Gaia Voices

Gaia, Great Mother, has many hidden treasures
To delight us, and nourish us, her human children.
Metals, hidden in the ground.
So far we have found
Copper,
Gold
Tin
____.

We have found coal!
Oil!
Of course, it’s not a “treasure” until it’s recognized as such.
The air!
There are many more, recognized and unrecognized.
Bio-diversity.

And the one I keep talking about,
A huge library of guidance about how to live together in this biosphere.
Like oil seeping out onto the ground and ruining the cropland in the 1700s,
We do not yet recognize this as a treasure.
Like groundwater, producing our wells,
We rely on this dynamic store, not recognizing its vastness,
And its vulnerability.

“Peak oil!?”
“Running out of oil?!!”
Yes, life will change.
It will be a big adjustment.
AND,
Gaia, Great Mother, has many hidden treasures,
“New” to us, because we have not yet noticed them.
Necessity will lead us back to our Mother,
For new treasures.
Currently undreamed of.
Waiting.
Hidden in plain sight.

The average lifespan of a mammalian species
Is a million years.
At under 200,000,
We’re just getting started!
If the human race were a child who could hope to live to 70,
We’d be approaching our 14th birthday.
(Not an “easy” age for humans.)

May we have the humility
The patience,
The courage,
To learn
To see
Our wealth.

I think it’s time to draw the bedside curtain around the drama of my suffering. “Life is suffering,” and like the drama of a child trapped in a well, it can be mesmerizing, but beyond a certain small circle of those involved, it’s really a distraction. At some point I just need to do the work of opening myself to self-transformation, rather than talking about it. I think I have sketched out my assignment pretty well, to myself and my friends.
And I have a good framework in which to work: I’ll be taking John’s meditation class “Taking Jesus Seriously,” starting September 24th, and running into December. I’ll be taking Tom’s workshop, “Spiritual Practice with John Woolman,” for the five Tuesdays in October, and my (mostly-non-Quaker) book group will be reading John Shelby Spong’s “Jesus for the Non-Religious.”

So, turning my attention to other matters, the book that my book group is currently reading brings quantum physics and psychology together, in an attempt to extricate us from the mental trap of our own making. The author, Amit Gotswami, starts with one of the most basic challenges to our current assumptions: “Atoms are not little things.”

We / I are trapped in a profound confusion.
Look at us, the industrial world…

I cannot be still. I am lost. We have lost our way.
At the moment, I must say, I feel quite pathetic.

I offer this to you, my friends, who can look upon me with the eyes of love,
when you choose to.
I am trying to find my way, and perhaps I will, but I offer my quest as having meaning whatever its outcome.

My problem, dear friends, is that I am not doing the most important things I should be doing!
Is it because I am broken in myself, and while the most important things are in plain view, yet I am unable to act?
Or am I hampered because, deep within me, a still, small, voice is trying to tell my ego, “you have other work to do”?
I know not.
Or is it that I have properly identified “my work,” but in order to do it I must allow myself to go through a self-transformation—one that I fear?

And why would I put this cry of anguish out for the world to see?

I offer you my painful state as a gift, my friends.
We, industrial civilization, are in a terrible place, and you know it. Perhaps you look at the number of adults on anti-depressants (as I have been, in the past) or at the daunting future our children face.
We have access to global media, and most of you, my friends, know that our society is unsustainable— even at the personal and emotional levels, never mind the ecological crisis.

I link my personal anguish, my personal sense of “lost ness” to this situation.
If I end up taking my own life, I do not want my friends to say, “he had personal problems he couldn’t overcome.” I claim a larger life than that.
I say my life springs out of a privileged class
of a great and rich country
at a stage in its development
where it must change
from being a voracious caterpillar into something else,
or it will fall to rotting
among the carcasses of its own food.

My personal anguish is “personal,” yes, and surely comes out of conflicts unresolved since childhood, AND it is inextricably linked to the situation in which Gaia finds herself.
Friends! We are lost! We must admit it, before we can begin to find our way.
We know this, and it is probably best we don’t dwell on it, or we will frighten the children. But, also for their sake, we need to recognize the gravity of our situation, and to accept its attendant grief.

