Living in harmony with the planet and all living things
Cultures that maintain early values and skills can teach us something about how to live in harmony. We don’t have to go back to being hunter-gathers to recapture connection with the earth. Even my grandparents could show the way. As dairy farmers, they raised their own food. We, their children and grandchildren, left the farm to pursue careers in new fields, domains of personal interest. Unfortunately, it is too late for us to return to the family farm. We no longer have the land or the skills to do so. However, our food and purchase choices could make a difference, supporting those who do choose such a lifestyle. Perhaps we’d have to pay more for food, but the system would be enriched through the human attention to animal husbandry and quality food production.
But there are also simpler ways to be in touch with the earth and our environment. These are practices of being present in any moment, being fully in touch with one’s own body and with the environment in which it lives. This awareness can keep one in touch with the living dynamics of the evolving biosphere as well the knowing one’s own body has in its interaction with its home environment. A biological basis of knowing has been evolving much longer than linguistic knowing. We need only give our usual way of thinking a rest, to make space for more subtle knowing, a knowing which is simply the organic functioning of the organism within its milieu. Bringing this kind of knowing or awareness to our human relationships, as well as the environment and other beings, we can listen and hear on deeper levels.
Re-Wilding Ourselves
recognizing our embeddedness in the universe
Mary Rees, 2022 09 22, newsletter Vol 22.2
We humans share common characteristics with all living systems from single cells to complex living systems. These include a very basic capacity for responsive self-organizing, for awareness enough to organically reach for what we need and to recede from what is a threat. When in touch with these innate capacities we can discern them from grasping, make wise choices for ourselves, and move in harmony with all beings and within the world. We come to new ways of listening and hearing. We abandon the tendency to dominate through human advantage. We can become indigenous again, ‘rewilding’ our selves, reconnecting as a part of all that is – without loosing our human potential, but rather enriching it.
Join me in developing greater awareness and responsiveness to these capacities, learning or remembering practice tools for responsible citizenship with the ‘more-than-human’ world.
Online small group inquiries into rewilding, how we “become indigenous again”
Express interest in online practice and dialogue with Mary link opens in new tab
Recommended reading:
David Abram, The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-Than-Human World
Mary Rees, Being Prayer — Transforming Consciousness
Current blog entries