Restoring and Restorying

it's already in our dna

What if each of us human infants are born with the sense of deep interconnection with the whole flow of life? What if what happens to that child confuses, numbs or even cuts off that sense of interbeing?

In 1968 when the Earth rise that is our banner was first photographed, science already knew that we humans as a species were emerging from a 6 billion year history of unfolding growth within the Earth’s systems. Seeing the whole vivid planet with its thin encircling atmosphere rise above the moon’s horizon, changed human awareness not just for Apollo’s three astronauts but for millions ever since. Seeing something within a much larger context than you have ever done before, is, in my understanding, a spiritual experience. What ever your worldview or religion, I use the word “spirit” to refer to the largest context you can hold… whether you name that “God”, “the Universe”, “the Great Mystery”, “Creator”, “Holy Spirit”, “Great Spirit”, “Jaweh”, “Providence”, “Divinity”, “Prime Mover”, “universal life force” or “something greater than myself”.

This puts us and our personal lives in a more collective context. In 1968 I was a university student in Belfast Northern Ireland, an activist involved in what became “Peoples’ Democracy”, a movement encouraging Northern Irish of all backgrounds to become aware of their low standards of living, lack of fair voting and their structural inequality under rule from London. Seeing that Earth rise image made me recognise the unity, interconnectedness and fragility of our shared home beyond my local “Troubles”. I had been an intensely curious child, always watching the movement of birds, insects and trees around me. My parents move to West Africa when I was two, opened up a more vivid sense of the wild natural world in which I participated. Being there from age two until twelve, in Ghana, the first African country to become independant of British rule, awakened my political instincts as well as the intensity of my passion for the more than human world. To my nineteen year old spirit, solving peoples’ daily living issues, would free them to give all of their world more care. My childhood experiences confirmed that the more than human world cared for us.

Now at seventy-three, in the accelerating collapse of the Earth’s systems over the last twenty years, my grief is intense but not immobilising. I no longer believe that transforming daily living conditions and political systems will awaken humans’ sense of their interconnectedness and move them to action. It is too late for that.

Now only the Earth-connected child in each of us can spark the transformation of awareness needed. It is the profound shift in human awareness, more profound than that in 1968, that may help us move into hospicing modernity , providing palliative care for white and western supremacy and enable deep enough healing of our collective trauma. Earth resonnates in each of us… it is time to listen to the earthquakes, melting glaciers and Artic plates, warming rising seas, disappearing corncrakes, the last white rhino and the increasing numbers of revolutionary loving voices beyond social media and our own embodied wisdom…