The Green Heart within each one of us resonates with and augments the vibrant Green Heart of Gaia. I’m using the term “Gaia” here to designate the vast, purposive, homeostatic, ever-evolving planetary organism that enfolds and embodies the Earth on all levels. Gaia encompasses all human and non-human beings, all planetary processes and elemental forces, every natural ecosystem and human community. Everything is part of Gaia. The heart of each human being is part of Gaia’s heart. Therefore, every human heart must be attuned to the Earth’s organic Green-Heart field, in order to fully express its real nature.
Gaia is constantly playing a symphony of life and diversity, of birth, growth and change, of death and rebirth, of returns and regeneration. If our heart defines itself only with reference to the human-created world, and is oriented only to loving and caring for human beings, it is participating merely in one narrow subset of the symphony’s music. We could say that the human-centered heart is responding to Gaia like a little toy piano—the one in the old Peanuts comic strip comes to mind. But our heart has a much larger and deeper capacity to join in with our planet’s entire orchestra and make its music even more beautiful. We wouldn’t assent to remaining like children playing toy pianos if we really knew what the full beingness of our heart could express and co-create.
It’s more important than ever in these perilous times for us to retrain, retune, expand and diversify our hearts, in order to take our true place in Gaia’s Green World and to join in with Her music. Each heart’s utterance is unique, but we must be able to fully open to Gaia, in order to allow our heart to reach its complete, authentic expression. Our living world is a sacred fount of beauty, meaning and worth. And not only the physical world, but the immaterial worlds of all the spiritual beings of Nature who share this planet with us. Our ancestors knew these beings and organized their lives around relating with them. We might call them Faeries or Orishas or Jinns, but whatever name we use, these beings and deities are still here today. Many of them are offering us alliance and cooperation so that, together, we can work to strengthen and seed Gaia’s irresistible regenerative forces into the future.
This process of communing and co-creating with the energies and sacred beings of Nature is what I’ve come to call Green Heart Magic. However we conceive of our heart—as an alchemical vessel, a vibrating web, or some other metaphor entirely—we know that it resonates with the deep pulse of Gaia’s Green World. Indeed, in most systems of chakras (the Eastern idea of the nodes or centers that secure our physical/spiritual existence) the heart chakra is considered to be Green!
And what is Magic? I use the term in its simplest, most straightforward way. Magic is rediscovering and re-attuning with the natural resonance we humans have with all life on the planet. How could we not resonate with it, since we are of it and always have been? For the last several thousand years, humanity has been on a massive detour of separation from our innate connection with the Green World of Nature. Now, when Nature Herself is unraveling, our spiritual calling is to reforge these connections and thereby move toward useful ways to link up with, affirm and strengthen Gaia.
A necessary step in this magic is to give up, again and again, the inexorable, self-important human-centeredness that constitutes the modern-day ocean that we all swim in. Whether expressed through politics, religion, economics or culture, human-centeredness blocks the natural flow of our heart. The human heart is much bigger and deeper than anything that the values, beliefs and institutions of the human-centered world try to tell us about ourselves. The heart is innately able to vibrate with Gaia’s Green Love force around and within us, and to infinitely increase our love for ourselves, our fellow humans, and for all life on Earth.
We are all natural Green Heart Magicians. We can all seek to create lovingly and synergistically with our precious Earth’s indwelling forces and beings, both human and non-human, physical and spiritual. In our lifetime, we may never see the flowering of the seeds that our magical green hearts are called to plant. But we must believe that our songs and ceremonies, our art and science, and, most important, our Gaia-centered Love, will help our planet move toward yet another return, another rebirth, into a regenerative, harmonious future.