Animist Monday

Every aspect of my life is founded on the unshakeable belief in the sacredness of everything. I am, in the old-fashioned sense of the word - an animist.

 I wrote that and then wondered what I meant by 'the old-fashioned sense of the word'. It seems to me that there is an idea or a feeling amongst those who would perhaps describe themselves as Animist now (and I'm delighted to say that number is growing) that only the 'natural' world has Spirit - human creations do not; cars don't, houses don't, businesses don't. But to my mind, in order to be authentically animist, we need to concur with the notion that everything is made up of the same stuff, everything is connected, everything is containing of and contained in Spirit. Everything.

Wikipedia gives this rather lovely definition of what it is to be an animist - "Animism is the religious belief that objects, places and creatures all possess a distinct spiritual essence. Potentially, animism perceives all things—animals, plants, rocks, rivers, weather systems, human handiwork and perhaps even words—as animated and alive." Amen to that! So I guess I'm an animist in the modern sense of the word too! 

When we perceive that the world is alive, every last bit of it, then we start to live in a constant conversation - a reciprocity between ourselves and everything that is not ourselves, understanding that 'they' all have their needs, their place, their ways of being which may or may not be harmonious with our own. 

So what is the conversation you would like to have - for example - with your job, your house, your garden? What about your conversation with money? Or the one with the food you eat? 

That's nettle and wild garlic soup thickened with lentils. I give back my gratitude and a song when I pick the nettles and wild garlic, having asked if it's ok to do so. The lentils are organic and from Europe, so I hope they were farmed kindly, but I don't know, so I offer them a blessing and of course my gratitude for their life sustaining presence in my bowl.

If you're talking to your house, are you going to stand there an complain about how ugly the paint is, or how horrible the neighbours are... or are you going to thank it most gratefully for keeping the rain off you as you sleep, for keeping you warm, protecting you from the elements, giving you a place to be, to call home, however humble or imperfect? 

If you're talking to your breakfast, does it matter if it was covered in chemicals and transported half way round the world to get to you? Do you need to apologise to your food for the way it has been treated? A conversation with our own bellies can be a life changing experience, beginning with gratitude for there being anything at all on the plate. 

How might a few moments in an animist mindset change your relationship to literally everything? 

This morning my lovely Treesister sister Tracy Shefras sent me this poem, she had been speaking with a Holly Tree and received these words -  

Be like a child
No Goal No Destination

Simply Present

No Agenda

Life will unfold itself

Into Spectacular Everyday Living

Surely it can’t get any better than That

Finding the Extraordinary in

A mop and bucket

A pair of garden shears

A bowl full of washing up

Surely the Mystery is veiled in The Mundane

The Rote

The Habitual

The Magnificent Present

No need to search for Anything

It's all right under your nose

Have fun just living Daily

Take a moment to gather the required Tools

To Perform

Your Own Personal

Height of Living
Quench Yourself First



There is so much beauty in engaging with the 'more than human world' ( a term created by David Abram I think), so much to gain, so very little to loose.

Grief is a Doorway

It's 3:23 in the morning and I'm awake because my great great grandchildren won't let me sleep, My great great grandchildren ask me in dreams; "what did you do while the planet was plundered? what did you do when the earth was unraveling?"—Drew Dellinger

"An apprenticeship with sorrow offers us the chance to build our capacity to stay present when the intense feelings of grief arise. Through meaningful rituals, a community of friends, some time in benevolent solitude, and effective practices that help us stretch into our bigger selves, we are offered the opportunity to develop a living relationship with loss. We can recover a faith in grief that recognizes that grief is not here to take us hostage, but instead to reshape us in some fundamental way, to help us become our mature selves, capable of living in the creative tension between grief and gratitude. In so doing, our hearts are ripened and made available for the great work of loving our lives and this astonishing world. It is an act of soul activism." The Wild Edge of Sorrow, Francis Weller

For many the only sane reaction to the news (or the 'not news', as so many broadcasters and newspapers are steadfastly refusing to report on it) of the 6th mass extinction and global heating/climate change - is grief.  I have always referred to grief as "the left hand of love" - for we do not grieve what we do not love.

