Earth-based Religions

It's Literally the Water of Life — Use it Sparingly

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Today we celebrated our annual water service at First Unitarian Society. Pouring water together that we had brought back to Madison from vacations in other spots, we celebrated our community gathering again after a summer spent apart. Like rivers running to the sea,/We’re coming home… (UU hymn)
The worship service also commemorated water as the holy necessity it is in our lives: the sacred water that runs through our veins, the water we drink to maintain our lives, the water that brings the earth alive, the life-giving liquid flow that cycles through the clouds, the rain, the springs, the lakes, the streams, the rivers, finally streaming to the oceans, where it evaporates to become rain again. Without water, there is no life.

Environment

Biomimicry and getting through our evolutionary bottleneck

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Here’s a fascinating article in The Sun about science and technology that imitates nature (only part of it is available online – they want you to buy their magazine so it stays alive – I know the feeling). If you have a design problem of any kind you can go to askNature.org and find out how nature does it. Nature has developed much more subtle and clever ways than our brute methods:
For the most part life operates on very small amounts of energy. When you look at the natural world, you see that organisms do not use high heats or high pressures or toxic chemicals to achieve their ends. A few do use toxins, such as venoms, in small amounts, but none heat anything with explosive force.

Earth-based Religions

Thomas Friedman a Wiccan?

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I don’t normally read Thomas Friedman’s op. ed. pieces. But this one — “Connecting Nature’s Dots” — drew my attention, probably because of the word “Nature” in the headline. Practicing Wicca attunes me to nature, since to me it’s sacred.

Environment

Spiritual Wisdom of the Week

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This week I’d like to share with you a passage from my book Spirit Matters:
Everything that has ever happened in the history of the universe is the prelude to each of our lives. Everything that has happened from the beginning of time has become the platform from which we launch our lives. We are the heirs of the long evolution of Spirit. Each of us is the latest unfolding of the event of Creation. Our bodies are composed of the material that was shaped in the Big Bang.

Environment

How To Survive This Century

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Naomi Klein has a fine prophetic piece in The Progressive this month. She laments the economic recovery that is now likely under way, because it is happening before we got around to completely changing our economic system. We are wasting the crisis. As a result full-growth capitalism will resume its destruction of the planet’s ecosystems. But it will happen in a meaner way than before, because it wasn’t just water that was bailed out to save the ship, it was people, and many of them will never recover. Her last word:
Capitalism can survive this crisis.

Environment

Belief and Action

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The article is called “Are you a believer?” in the print magazine. On the web it’s first called “Why don’t people believe in climate change?” and then “Why people don’t act on climate change.” Are the folks at New Scientist confused about the difference between belief and action?

Earth-based Religions

How Daily Are We? My weekend…

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I came in today to find we had all taken a break over the weekend. That’s fine by me: there is so much to read from last week alone. I spent a good part of the weekend creating a small open air service for members of the First Unitarian Church of Oakland. We met in Tilden Park, a large wild land that starts at the top of the ridge of hills that provide the eastern boundary of the Bay Area metropolis. You can stand at one or two places on that ridge and look one way to the Bay, its famous bridges, Alcatraz, the Oakland harbor and East Bay cities like Berkeley, and beyond to San Francisco’s skyscrapers–one of the most beautiful cityscapes in the world– and then turn and look the other way and see not just wild land all the way to Mount Diablo some twenty miles away.

Earth-based Religions

Giving Back to Gaia

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My husband Mark and I started composting again this week.  I’ve missed it, because giving back to the Earth — in this extremely literal way — is part of my spiritual practice.  In the past, even when Mark wasn’t gardening, I still composted.  We take so much from Gaia, we depend on Her as the very ground of our being, the source of our lives.  The least we can do is compost.

Environment

Obama's Climate Bill May Make Things Worse

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Here’s Rep. Dennis Kucinich explanation as to why he voted against the American Clean Energy and Security Act of 2009, which passed the House last week:
It sets targets that are too weak, especially in the short term, and sets about meeting those targets through Enron-style accounting methods. It gives new life to one of the primary sources of the problem that should be on its way out — coal — by giving it record subsidies. It’s worth reading his whole statement.

Environment

Dolphins Leapt All Around Us

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The highpoint of my vacation last week was literally 15 feet above the Atlantic Ocean. That’s how high at least one of the dolphins leapt as they swam around Barbara, my disabled sister, and half of the 23 members of the Vedder clan gathered in North Carolina for a reunion. Our beach vacation was the first time we had all gotten together in 10 years. It’s hard for that to happen these days. My mother is 86, my aunt almost 88, but most importantly, my sister Barbara uses a wheelchair, and that makes travel for her extremely difficult and very expensive.