The Sacred Land's Wisdom

Back in the 1990s I participated in a weekly psycho-spiritual therapy group. During one session, while sobbing in despair about all the human assaults on the natural world, I let it slip that I considered grizzly bears to be at least as important and deserving as human beings, if not more so. This didn’t seem to be an unwarranted opinion: at that time, there were about 55,000 wild grizzly bears in the world, and over 5 billion human beings. But I was confronted for being in my “lower self,” and the group leader said that I would need to “work on” this belief if I wanted to progress spiritually. At the time, I was so wrung out that I acquiesced in this perspective, but I’ve always regretted that moment when I assented to something I knew was fundamentally untrue. [Read more…] about Standing Firm in Gaia

Early June this year. I’m on the far northern California coast, carefully negotiating a steep, rocky path down to the ocean. To my right is the Klamath River and its delta. As I descend to the beach, my goal is visible—a large sea lion colony on a wide sandbar where the river meets the sea. Scores of huge adults are basking on the sand, while young ones clumsily flop around at the water’s edge. At the seaward end of the sandbar, a continuous parade of the ungainly animals slides in and out of the ocean. Once they start swimming, these creatures become graceful, relentless predators. The salmon are running, and the sea lions are efficiently grabbing them and gulping them down. A huge, sleek male swims parallel to the shore just 10 feet from me, his enormous head periodically popping out of the water as he snuffles and gargles. I’m close enough to see traces of fish blood in his whiskers. [Read more…] about Colonization Gaia’s Way

Many people see our current ecological crisis as also a spiritual crisis for humanity. While I wholeheartedly agree, I’m coming to understand that our eco-spiritual conversations often overlook something important. We need to meet, up front, our beliefs about the Underworld—the mysterious physical and spiritual domain under our feet, extending into the body of the planet, all the way to the center of the Earth.

Our indigenous ancestors considered the Underworld to be an important spiritual realm, along with the Middle World or Day World, and the Upperworld. The Underworld was known to be the home of powerful forces, beings, and deities, both material and spiritual. Ancestral people honored and co-created with these Underworld energies, thus supporting balance and wholeness in the land and all its inhabitants. [Read more…] about Approaching the Reality of the Underworld

When I was 9 or 10, my dad and I often played spirited games of poker in the evening. We enlivened most games by letting the dealer declare certain cards to be “wild cards.” If you got a wild card, you could assign it to be any card that would improve your hand. My dad’s favorite wild cards were “deuces, one-eyed jacks and one-eyed kings.” I still remember the thrill of drawing one or more of those magically-endowed cards.

The term “wild card” typically implies something unanticipated and unpredictable, with the potential for surprising results, either positive or negative. Since the onset of agriculture 10,000 years ago, humanity has increasingly become the wild card of our planet’s living systems, in the most negative ways possible. [Read more…] about Regeneration: Gaia’s Wild Card

On a recent winter’s day, I watched a ruby-crowned kinglet take a bath in an icy stream.

The stream was almost totally frozen over, but beneath the overhanging branches of a spruce tree, the water formed a small, ice-fringed pool. I caught sight of the kinglet—a diminutive olive-green bird with barred black wings and a bold white eye-ring—flitting around in the tree. As I watched, it flew down and entered the water, bouncing and flicking its wings up and down, and shaking and splashing its petite feathered body until it was wet all over. [Read more…] about Life in Gaia’s Calm Lane

The heart is sacred. Gaia’s lands and waters and plants and creatures are sacred. We are sacred. All existence on all dimensions shares a connection with the sacred, vital life of Mother Earth, of Gaia. This truth is deeply embedded in our hearts.

The heart has many levels. It is, of course, a crucial physical organ that pumps blood around our body. On the spiritual level, the heart chakra, typically considered to be green, is our energetic center; it harmonizes and anchors our non-material essence as a dynamic, vibrating network of light. And at the very deepest level, the heart is the essential Source and expression of who we are. It is our flame of being, housing our originating spirit. [Read more…] about Sacred Heart, Sacred Earth

A week ago Sunday, I drove a ways up into the Sangre de Cristo Mountains near my house. I stopped by a normally rushing mountain stream, now down to a tiny trickle, and hiked up from the dusty jeep road into the parched forest. I could feel how the land up here is so thirsty, so dry, prostrate from relentless heat and no rain. I sat on a rock for a while, and here is what the land communicated to me:

Yes, the land here and now is thirsty. But every human is thirsty, always. Even the humans in places where they are getting flooded, getting drowned, their houses and cars swept away, even they’re thirsty. Everyone is thirsty for they don’t know what. It’s the connection with Gaia that they thirst for. It’s to know themselves as part of, as lush and full and connected, not arid, removed and separate. This is the worst thirst, and it can’t be quenched any other way than to leave your allegiance to the human-centered world and come back to Gaia. [Read more…] about Our Thirst for Gaia