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Coming Back to Life by Joanna Macy:
It’s time of Passover. It’s time of Easter. It’s time when life comes to actual life with fresh, surprising ways and calls us also to come back to life.
Oh, it’s important on what I do, because we are born on planet earth. Everything that we know and everything that we’re given, our skin, and our thoughts, and our voices, and the – in our eyes, our capacity, to hear, to touch, to feel, to think—all of that comes from this wondrous, spinning, life-giving, big mama earth.
And – it is to celebrate that today, and we will, with music, and with… uh, we’re going to around the spiral of the work that reconnects, which goes like this— gratitude, honoring your – for the world, seeing with new ___, and going forth, and we have a whole day to do that within ourselves, with lunch in between.
It’s such an important moment for us to focus on the dominant society, and the public relations, and the terrors that it visits upon us, and the political campaigns, and the fresh ecological disasters has this kind of shock. And for paying attention, it can help us feel worthless. It can help us feel we don’t have all the answers. It can help to feel that we want to save the world, but how do we do that, we’re just one person.
And with the world wants right now, is for us to know, we belong. It wants us to know that we’re children of life. It wants us to know that it has enormous powers that’s ready to pour through us once we get in touch with our gladness to be here, and with each other.
I would like to say, just to- know- well, we’re so many that I was thinking, instead of having a mid-morning break, which is quite hard to do, because it’s just less than hour, we’ll invite you to go to the bathroom when you need to. Is that okay with you, yeah?
Alright, so, I have something very special for you to hear right this minute. It’s from a wonderful contemporary poet from ___, of ___, ___ activist. Demonstrations, and actions – poem who often speaks at events that I go to in the United Kingdom.
Glory be to Gaia, for rain boasts – and hillside ___, we honor and praise you ___, mysterious, blue planet, unique in this vast universe. Like your widest rivers, our hearts flow with gratitude.
Glory be to Gaia, for forest, valleys, and exquisite flowers, we honor and praise you, ___, great mother, thank you for clean air and water, and all the fruits and seeds, manifests to your abundant power.
Glory be to Gaia, for birds’ song, mountain, and clear lakes. We honor and praise you, ___, giant, pulsating orb of life, from which – grown. Please help us feel interdependence with all animal and human can.
Glory be to Gaia, for millipedes, worms, and all tiny creatures, oh – praise you, ___. – of life. We embrace your eternal cycle, the rich soil our bodies will be calm and the gift was present, moment is.
Glory be to Gaia, for – essence, and fish. We honor and praise you ___, planet jewel of the cosmos, sacred being infused in our DNA. Please, light the spark of this, in us that we may serve this precious life.
And we can say it, too. Glory be to Gaia. Glory be to Gaia.
One of the most thrilling things about being alive at this moment on earth is that there are two great rivers that have been separated for centuries that are flowing together—Science and Religion. Science and Spirituality. How tedious it was whenever they’re having their battles. And now, they’re coming together, and perhaps the most thrilling of all is that they’re coming together in recognition and we’re alive at the time when we can hear it and put our minds to this. That the earth is alive. It is a living system.
Oh, I know, at this stage, capitalism, and the industry of gross society are treating it as a supply house and a sewer, but it is a great, mysterious, luminous being, and everything we are, and everything that we can ever hope for comes from that. And this earth is present in the songs that we make, in the poems that we makes, in the dances that we make, and the equations we right, and the hopes that we have and the visions that we can kindle in ourselves, and with each other.
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