This is my response after watching the Webinar #1 replay again, and watching the YouTube “Conscious Apocalypse” slideshow.

It is so much material to integrate! I watched Terrapocalypse to Earthrise three times and it was not until the third time that I was able to take notes in my own words, and feel the full power of the vision of the lecture. Each viewing, I appreciate more how beautifully the presentation is structured.

I don't want to post the pages and pages it would take to share my full response. So I've tried to feel what is most important to me, now, in this moment and place of my current life. I am writing this from my little rental home in the Phinney Ridge neighborhood of Seattle. My youngest step-daughter, Pearl, is sitting next to me on the couch, reading a book she picked up at the downtown central library this afternoon. She rode the bus to get it and the adventure of that may be even more important to her than the book. It is 5:44pm on Saturday and it is 80 degrees inside our cottage and 80 degrees outside too. We have the front and back doors open in the hope of a breeze. Our west-facing windows, which look out over Ballard, to the Sound, Bainbridge Island, and the gorgeous Olympic Mountains, are our favorite part of this rental home, but we overheat all summer long. I think to write all of this to situate myself in terra, and the notion occurred to me in direct response to the terra ethic that I am sensing from all of the material.

It is also a way of expressing what I care so deeply about: the future for living beings, yes, and I really feel it deeply when I let myself represent that by saying the future for Pearl. It is in this way that I understand the Onandaga prophecy about a marker of relationship to the earth is how people treat their children. Yes, for me, the specific, local reality of this precious step-daughter grants me even more courage and resolve and love and willingness to face terrapocalypse and attempt some renewing form of terraspirituality. I was trying before I knew Pearl existed, but she gives me a whole new sense of urgency.

I also think about Jung's contribution to our possibility of treating our children better than in the past. The lecture has emphasized Jung's discovery of reimagining the gods and also Jung's discovery of the diversity of the psyche. Yes! My gratitude for the Jungian discoveries is so huge. I think Jung, and those who have followed, have offered such encouraging examples of conscious descent, that conscious relationship to shadow material is possible, and this suggests we may not always have to play unconscious contents out on our children or the landscape. That is one of the ways in which I want to dream the myth on. The way we treat our children is so dependent upon our relationship to the unconscious.

For me, Earthrise as an image of our new story is complicated. I think the film, “Gravity” captures that complexity. The earth from that vantage is so powerfully beautiful. The film represents the classic aesthetic response really well I think. But what are the humans doing up there? I recently saw the image of the first untethered astronaut, floating in space, the earth at his side. I'll try to figure out how to attach that image to this posting. For me, it is an image of the ultimate “alienation” of modern humankind. Detached from earth. Detached from the mother ship. The only “life support” is one's little space suit. It feels like a perfect symbol of the end point of the enlightenment to me. For me, “Gravity” is the new “Wizard of Oz”, also featuring a heroine who is dealing with issues about trying to go home. So maybe Earthrise is the image we need to appreciate Home, but I also think of what it took to get us up there, and all the space trash that such journeying has already meant. And when Sandra Bullock finally does make it back to the primordial mud, I am aware that this is not what Mother Earth feels like in many places now, and given the 5 Earth-Altering Events that we allowed ourselves to contemplate in Webinar #1, Mother Earth may not feel like Home for long.

I have been thinking about a lecture I heard by Keiron Le Grice in which he said the Cartesian move finds its ultimate expression in Nietzche's declaration that God is Dead and that we had to live out that evolution of consciousness as a way of developing a separateness from the unity consciousness of participation mystique. Now, he suggested, is the time for return to the ground of being, not as an infant but as an adult. There's the transrevolution, I guess. I appreciated Keiron's willingness to see that something important may have been accomplished in what has felt like such a disaster in the modern history of Western intellectual culture, and it IS a disaster if we don't do the renewal and return phase now, but maybe the science and technology of the last 400 years had some real purpose in this model of evolving consciousness. So similarly, maybe the Earthrise image is one of the great gifts we received from the science and technology of the BIG MACHINE Eradigm, but for me personally, I am looking for an image that is more grounded – that is me with my arms wrapped around Mother Earth and her oceans and atmosphere embracing me too.

I am so loving this class. I cannot imagine being given more rich ideas and images to ponder. It is helping me to think and feel much more clearly about the dilemmas I have felt as I have tried to find my place in climate activism which has plenty of shadow material of its own. But I think I better write about that separately, when I am ready to respond to Webinar #2.

untethered astronaut.jpg