It is widely acknowledged that there are a number of stages to the process of grief. The first of these is denial - which is where the majority seem to be right now. Perhaps the thinking is "if we ignore it, it might go away", because we don't want it to be true. Ever fibre of our being wants our world to be full of all the beauty there has ever been; all the diversity, all the colours the flavours the different kinds of beingness - all those who are currently dying at a rate of 150 to 200 every single day. It seems inconceivable that one day we might wake up to a world where there are no Polar Bears, Gorillas, Sea Turtles, Orangutans,  Snow Leopards, or Tasmanian Tigers - oh no, wait, there are no Tasmanian Tigers, they've gone. A world where the intricately woven web of life is broken. A world that is so radically changed that it cannot support the lives of those with whom we are consanguine, and it cannot support our lives. A world of famine, and flood. Desertification and starvation.

After denial comes anger. "ANGER is the deepest form of compassion, for another, for the world, for the self, for a life, for the body, for a family and for all our ideals, all vulnerable and all, possibly about to be hurt. Stripped of physical imprisonment and violent reaction, anger is the purest form of care, the internal living flame of anger always illuminates what we belong to, what we wish to protect and what we are willing to hazard ourselves for. What we usually call anger is only what is left of its essence when we are overwhelmed by its accompanying vulnerability, when it reaches the lost surface of our mind or our body’s incapacity to hold it, or when it touches the limits of our understanding. What we name as anger is actually only the incoherent physical incapacity to sustain this deep form of care in our outer daily life; the unwillingness to be large enough and generous enough to hold what we love helplessly in our bodies or our mind with the clarity and breadth of our whole being.

What we have named as anger on the surface is the violent outer response to our own inner powerlessness, a powerlessness connected to such a profound sense of rawness and care that it can find no proper outer body or identity or voice, or way of life to hold it. What we call anger is often simply the unwillingness to live the full measure of our fears or of our not knowing... in the face of simply being alive and loving those with whom we live.

Our anger breaks to the surface most often through our feeling there is something profoundly wrong with this powerlessness and vulnerability… Anger in its pure state is the measure of the way we are implicated in the world and made vulnerable through love in all its specifics.

Anger truly felt at its center is the essential living flame of being fully alive and fully here; it is a quality to be followed to its source, to be prized, to be tended, and an invitation to finding a way to bring that source fully into the world through making the mind clearer and more generous, the heart more compassionate and the body larger and strong enough to hold it. What we call anger on the surface only serves to define its true underlying quality by being a complete but absolute mirror-opposite of its true internal essence." David Whyte on Anger, from his wonderful book 'Consolations'. 

The original model for the stages of grief comes from the work of Elisabeth  Kübler-Ross and David Kessler and was specific to the grief felt by someone who loves someone who is dying or is themselves dying. In this model anger is followed by bargaining, depression and acceptance - these pre-suppose that the final outcome is unavoidable and acceptance, therefore, is the only sane destination. As this model relates to our grief for our Earth and for the lives of other Earth-dwellers, ourselves and our descendants - the outcome is not necessarily certain, and at the same time completely, unavoidably, definitely certain. We will all die - there's no getting round it. The Earth will die one day. BUT, we're not dead yet, and now, although the diagnosis is bad and the prognosis is not much better, what's happening is not yet a terminal diagnosis. We haven't been given a date to organise our funerals by, we've been given an opportunity to carry on and become very ill, very fast, or change our ways now and have a future which might include an ease-full old age.

So out of anger - righteous, heartful anger - needs to come the bargaining that finds it's expression in action. Action right now. Actions that change the way we live, not only on a personal scale but on a national and international scale. We, the humans, have the power to make a difference to how the next century looks for all of life on earth. But we must do it now.  Or get used to the idea of depression, followed by acceptance, followed by death for the majority of us, and sooner rather than later.

We have everything to gain and nothing to lose but our sense of powerlessness.

Related Poem Content Details

Turn annotations off BY THEODORE ROETHKE In a dark time, the eye begins to see,  I meet my shadow in the deepening shade;    I hear my echo in the echoing wood—  A lord of nature weeping to a tree.  I live between the heron and the wren,    Beasts of the hill and serpents of the den.  What’s madness but nobility of soul  At odds with circumstance? The day’s on fire!    I know the purity of pure despair,  My shadow pinned against a sweating wall.    That place among the rocks—is it a cave,    Or winding path? The edge is what I have.  A steady storm of correspondences!  A night flowing with birds, a ragged moon,    And in broad day the midnight come again!    A man goes far to find out what he is—  Death of the self in a long, tearless night,    All natural shapes blazing unnatural light.  Dark, dark my light, and darker my desire.    My soul, like some heat-maddened summer fly,    Keeps buzzing at the sill. Which I is I?  A fallen man, I climb out of my fear.    The mind enters itself, and God the mind,    And one is One, free in the tearing wind.

