Our relatedness with other living forms provides us something we sorely need: a reverence for the life of all creatures great and small, and an expanded view of our place in nature__ot as rulers over it, but as participants in it.
Raithe enjoyed a good campfire. Something comforting about the dancing light, the smell of smoke, and the way his face and chest were hot but his backside cold. He sensed a profound meaning in this duality as well as in the enigma of flickering flames. The fire spirit spoke in spitting sparks and shifts of choking smoke, but the meaning of each remained a mystery. Everything in nature was that way. All of it spoke to him--to everyone--in a language few could understand. What secrets, what wisdom, and what horrors might he learn if only he knew what it all meant.
Age of Myth
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Raithe enjoyed a good campfire. Something comforting about the dancing light, the smell of smoke, and the way his face and chest were hot but his backside cold. He sensed a profound meaning in this duality as well as in the enigma of flickering flames. The fire spirit spoke in spitting sparks and shifts of choking smoke, but the meaning of each remained a mystery. Everything in nature was that way. All of it spoke to him--to everyone--in a language few could understand. What secrets, what wisdom, and what horrors might he learn if only he knew what it all meant.
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[Some scientific] experiments_tell us that what we consider the objective world depends in some measure on our own conscious processes. There is no fixed eternal reality_ true understanding is not to be achieved with the rational mind.
The face of everyone in mine,the oneness with every blade of grass,the flight with the flocks in the sky, the dance with the clouds across endless skies.The strength with every tree,rooting deep into mother earth,springing forth into the heavens,extending branches of gratitude and love....Such a privilege, honor and grace,such a gift and joy.
The wild nature has a vast integrity to it. It means to establish one's territory, to find one's pack, to be in one's body with certainty and pride regardless of the body's gifts and limitations, to speak and act in one's own behalf, to be aware, alert, to draw on the innate feminine powers of intuition and sensing, to come into one's cycles, to find what one belongs to, to rise with dignity, to retain as much consciousness as possible. -Clarissa Pinkola Estés, Women Who Run With The Wolves, Singing Over The Bones, P10.
The current climate change is an outer mirror of our inner consciousness. It is an outer mirror of our attitude to try to conquer nature, instead of being in harmony with nature, but in the end the part can never conquer the whole.
As survivors and procreators, we unravel stories that at their root are not dissimilar from the habitual behaviors seen in nature. But as beings who know they will die we digress into episodes and epics that are altogether dissociated from the natural world. We may isolate this awareness, distract ourselves from it, anchor our minds far from its shores, and sublimate it as a motif in our sagas. Yet at no time and in no place are we protected from being tapped on the shoulder and reminded, __ou__e going to die, you know._ However much we try to ignore it, our consciousness haunts us with this knowledge. Our heads were baptized in the font of death; they are doused with the horror of moribundity.