Compassion Begins with Mother Earth

BY STARHAWK


Earth based spirituality covers such a wide spectrum of diverse religions and spiritual traditions, from indigenous traditions to modern NeoPagansim. We share no unified dogma, and no one person carries the authority to speak for all, certainly not me.

But I can say personally that the common thread I find in all our traditions is the deep understanding of interconnectedness. We are one interwoven tapestry of life on this earth, and from that basic insight arises compassion.

Compassion extends beyond love and sympathy for other human beings. Compassion includes compassion for the earth, for all the interrelated and interacting life forms, for the plants, animals, birds, trees, even the microorganisms that sustain life. For if we don't include that broader community in the scope of our compassion, if we continue to destroy the very systems that support our lives, we cannot survive. And we will create the devastation that leads to immense human suffering, loss and death.

Here's a compassion story: In the forest, the roots of trees are linked by a network of mycorrhizal fungi, whose threadlike hyphae interpenetrate the root hairs and extend their reach for water and nutrients. Scientists have traced pathways with radioactive isotopes, and learned that through these webs of fungi, trees feed their young. Moreover, trees growing in the sun will feed trees growing in the shade--even trees of another species. That's compassion!

Here's another: a couple of billions of years ago, life was simple. Just bacteria, simple cells without even a nucleus, floating in primal seas as they had already done for a couple of billion years. But even at that time, life was linked in complex associations. The green things, the ancestors of plants, used sunlight to make food from water and the carbon dioxide that filled the atmosphere. They gave off oxygen, and breathers evolved to make use of it, to burn food and use the energy, giving off carbon dioxide. All of life was linked in one common breath, passing back and forth from green to red.

Photosynthesizers could just lay back and be, basking in the sunlight. But breathers had to work, to go about and find food. They gobbled each other up with gusto.

But one day, as one primal organism chowed down on another, compassion intervened. Instead of dissolving and digesting its meal, the eater let its victim remain whole inside of itself, fusing into a new form of being, the ancestor of the cells in our own bodies and all complex organisms--cells with nuclei, eukaryotes.

Fusion became the rage. The new cells were bigger and could develop in all kinds of interesting ways, developing specialized organelles to do particular jobs, like making energy or propelling the whole thing around. And with their membranes relieved of many metabolic tasks, the new cells were free to combine in new ways, leading to an explosion of multicellular life, and all the strange and interesting things that came after.

And so compassion is embedded in every cell of our bodies. Imagine, then, what beauty and diversity might evolve if we made compassion the foundation of our religions and social structures.

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Starhawk is, in her own words, "the author of many works celebrating the Goddess movement and Earth-based, feminist spirituality. I’m a peace, environmental, and global justice activist and trainer, a permaculture designer and teacher, a Pagan and Witch. To see how it all weaves together, follow the many strands of my web." She is also cofounder of the Reclaiming collective in San Francisco, California (USA), and wrote one of my favorite novels, the compassionate utopian/antiutopian novel of the future, The Fifth Sacred Thing (1993), which manages to see both the worst and the best possibilities for our future and, most importantly, gives us the tools to help us realize how to make the best choice. Her newest book is The Earth Path: Grounding Your Spirit in the Rhythms of Nature. Committed to bringing the techniques and creative power of spirituality to political activism, Starhawk travels internationally teaching magic, the tools of ritual, the skills of activism, and classess in permaculture (both online and off).

The trees and the forest

(by Marina)

I recently left a job that I had done for nearly six years, a social services government job that meant a great deal to me, that I considered a part of my spiritual practice. This job was, I hoped, a way to practice Thich Nhat Hanh's Fourth Mindfulness Training: awareness of suffering, trying to be present for those who suffer, so we can understand their situation and help them transform their suffering. And this is where the limitations of this job revealed themselves. Being with my clients meant I needed to take the time to listen to them, and be open to what they needed help with, but that wasn't acknowledged as part of the job, really. The "real" job was grilling them for information so I could decide whether or not the government considered them deserving of a monthly sum that most of us would not consider to be enough to do much more than pay rent and buy some very basic groceries.  I wasn't there to be a guide or to be present: instead, I was a judge. Either they met the standards for the program, or they didn't, and if they didn't, I wasn't able to refer them to some other potential source of assistance because we had no training in that area at all.  

What I learned is that the U.S. social service safety net has a big hole in it, and eventually, I began to feel complicit in this corruption of democracy. The Eleventh Mindfulness Training deals with right livelihood, and reminds us not to live with a vocation that is harmful to humans and nature.  Every day, I had to ask myself: Does this work help realize my ideal of understanding and compassion? Is it at least a step in that direction? I barely had time to answer the question; I was too busy working, doing what they wanted me to do. I was becoming cynical, angry, closed off, abrupt and irritable. I wasn't sleeping well, and had little energy to do anything when I got home from work.  Being a judge wasn't something that I could stomach any longer...in truth, I was starting to feel like a jailer, herding people back into cages where they could be kept under control and away from more fortunate members of society---as though any one of us couldn't just as easily find ourselves in the same position.

In "Truth or Dare: Encounters with Power, Mystery and Authority," Starhawk poses the question: What would you do, how would you live, if the revolution wasn't something far off, was already here, happening right now? I thought more and more about that...and it became obvious to me that if compassion (instead of the economic bottom line) was designing a world, the job I was doing for the government simply wouldn't exist. I got out of there a few months ago, and feel much better about what I'm doing now, a job at a college, working directly with students. I'm still kind of a judge, but I'm in a better position to help them navigate the system, at least.

I don't understand much about economics, but all around me, I see the evidence: We need to start taking care of people, and, instead of judging them for what they lack, ask ourselves if their basic needs are being fulfilled, and what they have to offer. In the process, we will all benefit.

You can read about the 14 Mindfulness Trainings and see Starhawk's homepage