Awhile ago, I was talking with a couple of friends when one of them asked me if I knew my power animal . I have had many meaningful and profound encounters with animal totems and friends, including Bear, Moose, Wolf, Cat/Panther, Honeybee and Slime Persons (known disparagingly by humans as ’slugs’ ). But when I tried to identify one of them as my particular power animal, I couldn’t come up with one. Then in a flash of inspiration, it came to me.

“Gaia is my power animal,” I stated firmly.  It felt like one of those goosebump moments of truth when the molecules in the air seem to resonate with affirmation. After a moment of silence, my companions said in an awed kind of way, “I felt that.” “Yeah!”

Now, on this Earth day, I feel it’s also a bEarth day for me. Now I am sitting at the Camelot Coffee House, a place I like to go to work on my computer and drink coffee (it’s the only place nearby I can do both those things). While I was writing the last post, about the bEarth of my ‘Salon Phoenix’ project at SoulSpeak, the server (a young woman I have done a card reading for in the past) said to her boss, “She reads cards!”

“Oh!” she replied eagerly, “Would you like to set up here with your cards?”

As a matter of fact, I said, I’ve been looking for a convenient place to set up another day of the week. We agreed on Tuesdays. Then I let her know I was a musician. And wouldn’t you know it, she also wants to open the space for folkie countryish stuff of the very sort that I play. I love the idea of having another regular venue. I don’t need big crowds. I’m just ready for some space in which to play for folks. Even one or two is good. It’s a start, and it feels like a nice balance to the Salon evenings.
It feels like another bEarthing for me. A new beginning. It is significant to me that these openings are manifesting on this day, this Earth day, my power animal day.

It may seem like hubris to claim the entire planet as one’s totem. But it feels more like She has claimed me, and what can I do but surrender? Why would I want to?

I’ve updated the ‘what i do‘ page to reflect these new openings and shifts in my world. Do check it out.

Hallelujah and glory be to She.

This blog is in love with Gaia. The living body of planet has swallowed me and will never disgorge me. The greatness which contains all of us as mere microbes within its vast body humbles and elevates me simultaneously.

You want meaning in your life? Look no further.

I highly recommend an online book called ‘Earthdance: Living Systems in Evolution’ by Elisabet Sahtouris. Another title of note in this genre is ‘Animate Earth: Science, Intuition and Gaia’ by Stephan Harding. There are books by James Lovelock and Lynn Margulis and others as well.

What distinguishes ‘Earthdance’ (in addition to its utter freaking cool amazingness) is its availability . You can read it online, here. That makes it very quotable too, which I am about to do. At length. For the Gaia geeks out there (surely I’m not the only one).

Here are some highlights from my recent reading in Chaps 5 and 6:

On life as rock rearranging itself (’This wood is my father, this stone gave me birth‘)

Vernadsky called life “a disperse of rock,” because he saw life as a chemical process transforming rock into highly active living matter and back, breaking it up, and moving it about in an endless cyclical process. Vernadsky’s view is presented in this book, as we say life is rock rearranging itself — like music come alive — packaging itself as cells, speeding its chemical changes with enzymes, turning cosmic radiation into its own forms of energy, transforming itself into ever-evolving creatures and back into rock. This view of living matter as continuous with, and as a chemical transformation of, nonliving planetary matter is very different from the view of life developing on the surface of a nonliving planet and adapting to it.

On life operating itself intelligently without conscious supervision:

We seldom reflect on the fact that our bodies work without asking anything of our aware, thinking minds. We need not even know consciously what is going on, much less having to think or plan or do anything about it. And a good thing this is, because we would most certainly mess up our bodies’ wonderful work if we interfered in it in an attempt to control it ourselves. Lewis Thomas, the popular science essayist and physiologist mentioned earlier, has said that for all his physiological knowledge, he would rather be put behind the controls of a jumbo jet than be put in charge of running his liver. Any one of our organs is more complicated by far than the most complicated computer we’ve invented, yet it knows how to run itself, repair itself, and work in harmony with all other organs. ….

The sooner we recognize and respect Gaia as an incredibly complex and demonstrably intelligent self-organizing living being, the sooner we will gain enough humility to stop believing we know how to manage her. If we stay on our present course, clinging to our present belief in our ability to control the Earth while knowing so little about it, our disastrously unintelligent interference in its affairs will not kill the planet, as many people believe, but it may very well kill us as a species, as we are already killing so many others.