And what do I offer as a response to this grim analysis? Two things:
1. As in the past, I say, “We need not be lost. Gaia is a field of information and energy that permeates our world, including ourselves. Each of us, from our own point of view, can serve the cause of planetary wholeness. In fact, most of you are already doing this, but we need to be doing it better, more connectedly, more profoundly.”
2. The second thing I offer is my own anguish, my own struggle, my own search. I am hoping for a breakthrough, hoping to find an alignment, a ‘sync,’ between my own deepest concerns and a truly productive life of action in the outer world.
I have had a degree of success–including this website, which carries my cry of anguish, which I claim is our cry.

Even if I can get no further in my self-discovery, I offer my life to you, dear Friends, as a model of one who has consciously engaged with the Whole.
And is trying to find his right relationship to it.

______________
A reassuring postscript:
Earlier in this message I offered the possibility that my anguish and sense of disorientation might lead me to end my life. While this has been a danger in years past, and cannot be disregarded now, I feel relatively secure against that danger. Betsy and I and other supportive Friends have recognized I need to be careful, and we are creating a situation in which I am not likely to act precipitously, where if my despair gets too deep, I promise to look away from it, and into the eyes of their love.

I offer my inner journey as a gift to my community. Like the gift of a child, it doesn’t have to amount to much, by worldly standards, to be sincere and to be a treasure, to those with eyes to see.

Last week I shared my sense that, what we in the West call “Christ” is a built-in potential for humans.
I suggested similarities between how a human population develops writing and how it names the transcendent-transpersonal. It’s an interesting parallel. A culture develops writing; an individual learns to write (in the language of her culture). Similarly, a culture sees the Divine manifesting as Christ; an individual learns the language of Christ as a way of expressing to others and to herself, the Divine within and the Divine among us.

As I was writing last week’s post, I expected that this week I would make some sort of momentous “personal-christ” statement, based on extrapolating from the power I felt moving in me at the time. Of course things seldom work out as we expect. The power, the turmoil, I felt last week is still very present to me, but now I am trying to coach myself to settle in to a period of longing, a period of living with a sense of paradox and of “doing the work” to return to the Source.

So what I have to offer this week is not “my answer,” but only my quest for wholeness. I have been focused for years on planetary wholeness, which I call Gaia. As I have devoted myself to this work, I have discovered I must seek my own wholeness; if this troubadour is to sing of the beauty and wholeness of the earth with every cell of my body, then I am called upon to embody that beauty and wholeness as it expresses itself in me:
A fragment of the hologram of Gaia.

I feel called to express the combination of “my message” and “my lived life” as a coherent whole. That is part of the commitment I made to Lady Gaia, to be public, to be a witness in my lived life.
.: And what, dear Richard, might the coherent-and-beautiful-you look like?
.: Well, the most beautiful thing I can offer is my striving. The result will be flawed, of course, but that’s OK, that’s part of the package for every incarnate life on earth.

.: And for what are you striving?
.: Ah, now we come to the double-eye of my turmoil. One eye of my current storm is what followers of Carl Jung might call a “crisis of individuation.” I have gotten far enough along in my process of maturation that the semi-autonomous aspects of my personality which I have been calling “needy-greedy” are blocking my path toward wholeness. I am striving to love them, these fragments of the Divine, into the wholeness of my larger Self.

The other eye of my storm is the question, “how do I name this process?” Part of my Gift is knowing the names we give to “reality” have consequences. I want to call this process “giving myself to my christ.”
Another phrase would be “pledging myself to my higher power.” (This language has worked well for tens of thousands in AA.)
Or I could follow Jung and say “I am struggling to more fully integrate my shadow aspects into the next stage of my personality, all under the guidance of the Self.”
So, two eyes to my storm, two quiet nameable centers around which energies swirl with frightening speed.

My readers will recognize the energies in our society swirling around the second eye. If I say “Christ,” I am afraid I will offend my sister, Christine, and other Christians who might refer to themselves as “fundamentalists.” Chris has been talking about the “good news” for years, and has been looking for an opportunity to talk to me about the joy of accepting Jesus Christ as my personal savior. Am I going to tromp in and say, “I’ll take that Christ! This is what it means to me”?
When I talked to Chris on the phone this week, I said only, “I feel called to live with a higher level of integrity.” That made sense to her and she could relate to me in a comforting and knowing fashion.

