Of all visions accessible on this living Earth, no natural sight is more beautiful that a mother and child. If the mother and child are human (no matter of what race), they are beautiful.
If mother and child are lion or tiger, horse, bison, swan, or mountain sheep, beautiful.
If mother and child are bear, be they black or brown, grizzly, polar or panda, beautiful.
If mother and child are orcas or whales (from whatever pod the orcas, or whatever the type of whale), beautiful.
And on and on, throughout the visible enchantment of evolutionary diversity: Earth shares Her fecundity of magic and birthing miracles in patterns, cycles, and circles of rotating seasons.
Remember to re-member your existential disconnections back into Earth’s biosphere of relationships: back to the immensity, intensity, and intimacy of nature.
Remember to think like a mountain, to grow inclusive and sustainable, horizontally vast, vertically profound, practicing patience and assuring habitation for ranging species and communities, nuanced shades of ecologic-identity and spiritually beneficent dreams.
The constancy of flowing water wears away the hardest monuments of imperial stone.
Live compassionately and find the Way with your uniqueness of welcome, passion and embrace. Return to walking in the Beauty Way. Return to traveling the Red Road of becoming appropriate and responsibly human.
As we emerge through time’s emergency into the sacredness of maturity, we can release old views and the old need for clinging to transcendence. Deep in the numinous dialogue of maturity we learn to grow to the height of treetops, to trekking over rainbows, simultaneously rooting profound, and deeper still, into the ecosophy of the given and the open, and the narrative ancestry of where we came from, where we are and who we shall yet become along Earth’s continuum.
When in the here and now and when we are reconnected through Earth and Cosmos to reverence for all life forms, with our souls we go immersed in the renaissance spirituality of inscendence*. Then it is not to leave the Earth to find peace and plenitude in a hereafter, but to make peace flourish among us and attend, in trust and lovingkindness, the feast of inclusiveness, the banquet of biotic commensality.
Abide in the grounding dimension of natural creation. Abide via acts of beauty in rituals of community, communion, and affirmation, offering prayers as cultures of spontaneity, appropriateness, attunement, and metamorphic reconciliation.
Return honoring to everyday activity. Sound the Orphic voice that subverts the shallow mind, plants visions of awakening in buried, sleeping souls. Bestow blessings of wakefulness. An open hand is a blessing. Magic in the language of eyes is a blessing. A blessing too is healing touch. Always the dignity of recognition. Making conditional the union of courage and gentleness.
Restore truth. From truth grows trust. Through trust dialogue flowers between us. Through dialogue, shell-hardness cracks and possibilities break open. New life enters the world of potentials through opening.
To Earth, every mother is an Earth Mother, precious, nourishing, beautiful. Mothers respect this instinctual charge. To Earth, each child, a child of the Earth, is continuance, after its kind, renewal and beautiful. Children be birthed into belonging: honor, hallow, and love the gift of life. It is for you to become beatitudes of planetary future.
If you want to learn the way of the shaman, druid, alchemist, or sage, study the art of a tree. I you wish to experience the ecstasy of unknowing, go down to the ocean or recline in grass, with eyes upward, reflecting a starry sky in a cosmic night. If you desire to feel the sacred blessing of beauty without preparing to depart for the world hereafter, be at ease: look on a mother and child.
*A word originating with environmentalist Thomas Berry, “inscendence” is the future of Earth Spirituality; a directional alternative to transcendence, which locates the home of holiness in Heaven—not on this planet but in an ethereal world hereafter.
David Sparenberg is a world citizen, environmental & peace advocate & activist, actor, poet-playwright, storyteller, teacher and author.
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