On the likelihood of life on other planets:

Earth, it now appears — though we still search — is the only planet or moon in our solar system that had just the right size, density, composition, fluidity of elements, and just the right distancing and balancing of energy with its Sun star and satellite Moon to come alive and stay so. Yet its life is a result of this fortunate confluence of conditions, just as the development of a plant or animal embryo is. Our living Earth is likely no more a freak accident than is the seedling that grows or the frog egg that matures. All are the inevitable result of right compositions and conditions.

Some scientists believe the conditions of Earth were so special that Earth is a rare phenomenon, perhaps the only such planet in the universe. But there is no better reason to believe this than there is to believe that living planets are as common in the universe as are the successful seedlings and hatchlings of Earth. And if this is so, there are billions, maybe trillions, of other live planets in the billions of galaxies, each with their billions of star systems. Surely we are not alone.

On the influence of living organisms on the composition of the planet:

Thus the molecules in virtually all of the atmosphere, all of the soils and seas, all of the surface rocks and much of the underlying, recycling magma, have been through at least one phase in which they were within living creatures! It is easier to distinguish between life and death than between the domains of life and non-life we have assigned to biologists and geologists, respectively. In fact, virtually every geological part or feature of Earth we can find is a product of our planet’s life activity. Further, living organisms have invented 99.9 percent of all the kinds of molecules we know, almost all of them back when bacteria were the only creatures around, a few billion years ago.

on the potential swiftness of evolution from aggression to co-operation (some hope for us):

Rather vicious breathers can still be found drilling their way into other bacteria to reproduce there and eat the host bacteria from the inside. In the Tennessee laboratory of Kwang Jeon, protist hosts so invaded learned to tolerate and then to cooperate with their invaders in a mutually dependent relationship that brought about a new kind of creature. Surprisingly, this replay of the ancient evolutionary shift from outright aggression to full cooperation happened in only a few years’ time.

on the role of co-operation in evolution:

Margulis’ discovery, that eukaryote protists evolved cooperative internal schemes to overcome the problems caused by competition among prokaryote bacteria, was almost as much a shock to the world of science as was the Gaia hypothesis itself. Besides showing that cell `mechanisms’ such as mitochondria are creatures in their own right, she was suggesting that harmonious cooperation played a big role in evolution. This ran counter to the beliefs stemming from Darwin’s work, adopted by scientists in western countries, that evolution was just a survival race driven by competition.

Now, that is what I’m talking about.

Hallelujah!! Spreadin’ the Gaia word…

I find this phrase from the letter by the 100 scientists (see these comments on Word of Mouth for the beginning of this discussion) to be very telling:

We therefore need to equip nations to become resilient to the full range of these natural phenomena by promoting economic growth and wealth generation.

Excuse me, economic growth and wealth generation? Why is the line now always arbitrarily drawn between ‘economic growth and wealth generation’ (which can only mean continuing to use non-renewable so-called ‘resources’ at a rate far beyond what the ecosphere can sustain) and ’stop global warming and climate change’? What about working toward simple sustainability and a stable-state economy? What about ending the destruction of the environment, habitat and extinction of hundreds of species each day, period? The whole argument seems surreal. I feel like a voice in the wilderness, crying.

Especially in the third world with its massive population and extremely limited resources, it is very dangerous to encourage unhindered growth and wealth using the western model. Look at what is happening in those parts of the third world, particularly Asia, which have already adopted our the western model of economic so-called ‘growth. We urgently need to focus on a stable state economy for ALL the world, including ourselves, rather than encouraging everyone to think that the western way is the right way. It is a destructive, unsustainable paradigm, period.

Of course, before we can have a stable state, the third world’s economy needs to grow at least somewhat to a livable and sustainable level (but not ‘livable’ according to our western standard of two cars, three televisions and a plethora of disposable toys, pre-packaged junk food and a separate room for every body function and person in the home, plus guests), and the already-bloated-with-wealth countries (like us) need to throttle back on our gluttonous piggery. But the ultimate goal needs to be sustainability. I don’t hear that being acknowledged, or even mentioned much anywhere these days. There’s so much focus on the Big Picture of Global Climate Change (insert flashing neon red herrings), both on the ‘believer’ side and the ‘deniers’.

