even reverent, toward the land, plants, and animals that gave them life. We know that they expressed this reverence through an enormous variety of earth-centered spiritual practices. The most enduring of these still survive today. From the beautiful annual cycles of dance and ritual performed in the Native Pueblos of the American Southwest, to the simplicity of Scottish and Irish country people putting out milk for the faeries, ancestral veneration of the natural world and its gifts is still being expressed around the globe in ways both large and small. [Read more…] about How We Can Truly Honor Our Ancestors