Wishing you Love (and Grief) in 2019

The Peace of Wild Things

When despair grows in me

and I wake in the middle of the night at the least sound

in fear of what my life and my children's lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake

rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.

I come into the peace of wild things

who do not tax their lives with forethought of grief.

I come into the presence of still water.

And I feel above me the day-blind stars

waiting for their light. For a time

I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.

- Wendell Berry

Perhaps you will think it a cruel thing to say - I wish you, with all my heart, a 2019 that begins with love and with grief. Not just any old grief, I do not wish bad or sad things to happen to you, but I do most sincerely want you to understand the bad and sad things that are already happening to all of us. That will get worse and worse if we don't act now.

I hope you will forgive me. There is no malice whatsoever in this wishing - it comes from love and only love. I wish most of all that you fall in love with our beautiful planet, with your world, our world. I wish for you to love it passionately, with all of your heart. All of it, or just your own little patch - either will do. 

Then my wish for you, dear friend, without the slightest hint of bitch or witch, is that you grieve. I wish that your heart will feel like it's breaking with the pain of our broken world - because if you feel like that, it's because you understand what we have done; you know about the sixth mass extinction, about global heating, know about the storm and starvation scenario that our children have to look forwards to. Know that those who are children now are going to be living in a world which will be effectively habitable for humans, or not,
depending upon our choices right now. 

If you feel grief, then perhaps you will know that water is sacred. That water is life. That if we carry on polluting the water in the way we are currently then our descendants will inherit a planet in which there will be wars over water and in which even we, the rich ones, the ones who currently have everything, are quite likely to be starving, wanting for even the basics. 

When your grief spills over, and tears come, then my wish for you is that anger follows. Anger at what we have done, what we have allowed to be done in our name. 

And that out of anger, comes action.

My dearest wish for you, for me, for all of us, is that we start ACTING, right now. We know what needs to be done. We know that much of our current life style is totally unsustainable, and it's very clear that our Governments are not going to do anything like enough. So it has to be us. We have to be the ones to choose what our future looks like. Each one of us has power, especially as a 'consumer' to make a difference. If we keep buying chickens who have been raised in sheds where they see no daylight, have hardly enough room to turn around, are fed growth hormones and penicillin routinely, are smushed into a machine to be plucked while they are still alive and are then placed on a plastic tray and wrapped in more plastic - then that is what will be in the shops. If we keep buying washing powder, or water, or sugary drinks, or even yoghurt in plastic bottles and tubs - then we will live in a world where the seas are dead and the beaches are covered in plastic.

If we keep buying more and more and more and throwing the 'old' one 'away' then more and more and more of our land and sky will be full of these things, either buried exactly as they are or burned and released into the atmosphere or washed into the sea. There is no 'away'. There is only a place you cannot see from where you are standing.  Someone else's door step.

If we do not chose to reduce, re-use, re-cycle, re-purpose, re-invent, redress - who will chose it for us?

Every single one of us needs to give our very serious consideration to -
not getting on an aeroplane,
not buying anything sold in the kind of plastic that doesn't stretch when you push it with your finger - this is the stuff that's easy to recycle,
not taking the car if there's any alternative (walk, bike, bus, train or even - don't go!),
not leaving the lights on, changing to a sustainable energy supplier,
not turning a blind eye when our office/shop leaves the lights on,
not buying another one, a newer one, a better one of something that works just fine, buy only what we really need, and then consider buying second-hand/used/vintage/antique,
or from a local artisan maker who's creations are ethical and sustainable.
Not washing our clothes unless they are actually dirty or smelly and then washing them on the shortest, coolest cycle that will get them clean.
Not using chemicals - on our bodies, in our homes, on the food we buy, 
Not endlessly updating our wardrobe.

 If what stops you from buying organic food is the cost then I most respectfully suggest that you need to ask yourself what you mean by 'cost'.  Is £1 more or less today worth trading your future for?

Is the palm oil in your convenience food worth the destruction of thousands of lives half a world away?

Is the beef in your burger (especially if you are in America) worth the loss of the Rainforest? Is it worth the loss of the lungs of the world? Is it worth the carbon that won't be sequestered by those trees, now that they are gone? The spiralling temperatures, the storms, the floods, the famines...