Stop the crazy uncontrolled growth, I say. I don’t care about global warming, it’s a moot argument. The problem IS the machinelike uncontrolled drive toward economic growth and ‘wealth generation’. There is enough wealth already in existence, MORE than enough by far; it just needs to be redistributed a little more sanely, ie out of the war machine and the industro-corp production of cheap consumer throw-aways and into sustainable living on the planet. We need to start acting as if we’re here for the long run. Hello!! We are planning to have a planet for our grandchildren to live on, aren’t we?

“Think about the FUTURE, Jack!”

The book I’m reading (see previous blog post) is bringing me back to my awareness of the greatness and aliveness of this planet, and how we need to accept our place within her. We are not outside of Earth, we’re in her, like microbes in a body, and we have a role to play and it’s time we started playing it. Or perhaps, we need to accept that we ARE playing it, whatever we might think is happening, but in any case, to stop trying to detach, separate, elevate ourselves above and outside our matrix. We are of Earth, made of Earth, and we depend on her for everything. Everything.

All that we believe, think, understand, perceive comes to us through the medium of our senses, emotions, neuronal synapses firing. It’s all her. That doesn’t mean it’s not transcendent and spiritual. But it’s through her that we are that, too. Our transcendence is only possible because we are a part of her. As great, spiritual and amazing as we might be, she is more so, and she is what makes it possible.

In other words, we need to freakin’ get OVER ourselves and get inside the planet. And stop thinking of it, as her, as a buncha rock, wood and stuff. There. That’s my preach.

It’s been a long drought between words, fraught with changes, involving several select settings into which I’ve settled before wafting to the next. Time to get my fingers flexing on these keys and see what oddities I can thusly muster. Ah, so many tales, so little brain with which to arrange them into chronological or sensical order.

We’re barely past the full moon which soars higher in the sky, blazing like a silver-white torch, burning brighter than it did in the summer when the moon glows weak and low, barely visible above the trees.

Come autumn, the same moon rides higher and hotter as the days shrink and cool. You can’t measure this heat with a thermometer. It’s a soul heat, a wild strangeness that crazes cats (especially black ones), emphasizing their hallowe’eny qualities.

***********flashback: I’m climbing Mount Baldy. My elevation makes the shadows and reflections on the lake interweave interestingly. I’m standing at the feet of the cell tower which looms forebodingly over the place I lived two scene changes ago.This great footed beast has guy wires anchoring it to concrete; secure and smug, it pulses with monsterish power, terrifying all on its own even without my mind insisting on filling in the blanks with recent inadvertently researched information about the evils of scalar waves and all the ways ‘they’ are out to kill, control and undermine our very souls. I could dress up as a cell tower for Hallowe’en, that’d make the kiddies scream.My whole body vibrates with weirdness standing so close to the cell demon, but what the hey.

Those radiations are merely mutagens, and like the graffito said, “Mutate now, avoid the post-bomb rush.” So if there’s a ‘they’ playing a villain part in this cosmic play, then let’s take ‘their’ best shots against us and redeem them towards transformation. Suck in everything they throw at us and use it to grow ever more variably strong.

Crazy? O yes, thank you. And why the hell not? It’s better than cowering beneath the bed in nameless dread, seeking to escape the inescapable horrors being hurled by this modern world. We can’t escape the bad shit, so let’s embrace it, incorporate it, use it.

Anything can be a tool for transformation and fuel for change. Life is infinitely, radically adaptable. The first pollution crisis was oxygen back in the micro-organismic days when anaerobic bacteria were the dominant life-forms. Oxygen began as the toxic byproduct of the processes of life. It was corrosive and highly volatile, and bye-and-bye a crisis was reached and it seemed that Earth’s newly-minted life was doomed.

Then some smart micro-cookie figured out how to use oxygen so successfully that we now view it as essential for life. Life is mutative, transformative and most of all, successful.

