In considering climate change, population growth, economic corruptions, political barbarism, and all the concomitant systems that are so obviously not working, sometimes even the most environmentally attuned person will still, ultimately, end up in the position of viewing life on this Earth as "resources;" i. e. things we humans need and need to use well or things we don't use well. We do this from the narrow perspective of our own species and we don't see the well-being of our lives necessarily entwined with all the other lives of this planet.
In so doing, we engage in a subject/object relationship with life, meaning basically that everything that is "not me" has less reality and thus less value, than I do. This is how we have deadened our world and our own experience of life. If we enter a subject/subject relationship with life, then we are living as sacred being to sacred being, recognizing that each being has its own inspirited nature, its own intelligence, purpose and ways, and that we have commonality in this and need to live our lives in awareness and respect of that. And in joy......... in joy.
I don't know if humans will make it. I'd like us to; you and your children, and theirs....if we can do so in ways that coral reefs come alive with color and movement; if elephant herds still pound their feet in the soil and their own babies trumpet in play; if songbirds still sing us awake in the mornings; if vast communities of the plant kingdom re-establish their wild, diverse and fertile domains; if we can live as cooperative, extended communities who sing and dance more under the drama of the clouds and can take pleasure in silent, rapt fascination at the honeybee nuzzling the golden throat of a flower.
We rarely seriously consider as a moral imperative that the Earth would be an astonishingly beautiful and unutterably valuable Being to live and work on behalf of, even if our human presence ends. But....it is. To me, it is worth everything, whether I, or you, are here or not.
OCTOBER........ by Mary Oliver
There's this shape, black as the entrance to a cave. A longing wells up in its throat like a blossom as it breathes slowly.
What does the world mean to you if you can't trust it to go on shining when you're
not there? And there's a tree, long-fallen; once the bees flew to it, like a procession of messengers, and filled it with honey.
I said to the chickadee, signing his heart out in the green pine tree: little dazzler, little song, little mouthful.
The shape climbs up out of the curled grass. It grunts into view. There is no measure for the confidence at the bottom of its eyes--- there is no telling the suppleness of its shoulders as it turns and yawns.
Near the fallen tree something---a leaf snapped loose from the branch and fluttering down---tries to pull me into its trap of attention.
It pulls me into its trap of attention.
And when I turn again, the bear is gone.
Look, hasn't my body already felt like the body of a flower?
Look, I want to love this world as though it's the last chance I'm ever going to get to be alive and know it.
Sometimes in late summer I won't touch anything, not the flowers, not the blackberries brimming in the thickets; I won't drink from the pond; I won't name the birds or the trees; I won't whisper my own name.
One morning the fox came down the hill, glittering and confident, and didn't see me----and I thought:
so this is the world. I'm not in it. It is beautiful.