Do these questions not fill you with rage and grief? If they do not, you have not been paying attention. Please go and find out why they should - on our children's lives, I beg you.


My prayer for 2019 is that we pay attention, remember the next generations, change the ways we are behaving.


Most of all, I wish you love.

May 2019 be full of it,
for all of us.
And all our relations. 

The Power of Beauty

He and I have been courting one-another for about three years. I saw him first as a young fawn, nosing around in the sparse grass under hazel and oak, ears twitching at flies. I saw him again as the small herd made it's way up and down the hill; more grass at the top, more shelter at the bottom. He was more visible still as the leaves started to fall and I caught a glimpses of him and his fellow bucks (a male fallow deer is a buck, not a stag) tangling antlers in play, scratching the soft down off them on the trunks of the patient trees, and then this year he clearly fought for the right to mate. About a month ago I saw him following an exquisite little white doe, my heart danced for joy at the sight of her, and then leapt still higher as I heard their mating, which was surprisingly brief and surprisingly grunty!

This morning he simply stopped and stared at me; not running, not moving, just watching with those beautiful soft eyes. Then Druid dog ran up to see what was keeping me and the moment was over, he didn't see the deer at all (he's very small and the undergrowth is quite tall, a fact that obscures much of life from his view!)

Walking with a glad heart I was then taken with the beauty of the trees, stopping to simply admire the extravagant gorgeousness of autumn leaves in sunshine. The south westerly wind rustled his fingers through the branches and for a moment it was raining red and gold. I tried to capture tumbling leaves with my phone but had missed the moment, and I stood remembering how as a child I had run around after leaves, believing that I would be lucky all year if I could catch one. I always got one in the end, and I've always felt incredibly lucky.

I remember hearing the Dine elder and wise woman Pat McCabe speak about 'trying an idea on' - thinking something and wondering whether it's true or not, thinking it and seeing what happens when you think it. So there I was wandering along the lane, feeling full to the brim with the beauty of autumn, and wondering if actually this was the correct way to be feeling at this time. How can my heart be so happy, singing with the trees here, when trees in the Amazon are being cut down at a rate of more than 150 acres every minute of every day and 78  million acres ever year? How can I fill my lungs to sing when the lungs of the Earth are being destroyed? 

I looked at the trees and the leaves and the sunshine and the words "Changing Woman" came to me. I saw that the Earth herself is 'Changing Woman' - there are only two things that are certain in this life, one is death, the other is change. Everything changes, everything must change; life is dependent upon change.

So perhaps it's utterly appropriate to be happily in love with the Earth, with all of it, and in particular with this little bit that I have the honour and good luck to live upon. Not to spend my time in grief, bemoaning the loss of things I cannot see from here, but to wander - heart-full - in my own place, and to sing out that love, and live that love with every thought and deed. And as I had this thought a beautiful leaf landed on my heart, and the sun came out.

I feel I have my answer. I know that grief immobilises me, that when I attempt to face all the horrors of the cataclysmic changes going on in the world I can come up with nothing more useful to do than what I already do: I'm trying to be zero waste, I don't buy plastic, I do buy organic, I try never to drive my car for only one reason, I haven't been on an aeroplane since 1998, the list goes on. And the more I walked this morning the more I became absolutely certain that unreservedly loving and celebrating my patch of land is the best, most useful, thing I could possibly do.

I'm not suggesting for a second that this is something to do instead of trying really, really hard to be a blessing not a curse on this land - I'm suggesting that the more we fall in love with Earth, the more we celebrate our indivisibility from all else that is here, the the more we (or I, certainly) will feel able to do what I already do and find the strength for more, and more, even knowing that it makes the very small difference that it does. I will remember also that the difference between life and death is a moment, or a millimetre, and so each small choice by each person counts - could be the difference between life and death for all of us.

It's time....

Back when God was a boy, back - in fact - when God was a Goddess; juicy, ripe, fecund and overflowing with bounty - the necessities of life were seen as gifts from Earth. Mother Earth, Ma, Madron, Britannia, Rhiannon, Elen, whatever we chose to call her she provided us with everything we needed.  As far as we can tell from this end of history - we were in love with our Earth, we were grateful for her gifts and counted our blessings.