After something like that, you’d think we (life) would have the adaptation thing down. Maybe we have. Look at what’s happening now, what evil humans are doing to our helpless planet, look at the toxins we spew, the forests we raze, the purple hazes and poisoned sunsets. Who’s doing that? Is it you and me? I know better, and so do you; we’re mostly doing the best we can in our small ways. So who?
Here’s my theory: I think it’s Earth, going her merry evolutionary way, bringing in changes, using us to accomplish them just as she used the bacteria in the beginning to create the conditions needed for life’s next stage. We may think we’re all that, but we’re not so much really. We think we can exist outside of Earth, that we are different, extra-special, even that we come of extra-terrestrial origin. We pump our species’ ego with fanciful tales that set us apart, and we call those stories ‘religion’ and ‘the Truth’, but here’s the real truth, as I see it:

The human race is just one functioning subsystem among many, blindly performing our species’ role which is to transform our environment toward our own survival and to Earth’s specifications. We’re enacting the programming in our DNA just like ants performing complex tasks industriously in their anthills even though they don’t know what for or why, and birds who know exactly where they’re going even though they’ve never been there before. What makes us so different?

Ah, it’s our big brains, our fascinatingly complicated minds, right, I forgot. Well, how did we come by these brains? How do we know we’re not using them just as we’re meant to, despite our individual misgivings?

We don’t know anything about the greater purpose of our mass activities. But why should we? We, individuals, have no ‘need to know’, evolutionarily speaking. Our brain cells also may suffer terrible anxiety about what they do, and perhaps they tell themselves urgent stories about how they should do it differently, but still, they’re compelled to continue behaving as they do, coerced by genetically-encoded instructions that they can’t change.

So if humans cause global warming, for example, then who’s to say that’s not exactly what Earth intends us to do? Life will go on, in whatever changed form. The big picture is all that matters as far as the planet is concerned, and she calls the shots.

That doesn’t mean we have to like it, or that we shouldn’t do what we can to clean up our individual acts, but don’t be fooled. Unless the megalithic corporate bodies change their ways too it’s all just cosmetics to make us feel better. It feels good to live in harmony with Earth’s ways, to eat organically, to live simply. I like it. But I don’t believe that what I do as an individual is shifting the direction of climate change, nor an army of individuals, because between the war machine and the megacorps, our polluting activities are a mere drop in an ever-filling and overflowing bucket.

Politics and activism aside, perhaps the real solution to pollution is adaptation, something life has had a lot of practice with. I think Earth likes change. I think she’s playing with paints and body art, crafting herself, ooing and ahing over the cool shifting patterns. And maybe she doesn’t care about the fate of the average individual, but it doesn’t mean she doesn’t care about me. I think she cares for those who care about her. That’s my story, and I’m sticking with it. The average individual may not give a (silicon) chip for the needs of Earth as a whole, but I do. So there.

So, okay. On to some new randomly generated topic, just push the button and see what spins to the front. Snake eyes! Oops, wrong gambling game. It’s hard to think with fluorescent lights glaring in my face; fortunately this is a temporary situation. The bad news is, I’m stuck in it for now, until tomorrow. Feeling tired, dragged out after a long night of weird dreams. Today all I want to do is eat. I had two bowls of sautéed cabbage with onions, and it was the most delicious thing ever. Now I want something sweet. Growwwllll. Here I go.

The pendulum swings, yet forward motion appears to have taken place, for the background scenery continues to shift into brighter and more hopeful patterns. The world seems not as dark as once it did. The encouraging voice in my head remains accessible and responsive, while the discouraging scourge which once haunted me so loudly has receded into the distance, little more than a memory, and in those moments when its volume is raised, it’s relatively easy to recognize as the lie that it is. From this perspective, my downs are downright doable, while the ups are nearly too good to stand.

And oh my, these hazy crazy summer daze, so much happening, so little brain for taking care of business. Except for the money part, life is sweet and replete with delights and near-encounters with the antlered one who haunts my nostrils with his goaty smoke. Grunt! The dreamworld remains his domain for now, and I can’t complain, for my dreams become more solid all the time. If a dime were worth anything, I wouldn’t trade my life for a million of them (though I wouldn’t say no to an offering of the same).

Ah, the elusive carrot of cash. That, in fact, remains the sole septic hole through which my current of contentment threatens to flow, ’secrets’ and ‘laws of attraction’ notwithstanding.

