Finding our way home. Part I: What are we missing?
But if we are to continue at all, we have only one choice—to give up the conqueror role; to return to living simply as a small part of an organic whole.
But if we are to continue at all, we have only one choice—to give up the conqueror role; to return to living simply as a small part of an organic whole.
Someone once told me in reference to a hurricane in Florida that all over the news you see what a tragedy it is. News shows show the destruction and the horrors. But, this person said, remember to look for the helpers—helping, doing their work. The same is true now. Look for the helpers. They’re doing their work.
The third thing doesn’t require dreaming, but waking up. It’s more like a property of physics, the round Earth that triangulates everything. It’s also alive, meaning it responds to our efforts and brings its own powers, processes, pathways and beneficial relationships to the project.
We need to act where we can most effectively act now, in our communities and bioregions, cities and states. We’re only going to make it working together, building the future in place.
When it comes to building community resilience—or building community at all—we have our work cut out for us.
Farming is a science but it is also an art. There is no one book, one philosophy, one six-week course which can teach that.
We have the option to utterly divest, and build CARE based opportunities outside the current system. Which is what CARE-HOME-FARM is. It’s a model, which we hope to test and explore in real life, for an inter-sufficient community.
From a society-wide perspective, a new consciousness a involves major cultural change and a reorientation of what society values and prizes most highly.
The Spinsters hope to both beautify the downtown core and bring wool manufacturing back to Bellingham. They’re not the only ones looking forward to the transformation. Downtown Bellingham Partnership’s Jenny Hagemann says Spincycle’s move is “an exciting chapter” in the neighbourhood’s “continued revitalization.”
We can farm like an ecosystem, we can hold onto the rainwater and disperse it when needed. And, with trees nearby, they do much of the work for us. Why aren’t we paying attention?
How do we try to compensate for our destruction of so much of Earth’s life? By curbing ourselves? By deep societal change? By bending heaven and Earth to protect what is left, before it is too late?
An ecological chaplaincy then might be one that tends to the spiritual care of people of any or no faith who want to connect more deeply with the earth, or who worry about what is happening to the earth.