  | ||
| | |
Gaian Rants | ||||
The Resurgence of Cosmic Storytellers by Brian Swimme Imagine a small group of people gathered around a fire in a hillside meadow. The woman in the middle is the oldest, a grandmother to some of the children present. The old woman might begin by picking up a chunk of granite. “At one time, at the beginning of the Earth, the whole planet was a boiling sea of molten rock. We revere rocks because everything has come from them -- not just the continents and the mountains, but the trees, and the oceans and your bodies. The rocks are your grandmother and your grandfather. When you remember all those who have helped you in this life, you begin with the rocks for if not for them you would not be.” . . . Now she slowly sinks her hands into the ground and holds the rich loamy soil before her. “Every rock is a symphony, but the music of soil soars beyond capture in human language. We had to go into outer space to realize how rare and unique soil is. Only Earth created soil. There is no soil on the moon. There are minerals on the moon, but no soil. There is not soil on Mars . . on Venus. . . or on the Sun. Even the Earth, the most extraordinarily creative being of the solar system, required four billion years to create soil. We worship and nurture and protect the soils of Earth because all music and all life and all happiness come from the soil. The soils are the matrix of human joy.” She points now to a low hanging star in the great bowl of the night sky. “Right now that star is a work creating the elements that will one day live as sentient beings. All the matter of the Earth was created by the Grandmother Star that preceded our Sun. She fashioned the carbon and nitrogen and all the elements that would later become all the bodies and things of Earth. And when she was done with her immense creativity, she exploded in celebration of her achievement, sharing her riches with the universe and enabling our birth.” “Her destiny is your destiny. In the center of your being you too will create, and you too will shower the world with your creativity. Your lives will be filled with both suffering and joy; you will often be faced with death and hardship. But all of this finds its meaning in your participation in the great life of the Earth. It is because of your creativity that the cosmic journey deepens.” She stares into the distance. In the long silence, she hears the thundering breakers on the ocean shore, just visible in the evening’s light. They listen as the vast tonnage of saltwater is lifted up in silence, then again pounds up the sand. “Think of how tired we were when we arrived here, and all we had to do was carry our little bodies up the hills! Now think of the work that is being done ceaselessly as all the oceans of the world curl into breakers against the shores. . . . as the Earth is pulled around the Sun . . . as all one hundred billion stars of the Milky Way are pulled around the center of the galaxy. “And yet the stars don’t think of this as work. Nor do the oceans . . . They are drawn irresistibly into their activities, moment after moment. . . . We humans and we animals are no different at all. For we find ourselves just as irresistibly drawn to follow certain paths in life. And if we pursue these paths, our lives -- even should they become filled with suffering and hardship -- are filled with the quality of effortlessness. Once we respond to our deepest allurements in the universe, we find ourselves carried away . . . on the edge of a wave passing through the cosmos that had its beginning twenty billion years ago in the fiery explosion of the beginning of time. The great joy of human being is to enter this allurement that pervades everything, and to empower others -- including the soil and the grasses and all the forgotten -- so that they might enter their own path into their deepest allurement.” The light of the dusk has gone. She sits with the children in the deepening silence of the dark. . . . “You will be tempted at times to abandon your dreams, to settle for cynicism or greed, so great will your anxieties and fears appear to you. But no matter what, remember that our universe is a universe of surprise. We put our confidence not in our human egos but in that power that gathered the stars and knit the first living cells together. Remember that you are here through the creativity of others. You have awakened into a great epic of being, a drama that is twenty billion years in the making. The intelligence that ignited the first minds, the care that spaced the notes of the nightingale, the power that heaved all hundred billion galaxies across the sky now awakens in you too and permeates your life no less thoroughly. “We do not know what mystery awaits us in the very next moment. But we can be sure we will be astonished and enchanted. This entire universe sprang into existence from a single numinous speck. Our origin is mystery, our destiny is intimate communion with all that is, and our common species aim is to celebrate the Great Joy that has drawn us into itself.” Rocks, soils, waves, stars -- as they tell their story in 10,000 languages and 2,000 cultures, they bind us to them in our emotions and our spirits and our minds and our bodies. It is the Earth who speaks in all this. It is the Earth who persuades us to switch our allegiance from the partial to the whole. It is the Earth who carries out the transformation from terror to a celebration of life, and her only power is the magnificence of her story. Excerpted from a longer article published in ReVision, Vol. 9, No. 2, Winter/Spring 1987. Reprinted with permission of the Helen Dwight Reid Educational Foundation. Published by Heldref Publications, 1319 18th Street, NW, Washington, DC 20036. Copyright © 1987. | ||||
| | | | |