As for the language of “higher power,” I’ve always liked it and disliked it for the same reasons. The way the phrase is used allows many people to join together to do good work. The language of “higher power” says, “we will all have different views of what this means, and that’s OK; let’s get on with our work.”
Saying “Higher Power” turns our focus away from the Divine, to concentrate on the work of the Divine in our lives. Right now I am preoccupied with a sense of “being called,” of being drawn toward something, and I am reluctant to use language that says “yes, but let’s not try to talk about it directly.”

And what about Jung’s language, “integration of the personality under the presiding guidance of the Self”? I believe every word of it. But is that MY language? Is that what I want to say to my friends? I am a troubadour. My job is “to touch hearts with words.”

So these are the energies I can name, swirling around the second eye, the outward-looking eye of my storm. The energies swirling around the eye of my inner struggles are harder to name and more immediately frightening.
“Submission?”
“Obedience?”
“Self-sacrifice?”
Friends know that there is a reality that lies beyond any and all words.
I am trying to remember this.
It is in this realm that my work lies, in prayer, and in carrying my yearning for wholeness into daily life.

It has come to my attention…that I better start to talk more about Christ. Especially an experience I might name “my christ.”
.: Christ in YOU?!! You’re no god! You can’t even remember what day of the week it is.
.: That’s not how it works. “He walks with me…”
My brain is a swirl. My life a turmoil.
.: It’s not about “deserving.”
.: Approaching the Christ Archetype, the Pattern or Predisposition, the Perfected human. Imago Dei.

Before I am prepared to talk personally about what is happening in my life, about my sense of the presence of Christ in myself, I need to offer a glimpse of the framework out of which my thinking comes.

My theory is that there is a “social-Christ-event” within humanity at least every hundred years. The person who is central to the event is born in ordinary circumstances, a carpenter’s son, or the daughter of a petty merchant. Growing up, she passes for normal, because she is normal, while at the same time being precocious, prescient, with normal abilities in extra measure.
Children like this are all around us, and the adults they grow into. They are celebrated in the literature of all cultures. (I think Marion Anderson was such a person.) Another such person, Roland Hayes, touched me as a youth, with his album, “The Life of Christ,” especially the songs “Prepare Me One Body” and “Little Boy, How Old Are You?” This last song talks about one of these precocious children, about whom the culture marvels, but does not treat as alien.
I think the “social-Christ-event” comes occasionally to a community which includes one of these normally-gifted people. (I’m using the awkward phrasing “social-Christ-event” because I’m groping for ways to talk about this, and because I think I’m going to want to talk about “personal-christ-events” later on.)
I’m guessing these social-Christ-events tend to happen among soldiers in wartime and among first responders, and among mothers of families in difficult circumstances. Situations of adversity that demand all a person has to offer, and more.
The social-Christ-events that arise out of these situations are extreme, certainly, but they are also a natural flowering of the human spirit. It is part of what we humans do, along with thievery and singing. Recently, on the radio, I heard about an event that comes close to being a social-Christ-event, a story of bravery and self-sacrifice in Iraq. It involved an officer cutting the wires of an electric fence so that his men could escape from a situation where they were under fire.

If these events happen regularly, as I believe they do, the special thing about the social-Christ-event that happened in Galilee, is what later happened to Saul/Paul. I believe that on the road to Damascus, Saul/Paul saw Christ, in himself, in his own experience. He had been preoccupied with a social-Christ-event that had gained local notoriety, and he had an opinion about it, which was suddenly changed 180 degrees.
In the old language: “God spoke to him.” We Quakers would say: “he had an experience of ongoing-revelation.” In my understanding, it is because of who Saul/Paul was, in himself, that he could recognize that the Jesus-Christ-event he had been preoccupied with was an example of Christ. He could see the Christ in Jesus because of the Christ in himself.
Again, a normal human occurrence. Many of us have been touched,
enlarged into something bigger than we thought we were
by the example of a splendid human being.

