We who get to be alive right now are living in the sixth great age of extinctions. We passed planetary overshoot a while ago and the ecological and societal effects are irreversible. This is the doom some speak of.
Along with climate change and the move from religion to spirituality, another sign of our times is the rise of the G word and the F word alive and well in high places. I am speaking of course of Greed and Fascism.
When current events and self-perpetuating systems pin me in the extractive, enslaving, short-sighted story, there are 3 practices that help me to listen for divine guidance and to re-engage in the love story’s emerging plot.
Folks, this is serious stuff. In fact, managing human-aggravated global warming and climate change is the single most important moral matter of our generation.
Here we are, immersed in a swirl of biospheric breakdown and societal strife that isn’t going away; in fact, it’s getting worse. The darkness and distress cannot be passed off as the wrath of an angry God. Rather, we ourselves are at cause, and these are the real end times.
In the Northern hemisphere, we are in the season of Fall and harvest. It is also the time when a number of cultures and traditions encourage communion with our benevolent ancestors, saints, and spiritual teachers.
My thesis is simply this: A comet actually is heading our way. We ourselves set it in motion millennia ago. But only recently have scientists, echoing longstanding indigenous warnings, charted its course and voiced the alarm. Its name is Anthropocentrism and these are the End Times because human-centeredness will prove to be nearly as devastating as the comet in the movie.
The most ancient path I know is the ecological one. Creation is an intricate living system that honors life, death and rebirth within Earth’s natural cycles; where reciprocity is honorable, and all life is sacred. We humans, who happen to be mammals (but also a bit of a virus), have trouble remembering the path of Creation.
Our planet is not well. That’s an understatement. The Earth is in a state of crisis. Human aggravated global warming/Climate Change is a real and present danger.
We could describe the pain we’re in right now as the colonial anesthesia wearing off. In epic fashion, events of the past many months have connected all the threads of the story: white supremacy and racism, detention centers and prisons, militarism and policing, the wealth of a few at the expense of essential workers, broken healthcare, hurricanes, derechos, and wildfires, and certainly others.