Spirit of life

Photo: Time for a change. The background is a quilt my great grandmother made for me when I was born.

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"All of us have a God in us, and that God is the spirit that unites all life, everything that is on this planet. It must be this voice that is telling me to do something, and I am sure it's the same voice that is speaking to everybody on this planet—at least everybody who seems to be concerned about the fate of the world."

~Kenyan Environment Minister Wangari Maathai, winner of the Nobel Peace Prize for 2004


"Urban people are connected to the land by their gastrointestinal tract."

~American poet Wendell Berry


"Nature is the ultimate source of everything we have....Preventing environmental degradation is therefore essential to world security and world peace."

~Canadian environmentalist David Suzuki

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She was the first African female, and the first environmentalist, to win the Nobel Peace Prize. Sometimes it takes women to get us thinking. Our culture traditionally denigrated female energy. I heard it once on a Classical music program: a commentator saying the even-numbered Beethoven symphonies were feminine, weaker, less important. If you listen to the Sixth Symphony, it's about nature, peace. The Fifth is about strife and triumph. Why is peace a less significant statement than war?

It is the women weeping for their children who teach us that war will not answer our world's problems. It is the Wangari Maathais, willing to get arrested for planting trees in protest, willing to let their husbands divorce them for being too strong, who will change things around, if anyone does.

A few years ago my friend Daniel sent me to a reiki practitioner for my birthday. It was a remarkable experience; I can still see the visualizations from that session. I drifted down a long river with a high tower at the end, its height hidden in pink clouds. Somewhere the sun was setting, casting brilliant light through the mist. I did not reach the tower. When she aroused me from that trance, Lise said she sensed feminine energy had been an important part of my life for a long time, and I needed to get more in touch with my masculine energy.

About that time I took an interest in Tarot cards and other New Age devices. I bought a pack of chakra cards designed for meditation on various aspects of the self. Strangely, one card in the pack was duplicated; it was Willpower. That was always one of the weakest aspects of my psyche.

We tend to identify strength, willpower and determination with masculine energy. Why is that? Maybe it isn't the masculine energy I need to claim after all, but the power of a woman who was willing to stand up to her country's president for decades, fight for Kenya's Green Belt program to increase her nation's social, economic and environmental security.

Willpower is associated with the throat, my chakra that is most blocked. I resist speaking out, claiming what I believe. Even knowing what I believe is a challenge.

I have been contemplating mortaility. It is not only my own life that will pass away, but also my culture and this civilization. All these things come and go like the ebb and flow of a tide. They have done so since the beginning of history, and will continue for the rest of time. Our minds cannot live forever. Something will destroy our society as we know it. That may come in my lifetime, in my children's lifetime, or perhaps not for several generations. But inevitably it will come. It is the nature of the cosmos, and our lives are a mere blink of the cosmic eye. So why should I bother caring about the environment?

Monday afternoon while the girls were busy packing, I went down on the dock for the year's final communion with Lake Fletcher: the deep blue water, the mix of colours across the lake: cedars, pines, maples, birches. I have grown accustomed to that vast wall of green, a multitude of leaves containing millions upon millions of chlorophyll engines driving the force of life. Sunlight passing through microscopic chambers is converted to the sugars I eat, the energy that moves my muscles, lets me breathe air. All this wonder is impermanent, and yet it's vital to my life now, in this moment of existence.

More than ever I must learn to live in the moment, to feel power flowing to enact whatever makes life worthy while it lasts.

Handwriting analysis: loner with a strong self-concept

A sample from my handwritten journal.

Analysis from http://www.handwritingwizard.com/index.phtml, thanks to manhattan for the link.

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