I hold, with C. G. Jung, that the discovery of “Christ among us” was latent in Jewish culture. It was also latent in Greek culture of the time, and much of the Middle East was ripe with this possibility.
An important part of the Jewish contribution, as best I understand it, was personalizing the divine. All established cultures have ways of representing the transcendent and transpersonal aspects of the human experience to the members of their culture, and these different ways of talking about the super-human, the Divine, all work pretty well, and all point in the same direction, in terms of “how humans should act.” Jewish culture looked at the transcendent-transpersonal and said, “we understand these experiences within ourselves and in our shared lives as the actions of a being. A being like ourselves and unlike us, as well.” Like many groups in the area at the time, Jewish culture made a covenant with the divine as they understood it, entered into a relationship with it, as if it were an entity rather than an impersonal, non-specific, beneficent pattern. This approach worked well for them. Members of the culture grew ready to see the divine manifest in human form, perhaps as a messiah, a God-filled person, a savior who would free them from their burdens.

So, the culture shared by many in the Middle East predisposed them to re-cognize the Divine in human form. Saul/Paul was fixated on this issue, and had an epiphany. The power of the Jesus-Christ brought Saul/Paul’s own Christ into awareness, and into action in the world. What impresses me is not that Christ had happened in Jesus, or in Saul/Paul, but that this re-cognition of the Divine then spread throughout many parts of the Middle East, and came to be the meta-story of what we now call “western civilization.”
What impresses me is that the re-cognition of “Christ” touched so many people through the centuries, shaping their lives. I believe this is because it is a good way of understanding the universal human experience.
I believe there are other good ways of understanding the human experience that do not personalize the Divine (Taoism, for instance), that do not make the transcendent-transpersonal into a being. But I have come to believe that, despite its evils and excesses, Christianity has something very important to offer to the human experience. And the core of that, in my experience, is “the Christ within,”
the imago Dei we carry within ourselves, that can speak to us, and guide us, if we open ourselves to it.

Whatever Is Gaia Up To?!!

Of course, the spread of Christianity across populations of many indigenous religions was only one example of a shift in humanity that happened about that time. The spread of Buddhism and of Islam mark, with Christianity, a period in human social development. Was the human race somehow developmentally ready to “take a step?” I don’t have an answer to this, but I think it is important to marvel at the question, to open ourselves to the possibility that there is a global dynamic at work, taking different forms, but with an underlying coherence. Certainly we saw a similar planet-wide human development earlier with the development and spread of literacy. Again, this in-built tendency of humans to write expressed itself in different ways on different parts of the globe. Here, also, there seems to have been a ‘readiness’ in the population. One writer and one expression of Christ are marvelous things, but the real power comes when this cultural form spreads through a population and becomes something “we” can do.

Summary, June 14 to July 18

Whew! What a month of activity!
With the deadline of the Friends General Conference Gathering looming, I finally got going on making a presentable Quaker Community Forest (QCF) website. I featured some of our activities where I have good pictures and where the focus is on building our spiritual connection with nature.
Now up on the QCF website we have:

1. An INTRODUCTION to the project

2. Two ANALYSES of our current situation, one Global, one Ecosystemic

3. Some of our VISIONS of what we eventually want to see in a Quaker Community Forest:
Cynthia & Ralph’s and some of my poems: A Suggestion To NYM, Cathedral Forest, and Our Story Forest

4. Some of our STRATEGY for creating a forest-friendly culture:
Our memorial service for the three acres of trees that were about to be harvested
Our Teen Retreats
The Student Grove Project

In addition to the flurry of QCF work, I also reported here an experience of guidance.
This provoked a wonderful comment from Liz, where she dared include a reference to “the Adversary.” I am thrilled she would offer this concept to our ongoing discussion. If I try to use it to map my reality, I’d say “the Adversary was present, detected, and argued with, back when I posted on April 7, speaking of my divided self. I said at the time, “we’ll see how this goes…” I can report now, that it was a struggle, from early April until mid-June, and then, as reported above, the floodgates opened.

I am grateful.

