Earth and ReBirth

Easter for me has always been a celebration of rebirth.

Winter in Buffalo NY – where I spent many formative years – was bleak gloomy even a bit scary with the potentially deadly snow falls.

So, to get through it we had to have complete faith (yes faith) that winter would not last forever – as a kid that was easy for me. “Spring and the Easter bunny would bring back our green grass and barefoot weather”

Obviously, I had never had any first-hand experience of the death on the cross and the resurrection of Christ, so there was nothing gory about easter for me. In my mind the resurrection came from the leaves of our trees. Clearly the Japanese Maple in the front yard and the oak in the back yard were coming back to life. In Buffalo March was a month of slush and melting dog poop in my neighbourhood.

April brought the yellow exuberance of the forsythia and the courageous purple crocuses popping up through the snow. But we often wore our snow boots to Easter mass, so the Easter bonnet was not a thing for me.

Easter has always been tied to the inherent coming back to life that is springtime. Then came Earthday: April 22, 1970, was the first one. I was 8 years old at the time, so it impressed me greatly. My age group really loved to tell our parents to quit being litter bugs, but then we went on to drive our SUVs around looking for the best Barbeque Steaks – as served on a teak table thank you very much.

It seems to me that the human consciousness MUST keep evolving if we are to survive this latest mass extinction going on all around us right now.

But GAIA Mother Earth will be fine. She is used to cycles. We can all die she doesn’t care.

You know how puppies bite the hands that feed them? So the mama dog has to wean them, by nipping at them or running away? If humans take pet dogs, we have to train them as well.

Could Gaia earth b trying to train our poor little baby mammalian brains? Our, monkey brains bite, and we have to grow out of them Personally I have faith that Gaia will get us trained before mankind is extinct. …but ots only faith.

Science has brought us a long way, but with little concern for the limits of growth that we have known about for sometime now. Pythagoras taught us geometry, Galileo brought us astronomy, then the Einsteins figured out that energy equals the total mass multiplied by the speed of light. Wow! So what did we do? Bomb each other.

Science has brought us far. But in a very masculine, tower building kind or way….Sir Isaac Newton famously said “I can see so far because I am standing on the shoulders of giants”. That’s great. But this has lead to want to go to Mars without even cleaning up our own soiled nest?  How macho is that? The old bible told us to husband our earth – but then to go forth and multiply. I think it is now time to get more humble, with our host planet and sole resource provider. Remember that if you are nursing your baby but the police are knocking at the door – your milk will dry up. We need our mother to continue to nurture us – not to send us to Mars (without air or water)

Mother Earth is all about rhythms and networks AND CYCLES – not squares, angles and towers. The UUs STRESS that we are each an integral part of the network of life. We are NOT as strong as today’s strong men/war lords…Gaia is not able to support those capitalist industrialist billionaires. She (we) are only as strong as our poorest children, our sick refugees fleeing Syria, Palestine or the Ukraine, our self-beaching whales.

So, I say welcome to the Age of Aquarius – we are well into its dawning now. I hope that Aquarius will prove to be a much more feminine era then was linear, jealous Pisces. These cosmic cycles are supposed to last millennia. All our great spiritual leaders – from Confucius and Buddha through Moses and Jesus to Mohamed – all lived in the era of Pisces. Lately we have had Thich Nhât Hanh and Greta Thunberg step up to the plate.

 

I’m pretty sure Gaia earth knows all this. Now our human society just needs to figure out where we stand on this planet.

If Humankind is to survive, we will have to pull upon more than just faith in the Father Son and Holy Ghost. We also Have to chip in with our fellow earthlings: the trees, the cockroaches, and the sharks and eagles to help mother earth.  Starting to help on Earth Day feels right to me. Hopefully we can join team earth as fully paid-up union members. We are neither above nor below the rest of life on earth we are just part of the great living Gaia earth. And if we have more power, so we have more responsibility…remember Noblesse oblige (as the french say).

In fact, I understand that Mankind’s survival is predicated on our faith in ourselves and earth to keep nourishing us. We MUST share more equitably with each other and the rest of the web of life if we are to stay a part of it. Thanks, Greta, for pointing that out!

Of course, Easter is about Springtime. But I for one am in the autumn of my life. I am working on passing on the alchemists rendering of my life struggles and traumas to the next generations it the best ways I can.

When my daughter was two years old, she told me unequivocally that she had been my grandma before I was born. Of course, I don’t understand that – or anything else about the afterlife. But I DO have faith that the universe will work it out so that my Grandma’s winter wasn’t her end either.

As Mufasa from the Lion King explained in his talk to Simba “we become the grass and the antelope eats the grass” to love again.

I will close with a story that I believe is Taoist: There once was a wave who was loving life zooming across the top of the sea until it saw the coastline approaching.

Then it got scared and said to its neighbor – OMG we’re going to die. Look at that our end is approaching.

The neighbor responded – I don’t know about you – but I’m not going anywhere. I’m the whole ocean.

So to you I say in Zulu – “UBUNTU” which means – I am, because you are, because We are. God bless us everyone.