…the individual self is…
a fleeting meeting-ground
of intricately woven relations,
its nature is profoundly participatory,
but is, for that,
no less endowed with distinctiveness,
particularity.
….Joanna Macy
the appalling consideration that we are not here to enjoy nature but rather we are a part of nature is the fiction of ‘otherness’ shining its shallow heart…..coming home where we belong requires a heedlessness of liberation…..may we be one with where we are born….
The interdependency of human thought and the environment is a vast topic which has not been explored with anywhere near the same passion as the assertion of independence. But this mutuality goes back to the very origins of a human consciousness that evolved with the rest of nature. Human knowledge, if nothing else, is a testament to the connectedness and interdependence of life. There can be no subject apart from an object. This understanding should transform our epistemologies by embedding not only being but the capacity to know in an earth imbued with intrinsic significance. A return to what is a birthright of meaning is more than a philosophical journey. Something changes in the mood. An atmosphere of nihilism dissolves. Certainly I notice this shift when, turning away from the page or the computer screen, the living world is suddenly present. What is at stake is sanity. There is a mad arrogance that flows from the diminishment of meaning in nature, one that approaches megalomania. A presumption of omniscience accompanies every dangerous attempt to control and dominate nature. What is sacrificed with the elevation of human consciousness above natural process is not only the idea of the intelligence of nature, but one’s experience of being immersed in a larger whole. A deep and continuing relationship with all other forms of existence is an ancient aspect of human consciousness. By an incremental process of separation from the body, from emotions, from the direct experience of nature, nature becomes alien. Knowledge, which has become a form of power rather than intimacy, works a kind of magic in the psyche. The interdependency of human thought and the environment is a vast topic which has not been explored with anywhere near the same passion as the assertion of independence…….Susan Griffin
So this is how the world was made flesh,
though surely the word came after
the sublime idea, after the sea’s withdrawal
and the island’s emergence
with first birds and giant lizards
carrying their young into the pampas.
…Lynn McMahon
