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Gaia-Centered Spiritual Practices—Part I

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What attitudes and practices can we cultivate in ourselves that will help us attune to our Gaia-nature? (Remembering that we already know deep within us that we belong to Gaia’s Green World.)

My sense is that the people reading this already lead a spiritual life of some kind. But let’s do a quick check to make sure our existing beliefs and practices are attuned with Gaia as well as they could be. (Read my previous posts to flesh out these ideas.)

Does your path/liturgy/doctrine focus solely on the direction Up, and disregard or even denigrate the direction Down? Hmmm…some adjustment may be called for here. [Read more…] about Gaia-Centered Spiritual Practices—Part I

Going With Gaia’s Grain–Part II

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A few posts ago I presented the idea that we can choose to go with Gaia’s grain, and therefore, against the grain of the currently dominant human-created world. We can attune ourselves with Gaia’s fundamental principles, which, right from the start, are in a totally different dimension from human-centeredness. The latter assumes that human beings are separate from and superior to the rest of creation. Gaia-centered thought begins by assuming that human beings, like all beings, exist within Gaia’s vast web and are interconnected with all physical and spiritual life on Earth. Therefore, if we study Gaia’s rhythms and patterns, we can get clues about ways to start going with Her grain.

One important clue is the circle, and its wilder sister, the spiral. We know that Nature works in circles and ever-returning cycles: the cycle of a day, of the seasons, the moon in a month, the sun in a year, and the ceaselessly-repeating cycle of Life, from birth to growth, to maturity, decline and death, followed by regeneration and rebirth. [Read more…] about Going With Gaia’s Grain–Part II

Gaia’s True Abundance

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Visualize a beautiful earth, untouched by human greed. Imagine crystal clear skies everywhere, wild waters pure enough to drink, and vast, clean, undisturbed wild forests, deserts and seacoasts. It’s almost impossible for us to imagine, even those of us fortunate enough to live in fairly intact, semi-wild areas. In other, less fortunate places—in the cities, in the fossil fuel extraction zones, and the industrial agriculture zones—clean air, land and waters have been not only unattainable but almost unimaginable for generations. And humanity is in a constant state of deep grief because of this, whether we know it consciously or not. [Read more…] about Gaia’s True Abundance

Grandmother Gaia’s Essence

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The Feminine is a very different story than the Masculine. In the deepest esoteric sense, feminine and masculine are polarities, perhaps the most important polarities that form our physical and spiritual reality. But this in no way means that they are merely “opposites.” The feminine isn’t just 180 degrees different from the masculine; it is in another dimension completely.

I learned more about this recently in a dew-drenched green meadow surrounded by tall, dripping pines and firs up in the mountains east of here. I had spent the previous day sitting by the river singing and praying. My intention was to deeply attune with the sacred, overlighting, undergirding being of the land—the Green Essence of Gaia. She revealed herself over and over to me as Grandmother. [Read more…] about Grandmother Gaia’s Essence

The Green Force

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The great, vast being of Gaia is continuously generating a force that creates and evolves life on all levels. I call this force the Green Force. It’s the force that brings plants up from under asphalt streets, that sets seeds growing on bare sand. It is, in Dylan Thomas’s memorable words, “the force that through the green fuse drives the flower.”

The Green Force energizes and expresses the entire organic continuum of birth, growth, flowering, ripening, maturing, declining, dying, decomposing and giving birth again—the dynamic, ever-renewing process that we call Life. As we know, plants get their energy directly from the sun, from photosynthesis that takes place in the plants’ chlorophyll, their green pigments. Then animals (including us humans) eat the plants, and/or eat animals that eat the plants. Even the strange and mysterious fungi and bacteria beings “eat” the remains of dead plants and animals. So each one of us, each living being on Mother Earth, literally partakes of Gaia’s Green Force as an intimate and basic part of our day-to-day survival. [Read more…] about The Green Force