And grateful to you, my friends, for your ongoing interest.
Richard

Whew! This feels like it’s going to be an important part of my year ahead, at least.

Ah, how to not lose focus on my core mission when an acquaintance is in trouble and asks me for help?
I don’t have an answer to this question, but part of the answer is “Don’t give up,” and I’m back.

With scant weeks to go before presenting Quaker Community Forest (QCF) at the Friends General Conference 2007 Gathering in Wisconsin, I’m finally working on the QCF website.
I (part of my inner committee) said I was going to do this back on April 7. It has taken me a month to get going. This delay was foreshadowed by the argument that my inner committee was having at the time.
Part of me knows, and part of me is still unwilling to accept, I can’t just *announce* I’m going to do something. Part of what is true (for me) is that a proper motivation has to come out of a deeper place in me than the part of me that “announces” things.

Another tidbit to drop, as I look back over the last month-plus, is that I’ve had a fine experience introducing someone to the I Ching, and I’ve gotten a second request. Maybe it’s time to offer this to a few folks in the context of my Quaker Meeting, in July or August? Any interest?

Here’s a summary of what’s happened on this website since my last summary, on May 5.

I started, May 18, by reporting on my preparation for a presentation to Prospect Hill Friends Meeting, titled What is Gaia Exactly?
I see clearly now that I said:

Gaia is not a “thing;” I’m calling us to a new culture.
We have to talk about how culture is constructed. We “see” through culture-created glasses. (Feral children missed out on the stage of culture-creation.) Vision is an active and constructive process. I “see” all life on earth as part of a single process. I see a coherence in its development. We are all part of a great coherence which I’m calling Gaia.

Wonderfully, a friend responded, “I wish you made sense to me.” And on May 25 I wrote about how I want exactly this kind of frankness from my friends.

Then, it was off to Quaker Community Forest.
I have a wealth of writing about what we are up to, in the old TreE-Mail newsletters, and I also have lots of pictures taken at QCF events, which I have never shared beyond the immediate participants because I didn’t want to choke up people’s computer modems.
Now I have started combining text & photos together on the website!
Yes!!
I’m doing the easy things first, which means a “memorial service” we conducted for a grove of trees and a series of Teen Retreats we did.
Next, the Student Groves Project. (I hope. Knock on wood. No “announcements” here.)

In response to my last post, my friend Nils wrote:

“Dear Richard,
I value your friendship and love
and only wish you made sense to me. …”

I was thrilled. I wrote him back:

What a wonderful response!
I would like permission to quote you.
Really.
Either with your name attached or anonymously.
It has taken me so long to really start doing this Gaia Troubadour work because it hasn’t made sense to me either:
“Us, inside a living organism! Like e coli in someone’s intestine? You gotta be kidding!”

And I know it doesn’t make sense to lots of people.
Part of what I have been doing for these last decades is refining a personality and a place in my community that allows me to say things that people don’t feel they have to take seriously or “believe,” but they are still willing to hear from me —to entertain my thinking at some non-threatening level.
Your wonderful statement is a model of the relationship I want people to feel they can have with me. One where they find me to be a valuable friend, and we can speak frankly together about how this Gaia Troubadour stuff doesn’t make any sense to them.

Writing this to you allows me to realize that part of what the website is about is just getting the ideas out where people can see them, giving these weird ideas some months and years in the light of day, to discover that nothing terrible happens.
You, and many of my other friends, don’t even have to read them for this “light of day” time to be valuable. A few of the ideas will connect with a few members of our shared community; word will get around that while I may be odd I am not out of control, and that in fact the Gaia Troubadour can be entertaining. As a community (I hope) we will discover settings where I can speak my heart and people don’t need to feel threatened or challenged. (This is already true in meeting for worship.)
And then, when we (and especially I) have had time to be reassured that it is not actively dangerous just to say such outlandish things where everybody can see them, then in face-to-face conversations I can begin to make connections between what I have been saying and the inner realities I know people carry. Like “prayer.” That’s a nice example of something some people “believe in” and other people don’t, and that feels tricky to talk about.

And in the meantime your wonderful statement,
“I value your friendship and love and only wish you made sense to me”
is the perfect thing for my friends to be saying to me.