Ooh, I feel a rant coming, take heed:

This New Age justification for greed makes me want to point bright mirrors at the spewers of so-called secrets. I call it a scam! They name their same-old formula of affirmation and positive thinking a ’secret’ to lure those who seek to be special, plaster the masses with mass media pointing them in the direction of accumulation, the right and only solution for all dissatisfactions. They name examples and repeat insistently, “See what I have manifested for myself! A million-dollar mansion! no! four million! and why stop there? You too can own more than your share if you dare to dream as big as me, for bigger is always better! If you find yourself scrambling to survive, obviously you did it wrong!”

Ha. This so-called secret is nothing new. Though there’s some truth in this secret thing, it’s tainted by an ancient and ugly agenda: screw the people while seducing them into thinking you’re out to help them. Then the power of their collective, half-asleep, hypnotized desires (in the form of cash shelled out for books, DVDs and workshops teaching them how to be more like the right ones) can be siphoned into a many-headed hydra controlled by the same old elite, leaving the poor ever-poorer, ever-hungrier, ever-seeking the same old goals defined by the ones on top claiming to be blessed. New faces, new names, but it’s aristocracy all the same.

It takes some to get some, damn it. If the window of opportunity opens for you, it’s because you’re in a position to take advantage. If you live on the mean streets where windows don’t open, all the wishing in the world won’t change your fate without action and a bountiful helping of help.

Let’s call this thing by its name: it’s just another fake-o spirituo-materialistic pyramid scheme to feed the greedy monster of capitalism which has already sucked out half our brains. I’m not immune; I too am easily seduced by pretty toys, bright colours and flashing pictures of possibility. I lust for that same carrot even though I know it has been programmed to dangle always just out of reach. Still, I see the man behind that curtain. I know his name.

Desire is human and I’m okay with wishing, but now I choose to change the direction of my intention. And here it is (drumroll): I want to live on the ground in a world where sustainability is mainstream and love is the new normal.

Speaking of desire, let’s not forget our antler-headed man Pan, nor the sweet softness of his mama and main squeeze, Fat Naked Woman. If evolution happens (and it does) then our forms can be no accident. Our bodies of mostly water have evolved for a purpose, and it is obvious: our upright stance, sensitive naked skin and kissable lips clearly indicate a predisposition for coziness. Snuggles, sexy touches, strokes, licks, sniffs of pits and other niches are our real jobs, though our many layers of clothing and the multiplicity of ways we outlaw pleasure seem designed to force us to forget it.

The truth is, we are sensual creatures and our arms are made for hugging; evolution is leading us inexorably toward more love. It all adds up to God.

Love is our job, and let’s face it, nobody else can do it. Cetaceans have the bare skin required, but not the arms, and the other primates have the arms, but not the bare skin. And thanks mostly to our own doing, there are now far more of us than there are of the other so-called higher mammals.

People, awaken! All our fantasies and distractions are intended only to take our minds off our evolutionarily-mandated heart’s desires for intimacy, sweetness, funky pheremonic stews and pleasures of the flesh. Once we have what we really want, we won’t need bigger, better, faster cars or castles of gold. We’ll be too busy feeling the sensuousness of bare feet on soft soil and the sweet breezes in our hair. And really, this is exactly what we most fear and why we struggle to save ourselves from our own inexorable fate.

Resistance is futile. We will be assimilated into the grand orchestra endlessly playing its ever-evolving love song, which, though softer than the screaming sirens of greed, is so much more reliably rhythmic, musically melodic, happily harmonious and sweetly seductive than all the crass blandishments and tinny come-ons of the commercial world that once we tune in, we won’t be able to get it out of our heads. Love is a virus, and it is catching.

The song says, the time is here, the time is now. It’s time to crack the shells of the eggs which have incubated our life’s true purpose and discover that, lo, what we have most feared is our own selves! And yes, we are sensual animals, yes we love pleasure, yes, we love to say yes.

YES! Yes to life, yes to love, yes to the beauty of each precious and perfect moment, yes to fomenting a soft revolution to gently crumble the barriers separating each hungry lonely heart from its own sweet self, its Oneness with All. It’s time to fall in love with the world, our own faces in the mirror and all the weirdness we once feared.