We seem to have viewed Earth as Feminine - it makes sense, women are the one's who give birth...life clearly comes through the female. We scratched our gratitude as magical fertility symbols into the soft clay of pots, carved the curve of round bellied women in clay, wood, stone, antler and bone and wove it into the very fabric of life. Our gratitude, our reverence, and our constant hope that She would continue to provide.  We were in relationship with the Sacred Feminine.

When farming came along - if you have ever actually tried existing as a hunter-gatherer you will understand with piercing, tummy-aching clarity what the advantages of farming are - these freely given gifts slowly embarked on a journey that ended when they became 'produce' - something to be owned, bought and sold.

Clever little beans that we are, as our population increased and we strayed into territories that were not necessarily as fertile as the one's we had left, we found a way to increase the odds of there being any given foodstuff where we wanted it when we wanted it.

Sadly, over time, we have become so disconnected from the original 'source of all' that we fondly imagine we are completely in control of the process. We feel that as we buy and sell and hoard our 'goods' we are making the world a better place, few of us noticing that it is to the advantage of the few not the many that these things are organised. We have fallen out of relationship with The Mother of All Things.

Farming originated in Sumer around 4,000 years ago, and it seems from the records that as soon as we started to farm we changed from a society with equal rights for everyone to one that started to dis-empower and denigrate the feminine. Agricultural surplus meant that particular landscapes became worth invading and fighting over. War was what made men great, and military leaders became more important than the goddesses of the land.

There is an often relayed myth that says in early Celtic society land had always been owned by women and passed down through maternal blood lines. There is apparently no written evidence for this assertion, but scholars suggest that there may be considerable truth in the 'myth' simply because it has been related as fact so frequently in what was written down. Either way, times clearly changed, and even among the Celts the rights of women were eroded. Goddesses were conquered by Gods, women became chattels.

Time passed in an increasingly masculine world until according to a book written in 1777 (by that prolific author 'anon') "in Saxon times, the rank and consequence of women appear to have been considerable..... the Norman invasion was fatal to the rights of women." With the Normans came a lineage of brutal Christian kings and the 'Doomsday Book' - a giant list of all the things that these kings had dominion over. It is interesting to note that it was the Church that owned one quarter of all the land in England.

In these islands of Britian the dis-empowerment and denigration of the feminine reached it's height during the 'witch trials' of the 15th, 16th and 17th Centuries. Christianity had arrived here in dribs and drabs with the Romans in the first century AD, but really gained a hold in 597 with the arrival of Augustine. Much of Europe and small patches of Britian were not officially Christianised until as late as the 11th Century but churches were built upon sacred places, local Goddesses were turned into Christian Saints and the feminine became not sacred, not even just a little bit less good than the masculine - but the very embodiment of Evil.

Christianity speaks of the Father of All Things, not The Mother. The followers of this father and his son took it upon themselves to root out belief systems that did not concur with their own. Before Christianity the majority of healers were women; among the healing wisdoms of such women were the herbs, charms, positions and potions required to bring a child safely to birth - they were honoured and respected until the Inquisition announced that no-one did more harm to the Catholic faith than midwives. A new law was passed saying that anyone who was 'curing' without having studied at a university was a witch and must die. Since most women were barred from university this was a guarantee that women's healing powers and relationship with the healing properties of plants, spirits and intention would have to either end or hide.

As women's power was taken away from her so was the land taken away from the people - and vice versa. The first enclosures of common land that we know of here in Britain happened in the 12th Century. Enclosure meant farming that was undertaken by the many became to the advantage of the few. Vast swathes of common land and 'open fields' were enclosed and access to common land severely restricted. Access therefore to free food and medicine and engagement with the land as Sacred Ground became made smaller and smaller as the rights of 'owners' became more and more violently enforced.

Rebellion was frequently followed by charges of witchcraft and hundreds of women were killed and many thousands more silenced by violence. The global figure for women executed for witchcraft is thought to be something like 9 million. We actually got off very lightly here (if hundreds of women dead rather than millions can be called such a thing). Torture was not a legal way to extort confession and being tried as a witch in The British Isles was not necessarily a death sentence - only about 25% of those tried were actually killed. The story is not the same elsewhere in Europe and America where horrific tortures were endured and death was the almost certain outcome of an accusation of witchcraft. We get the expression 'the third degree' from these times - people, mostly women, were tortured in ways that every part of me cringes away from, I cannot even write about it. Many confessed having been tortured once, most confessed having been tortured twice, everyone either confessed or died having been tortured three times.

