David Spangler Wisdom
©2010 by David Spangler with the Lorian Association:
No pun intended, but there is a gulf between where our society and our collective human consciousness are at the moment and where they need to be to fashion a world that is sustainable and that works for the benefit of all species of life. To write off this tragedy as “just another oil spill” and part of the price for doing “business as usual,” is to lose an opportunity to recognize the need to revision ourselves and our world and to move in a different, more holistic direction. If this tragedy has a deeper meaning, I believe it manifests in how we can seize this opportunity. (A new book that looks at how we can make this change in a most positive and creative way is Plenitude: The New Economics of True Wealth, by Juliet B. Schor, an environmental economist; I highly recommend it.)
Many years ago a friend of mine was involved in drilling oil wells in Louisiana. One day he gave me a small bottle of crude oil brought up from a mile or so under the earth. I was interested to see that it had a reddish color, which made me think of the way many indigenous peoples refer to oil as the blood of the earth. In many spiritual traditions, the spilling of blood in sacrifice is considered transformative. Perhaps we might see this oil spill as Gaia spilling her blood to effect a transformation in our consciousnesses that we may learn to truly think like a planet and to care for the world that sustains us. If so, my prayer is that this sacrifice is not being made in vain.
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No pun intended, but there is a gulf between where our society and our collective human consciousness are at the moment and where they need to be to fashion a world that is sustainable and that works for the benefit of all species of life. To write off this tragedy as “just another oil spill” and part of the price for doing “business as usual,” is to lose an opportunity to recognize the need to revision ourselves and our world and to move in a different, more holistic direction. If this tragedy has a deeper meaning, I believe it manifests in how we can seize this opportunity. (A new book that looks at how we can make this change in a most positive and creative way is Plenitude: The New Economics of True Wealth, by Juliet B. Schor, an environmental economist; I highly recommend it.)
Many years ago a friend of mine was involved in drilling oil wells in Louisiana. One day he gave me a small bottle of crude oil brought up from a mile or so under the earth. I was interested to see that it had a reddish color, which made me think of the way many indigenous peoples refer to oil as the blood of the earth. In many spiritual traditions, the spilling of blood in sacrifice is considered transformative. Perhaps we might see this oil spill as Gaia spilling her blood to effect a transformation in our consciousnesses that we may learn to truly think like a planet and to care for the world that sustains us. If so, my prayer is that this sacrifice is not being made in vain.
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posted by Community Threads @ 3:20 PM
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