The Good News
“We are returning to our native place after a long absence, meeting once again with our family in the earth community. For too long we have been away somewhere, entranced with our industrial world of wires and wheels, concrete and steel and our unending highways, where we race back and forth…..
… a feeling of intimacy we now experience as we recover our presence within the Earth community…. Presently we are returning to the primordial community of the universe, the earth, and all living beings. Each has its own voice, its role, its power over the whole….” Th. Berry: Dream of the Earth, chapter 1 ( 1)
source:internet
This meditation is inspired by words of Thomas Berry in The World of Wonder
- What do you see when you look up to the sky at night and you greet the moon and see the myriads of twinkling stars looking at you? What are your thoughts when the day fades away or you look out over the ocean or a river in the evening? What do you see?What do you see when dawn breaks over the eastern horizon?
- Imagine that someone is with you and tells you about an abiding world, a world imaged forth in the wonders of sun and clouds and the stars and planets at night. What is this person telling you?
- You might have heard that this world is guardian, healer, teacher, sustainer and the origin from which you came and the destiny you return to. Have you ever felt this?
- A world that is the source of a tremendous strength and power in times of hardship and suffering. Do you feel this strength that comes from the Earth? Especially now in these times of deep crisis?
- Now you look at yourself in the midst of a cosmic world and the Earth. This is where you belong. Part of one single community: the universe. Do you feel that you are part of the universe, that you are the universe?
- When Th. Berry speaks about coming home after a long absence, where have we been? Where have we loved and what has filled our hearts with beauty and a sense of connection with the ground under our feet?
We have lost it, this deep intimacy and knowingness about nature. According to Thomas Berry alienation is the oldest and most universal human experience, our not knowing how we belong to the universe. Do you know your place and role in the Earth community?
At our birth we know we have come from a spirit place, with a clear mission. During our life we forget this and the journey of our life is to remember how deep we belong to nature. Yes, we are nature. Now is the time to come back to our deep knowingness and wisdom about life on this planet and our relationship with Mother Earth. The good news is that this knowing is not lost, we have only forgotten it!
Coming Home
In our time, all over the world there are voices of the Elders. The council of thirteen grandmothers, ( Earth Elders from all over the World) speak to us: “The Grandmother of all Creation, the One who is the maker of life, The One whom we have forgotten, is calling us. She is not angry with us, she is sad that we have forgotten who She is”. (2) She is coming back into our consciousness through prophecy and visions. She brings profound nurturing, a depth of compassion and a deep love for caring for all that is alive.
This power is coming to life in all of us who are awakening to the profound mysteries of the Earth and her community of life. This feminine energy is awaking in the heart of women and men; it is the energy that will help us to heal the Earth, by balancing our own energies.
More than five hundred years the circle of life was broken the grandmothers say, because the original teachings of the Creator were forgotten; knowing who we are in time and space as children of the Mother. All the grandmothers believe that we must develop a different relationship with Creation itself, otherwise there is no hope both for humanity and the Earth community. Nature is showing us the signs. If we can only see, the Spirit world is so close.
Earth Wisdom
We are born with a memory in our cells: the memory of how nature works, a memory about the wisdom embedded in Creation. Creation stories tell us, that Wisdom ( often personified and called Sofia) created the Universe. The Ancient people call this Knowingness, Original Thought. Original Thought is insight in the purpose of the Creator in creating and in the structures and patterns that uphold Creation and Evolution.
We live our life mostly driven by certain thoughts and beliefs. It is what education and culture tell us. We consider it as “normal life”. Original thoughts are created from a Divine state of Oneness. They are sacred laws and sacred truths. They can break the chain of the beliefsystems which cause so much devastation in our soul, in the soul of the community of life. The main beliefsystem is that we are made to think that we are separated: separated from God, separated from each other and separated from nature, Earth, the Universe. Original Thought reveals to us that Spirit lives inside of us, that there is a place in our soul where we know the ways and thoughts of our Creator. That we are part of all life, from the Beginning up to this moment. Each created being has a place, a very unique place in the circle of life. If we know this, we see that our life has such a deep meaning. Love knows no boundaries and forms.
We are called to go deep within and listen in that sacred and holy place and then go out. To see the sacred laws and wisdom in all life that surrounds us. We become learners, we are students in the school of Earth Wisdom. It is a profound and lifelong process. We are the ones to bring back profound knowing and seeing into the world of today. It is only through this way that we will find the ways that diminish life, ways to end domination of nature and to find again our place in the circle of life.
The spiritual power of the Earth and the heavens lies dormant in each of us. It is the time now to allow this power to be released; we will need it badly in our healing work with Mother Earth. This spiritual power will guide us in these challenging times now all life on Earth is in danger.
Why is the Earth our Mother?
Wisdom created the Earth, in perfect harmony the Word that creates. The primordial creative power is feminine, the Divine Feminine, in perfect balance with the Divine Masculine. Wisdom, often pictured as Sophia, brings order in the chaos, she is womb, consciousness, knowingness. The Wisdom of God is the sacredness in all that is. Wisdom is the foundation of the whole creation. All that is bears her imprint.
For millennia, traditional peoples all over the world have believed in an Earth Mother who gives life and receives the dead into her rich soil. The old Greeks called her Gaia, the earthly presence of Anima Mundi ( soul of the cosmos, Earth) , ( Ibu Pertiwi, Indonesia). She gives birth to all there is, this great nourishing being, both material and spiritual together. For the ancient Greeks she was the principal Goddess. Yet the experience of her presence gradually disappeared from ( Western) human consciousness. But she is coming back, step by step.
A new Earth consciousness is rising in people!
There is an interior life in everything that exists and therefore we can say that everything that is created has a soul. From mountain to rivers, from a star to a worm. From a tree to monkey and in each human being. For us, humans, it is a great shift in our lives when we begin to grasp this. It is discovering the face of the Mother, Gaia, Sofia, Ibu Pertiwi in all that we see. Then we begin to sense the wisdom, the order, the ways of functioning of the universe, the natural world. Then nature is no longer an “it”, something outside us, but we begin to realize that we are nature, our soul is nature, our bodies are nature. We are made from the same stuff as the first atoms and stars.
We are all of the same family, we are kin; we are One family of Life. Kinship is the basic pattern of relating in the universe. Then great respect, awe and wonder are born in us.
“We need to awaken again to the grandeur of the Earth processes
and to awaken to the Dream of the Earth.
We have to return to the memory of our cells and the Earth wisdom in our genes.
The desire of the Earth is in our genes.
We can only be sensitized by what is revealed to us. ”
Th.Berry. Dream of the Earth.
- Dream of the Earth. Th. Berry ISBN 0-87156-622-2
- Grandmothers Counsel the World Carol Schaefer ISBN 978-1-59030-293-4
June 2017