It is no co-incidence that one of the most powerful symbols of 'witchcraft' is the cauldron. What is a cauldron if not a creative container - a wombic space? It is the creative nature of Woman and her connection to the Earth and the Cosmic Womb that the dominant paradigm has sought to limit. We have been persecuted for our authentic power; for living our creativity, our sensuality, our intuition and our wildness. For far too long now it seems that the toxic male has sought to dis-empower the female and attain 'power over' - because he does not have 'power of'. Our history has been moulded by misogynists and as it is always written by the winners we have suffered grievously at it's hands. The Malleus Maleficarum (a handbook for witch-hunting and identification) was written in 1486 by two monks at the instigation of Pope Innocent the 8th and it singled out women as the primary practitioners of witchcraft. This one book was responsible for generations of children watching as their mothers, sisters and aunts burned at the stake throughout Europe and the New World. Between 1486 when it was written and 1735 when the Witchcraft Act was repealed paganism became devil worship and what little remained of our 'folk' customs, and our living relationship with the Spirits of the land, became heresy.

The enclosure of our common resources; from land and forests to the inhabitants of the oceans and the water itself, is still happening now. All things are increasingly creeping into 'private' ownership. Our sacred relationship to the land is our power, but more than that we ARE the land; we are Sovereignty. I hesitate to use that word 'resources' - I don't mean it in a 'productivity' sort of a way, but in the sense that we are resourced both by the generosity of  Life; in that we need food, water, air etc. to continue to live, and in the sense that we are energetically resourced by our connection to All that Is. It is only when we are disconnected from our sense of being indivisibly interwoven with everything and everyone else that it becomes possible to control us. We too become a resource, we become produce. 

By 'we' I do not exclusively mean women, I mean the feminine in all of us. This may well sound like a polemic against men but I assure you it is not. It is not even a polemic against the masculine or indeed one against Christianity or farmers. As someone who partly grew up on a farm I know that farming and respect and gratitude for Life are far from incompatible, indeed the majority of farmers love both land and animals deeply and care passionately for their welfare. But as actual farmers have been replaced by the CEO's of enormous agribusinesses, respect and gratitude have been lost. We are all of us a balance (or an imbalance) between masculine and feminine energies. Typically but not exclusively the feminine will be most powerfully expressed by a female body. But the land belongs to all of us, she has given birth to all of us, she is our most ancient ancestor. The de-humanisation and subjugation of half of the population is the de-humanisation and subjugation of half of all of us. The feminine has been dis-empowered, or at least our connection to her deep authentic wildness has. The common ground of our humanity has been fenced. We and our land to which we belong are being abused; we know this in our bones, in the very beating of our hearts. Bones and a heart that are made out of the same stuff exactly as all the rest of creation.

HOWEVER - In actual fact, women in the west have more rights at this moment in history than at any time in the last 4,000ish years. There are women in positions of power from Germany's chancellor to Canada's 50% female government. I believe that this is 100% connected to the land. When survival was an issue the feminine was honoured -  when we invented farming survival was not an issue in the same way, it didn't feel necessary to acknowledge the power of the land, of Earth, of the feminine, so we stopped. We forgot our lives depended on Her. Now, our survival is once again in question. Humanity has brought Earth to the brink of collapse. Species are being wiped out at a rate of hundreds every day as a result of our treatment of our home, the biosphere is clearly unstable, global warming is quite possibly out of control and it's almost certainly too late. Self interest is reviving our connection to the Divine Feminine. We've remembered we need her.

What's needed now is for us to move beyond patriarchy and beyond feminism to the place where the feminine and the masculine are honoured in all of us, and exist not in warring polarity but in balance. Only then will we start to be able to create a world where respect and tolerance are the norms, and where 'all that is' can exist peacefully. Everything is made up of the same stuff, everything has spirit, everything IS an emanation of The Divine. Perhaps if we can bring ourselves back into balance then we can bring our world back into balance. If we can re-empower the feminine, love and honour  Mother Earth and remember that we are, all of us, responsible for or participant in this broken patriarchal narrative in which we find ourselves - then we can change the outcome. Or, even if it is the End of Days, let those days at least be days of beauty and of peace between us and each other and our Earth.

Here, I've picked you an apple.

It contains neither knowledge nor shame.
But wisdom.

The knowing that you and I and everything else are related. All one family. All one.

Shall we love each other as though this were true? Shall we treat each other as though we all belonged here, to the Earth?

My deepest longing is that it may be so.
What is yours?