by Mary M
We are all children of the same Mother–our flesh is hers; it returns to her–and sometimes she reminds us.
In the sobering events of the last days, we have watched images of her power. As the tsunami burst across the northern coastlands of Japan, we saw her face in the water.
In a less technological age, we either would not have known of these events, or the speed of communication would have required weeks to spread the story. But now our knowing is instant. Headlines on the internet reflect updates made only moments before. We watch our Mother change instantaneously, calm ocean to fierce. And we may read in the changes she brings to one place that changes may come as unexpectedly to others.
What human technology can halt the shifting of tectonic plates? What bubble of human knowing can stand against that face in the water?
It has always been so. In all our stories. Creation stories. Stories of First Man and First Woman. Stories of the Twins. Stories of the Flood. The story of Atlantis. Our grand Western archetypical poems that include the wanderings of Odysseus. Perhaps even more recently the Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner.
The bubble of our human knowing floats always within the larger circle of the sustaining Earth. And sometimes we are allowed a little more time to root in, to anchor ourselves, to strengthen our relationships.
We are all related. We are ALL of us RELATED. The air above one nation penetrates another. And so today we read about Japan’s nuclear power plant leak that has followed the earthquake’s and the tsunami’s unsettling of the ground on which it was built or–I might claim–rooted.
What happens to our roots when the ground shifts?
How strong are we in our relationships? How strong are our families, our human communities, our love and respect for our non-human brothers and sisters among whom we so often unseeingly walk?
We have the opportunity still to remember and honor these precious ones. We have time to protect those, human and not, who still walk with us, and who, even though weakened by our frequent blind pursuits of self interest, struggle to remain.
The power, as it has always been, resides in our communities. It resides in the food we eat and how we honor that food before we consume it–how attentive we are to where it came from and how it links its molecules with ours to give us strength. It resides in our neighbors and how much we demonstrate our love for them. It resides in the plants under our feet, the humble plants, that so generously heal us.
This is our work, to honor and build these connections.
And to thank our brothers and sisters in Japan, in their time of grief and rebuilding, for a little more time to burst the bubble of our own forgetting and to let in the light.
