This planet Earth is a living, breathing, evolving being. Scientists like James Lovelock, Lynn Margulis and Stephan Harding (and many more) have made it abundantly clear that Earth is self-regulating and does not function according to mechanical models. This is no dead ball of dirt and stone that happens to support a precarious skin of life on its dead surface, but rather, a great, mysterious and miraculous living body that we are fully participating in.Humans have evolved a schizoid separatist culture in which we view ourselves as ‘outside of’ nature, so that we ‘are doing things to’ the planet, in much the same way as we view ourselves as separate from our own physiological beings. Spiritual and religious systems of belief tend toward the view that our physical bodies are merely vehicles which we use until we die, at which point we will be in the ‘real’ reality, or Afterlife.

After twenty years of astrological and metaphysical practice, and having grown up in the wilderness of northern British Columbia, I have come to fully accept the entity-hood of Earth. What does this mean to us individually and as a species? We need to change our attitude first, then we will find that our actions will follow. If we truly understand that our own physical bodies are living expressions of our own selves, not simply biological mechanisms or toys for us to use up and throw away, we naturally find ourselves behaving differently. The same applies to changing our view of the planet as a whole. Our current behaviors cannot continue if our cultural worldview changes to one that honours the beinghood of Gaia.