A vision I had twenty years ago while holding an Ecstatic Wisdom Posture describes our dilemma and our promise this way:
Black and white Kachinas dance in the center of a circle. I wonder where the women are. I find them off to the side, standing in a circle dressed in black shrouds as they help a woman give birth.
Suddenly I see through the eyes of one of the black and white Kachinas. As he swings his head from side to side, I see the desecrated earth and the green beautiful earth and I hear him chant,
"You choose, you choose, you choose."
Then the animals come spilling through, their eyes peering out of the rainforest, watching us. A huge heart rises in the midst of the circle of dancers. I see its wounds and also that it is healing itself. A river of green slashes through the heart, carrying heart energy and spilling green all over the earth.
I see that the green river has opened the heart so I can see the texture of its interior. I am shocked to see it is the same texture as that of the molten "holy" rocks I saw yesterday in the Jemez Mountains.
I wonder if our heart's interior simply mirrors the earth outside our bodies,
if all our bodies' parts and functions reflect the earth outside us.
Can that be right?
Is the earth really outside us?
Maybe, instead, the earth is ourselves turned inside out.
Brian Swimme in
The Universe is a Green Dragon says:
"Think of how, for billions of years, the presence of the fireball flooded the Earth. There it was, each instant, washing over everything on the planet, and only now have we learned to become sensitive to it. We are awash with the presence of the universe, already swamped in its beauty. All things have discharged themselves into the world, merely awaiting our development of the sensitivity to respond to them. To live as a mature human being is to journey home, and our home is enchantment."
May we all remember to choose an enchanted life…
*Thomas Berry and Campbell quotes from Huffington Post: Practical Dreaming in the Hopeful Light of Earthrise by Craig Chalquist.