The call to create new cosmologies

& sitting at the edge of the roof

Like many of you, I wait to see the aftermath of a second major hurricane in less than two weeks. I check in on family in the direct path of the storm, I think of strangers, of the land of Black Mountain, North Carolina which holds a special place in my heart and was hit the hardest by Helene. I look with guilt and gratitude at the blue skies and sheltered northern land around me. As the earth continues to remind us that these are not normal times, I think of the first time I woke up.

I was sitting in the old Hotel Denver in Glenwood Springs, a small mountain town in the heart of Colorado. It was frigid and misty, a transitional time between winter and spring when the town was still quiet. I came across a small bookstore with a fat black cat that wove between my legs as I browsed. I bought a book called Spiritual Ecology. It was a collection of essays about cultivating a spiritual response to our ecological crisis.

I’m not sure why I bought it really. Maybe it was the insistent purr of the cat when I picked it up, or the clarifying mountain air. Because up until that point in my life, I had simply been wandering and wondering, catching and riding the coattails of my next curiosity.

This is how I ended up far from my origins in Michigan, far from the job I had landed at an advertising agency after graduation with an art degree. Now I was living on the front range of Colorado and working at a veterinary office. There was a pull toward something, or maybe a push away from something, I couldn’t escape, even if I couldn’t name what that thing was.

I always had a connection to nature, but I also grew up in a traditional Midwestern culture where the closest many people got to spiritual is church and the farthest many people would go to support the environment would be to recycle, maybe. And the words “spiritual” and “environment” were certainly never used together.

So I couldn’t shake the feeling that there was this piece of me that was missing. I believed at the time that Evan and I moved to Colorado for the adventure of it, but now I think maybe it all culminated toward this one moment, in this sleepy town cradled by mountains, with this book in my hand.

I read these stories, laced with anger and love and hope and anguish for the soul of the world. With each chapter, pieces of my learned separateness shattered piece by frozen piece. They were stories, musings and laments about what it means to be here, right now, as a human seeing the great expanse of the universe with stardust eyes. It showed me that I am not just me, I am the universe awakening and reflecting back to itself through my eyes. The individual dissolved to reveal the whole.

It was then that I knew my purpose, finally. I had to be a storyteller, through whatever medium that may be. I needed to be this channel, this translator, between humans and the natural world. That very moment in that hotel shrouded in fog, suspended in time, became the beginning of this path that I’ve taken.

As I wait for the hurricane to pass, I pull out this book again, now dusty and stained with dirt. I open it to a place still marked by the free bookmark the cashier gave me all those years ago. Rumi greets me.

Sit, be still, and listen,
For you are drunk,
And we are at the edge of the roof.

I’m not sure there are better words to describe where we are at the moment, drunk on division and individualism, unaware of the fall beneath our dangling feet.

Thich Naht Hanh then goes on to talk about how in the Buddhist tradition, there is no birth and no death, only a rearranging of things. We must come to terms with the idea that humans may very well not be here in our current form forever, he says.

You have to learn how to accept that hard fact, without being overwhelmed by despair. That is why we have to learn to touch eternity in the present moment, with our in-breath and out-breath.

How do we move forward then in a time of such transitional upheaval? Is it even possible to continue reaching out to embrace the world without falling apart when that also means embracing the destruction and heartbreak?

I read one more chapter and find the answer. Every culture in the world has created stories, or cosmologies, that describe where we came from and where we are going. While each society had their own unique plot lines, I’ve found it interesting how there are so many elements that often overlap: cosmic eggs from which the universe was born, earth retrieved from the floor of the ocean, elements of the cosmos forged from the body parts of gods, animals and humans interacting and shifting between one another.

There are pieces of all of our stories that hold common threads. Spiritual Ecology questions what we could achieve if we began creating a new global cosmology that highlighted a common origin. Not just as humans, but also with animals, plants, rock, stars and sky. Maybe this would sew us back into community. Maybe this would highlight the places where we went wrong.

Since the Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution, we’ve become a society that favors the “logical” left-brained thinkers over the intuitive right-brained feelers. We’ve created a battle between the two sides of our one universal brain instead of learning how to help them integrate.

The intuitive mind is a sacred gift, and the rational mind is a faithful servant. We have created a world that honors the servant, but has forgotten the gift.

~ Albert Einstein

What this tells me is that despite how frivolous one may feel about it, we need more poets, artists, healers, creatives to go out into the world. We don’t need anymore lawyers, scientists, or practical folk. We already know the solutions to our current crisis, we have all of the tools.

What we need are the people who can change hearts, inspire new perspectives, lift up those who have been depleted. It was a simple book that completely changed the trajectory of my life after all. If there were more of these voices out there, more people could find a specific story they resonate with.

Maybe it will be a blog post, an art piece, a podcast, a conversation that will inspire just one more person to think differently. Arguing and debating has nearly never changed anyone’s opinion. But like flower essences, art has a way of seeping into our bones in a subtle way that quietly rearranges our thoughts and energies, making us believe these ideas were ours all along. It leaves us feeling renewed instead of attacked, changed in the best way.

The ability of matter to organize and reorganize itself is remarkable - from the formation of the first atoms to the emergence of life.

~ Spiritual Ecology

Now at the twilight hour, waiting to see what has become of Florida, instead of sitting in tense silence we can take up our looms and start creating new tapestries, new stories. Even if we’ve already flown too close to the sun, even if all we can do is hold on and look for eternity in the present moment, the act of creation is the spark that may just keep us here for awhile longer.

Please tell your stories. Share your creativity, your inspiration, your gifts. The truth within these things will do all of the talking needed. Change of policy, the birth of unstoppable movements, the healing of divisions starts with the change of heart, nothing else.

Sending ALL my love to anyone affected by these natural disasters. I continue to pray for your safety and for that of the world.

Much love,

Val

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