Nils responded:

Of course, quote me and use my name or not as you wish. I do understand your concept of us all being connected and as such part of something larger that our individual selves and e coli in an intestine is not a bad analogy. … In our meeting house in Pennsylvania there are many majestic trees that were fertilized by the horses of early Quakers, and the trees also used the carbon dioxide that those horses and Friends may have exhausted and so the trees are in part made up of “waste” products. …
Well, dear friend, we raised a chuckle from Peg in reading our mail, so our day has been a success.

Prospect Hill Friends Meeting has invited me to present to them this Sunday.
Lyn and I agreed on the topic, “What IS Gaia exactly?”

Here are my current thoughts, in preparation.
Today I say:
Vision is an active and constructive process.
I learned about “vision” in junior high school science class. They taught, “the process of vision begins when light enters the eye…” with a diagram of a cross-section to the eye, and the image of a tree upside down on the retina.
I believe the explanation and diagram are accurate, but woefully inadequate. Fundamentally short-sighted.
What we “see”… –reality-creation– is a dance
and the eyeballs are only the dancing shoes.
The process of “seeing something” –of reality creation– is well described as
a story we tell ourselves.

And the fullest expression of human “seeing”
is culture, which is a many-layered fabric of stories.
The creation of culture is an amazing process. Archeologists report excitedly on the early stages of its development:
“We have found high concentrations of pollen grains among the skeletons buried in these ancient graves! This means these people from the dawn of the human era were buried with flowers. The creation of story, of meaning, of culture-mediated reality had begun.”
Culture includes stories which hold paradoxes. Example: a god, devoted to us, who punishes with death.

.: I thought your topic was
What IS Gaia exactly?
.: Thank you. That IS my topic.
Where I have gotten to, so far, in my presentation is:
I “see” Gaia.
If we are to “see” Gaia together, it will necessarily be a creative process, a dance between ourselves and unmediated reality, which we can know only by mediating it.
So far I’ve been talking epistemology: how we know what we know.
Talking Owen Barfield’s SAVING THE APPEARANCES
Talking Alfred North Whitehead and “process theology.”

Let me try to shift my focus from how we humans mediate unmediated reality
to the shape of reality my vision shows me:
Just as gestation is a process,
Just as the succession of forest types to a climax biome is a process,
I believe life on earth is a process.
A dynamic process we can recognize.
One we can try to work with, rather than against.
Indeed, I want to shout from the roof tops to the lost citizens of Industrial Civilization:
Here is organic wholeness!
Here is guidance for what ails us!
Here is a basis on which we can make our billions of choices.
And if we do
We will find
We will co-create
Our proper place in the world.

“How?” (You might ask.)
“Would this discovery of Gaia’s process take place in a laboratory?”
“Would we try to poll all of humanity, and maybe the animals too?”
“How would we learn what Gaia ‘wants,’ where she is headed, where she wants to go?”

Today, I say:
Just as the embryo is a pattern that becomes manifest through the process of gestation
So Gaia is a pattern
In the process of manifesting.

So, before a particular process of Gaia unfolds in the world,
(Like an El Niño winter or a monarch butterfly migration)
Before the manifestation of a particular Gaian process into material reality,
There exists already, a pattern, a set of likelihoods associated with the process that will be unfolding.

And we have access to parts of that pattern,
We can P A R T I C I P A T E,
through prayer, intuition, tuning to the non-material world.
Not that any of us
Or even a unified world culture
Could apprehend the whole pattern. We are too limited for that.
But we can know a lot we are currently ignoring.
And, as Quakers say, if we follow the light we are given, more will come.

You might say:
“True or not, this is too grand for me. I have a few hours next weekend, but I’d have to bring the kids.”

That’s where Quaker Community Forest comes in.
Come into the woods with us.
“See” nature anew
while refreshing yourself,
as you almost always do,
“in nature.”
Join in a community of shared experiences
Making stories that explain what we are coming to know,
Creating a culture
Large enough to hold paradoxes of Love, Nurture, Death
And continual Rebirth.
Recreate,
Re-create
Our Earth.