I have just come back from Rowe for a weekend with Deena Metzger. Deena is a poet, a therapist, a shaman, and an elder. I have been with her a number of times and I love her fierceness, her warmth, her willingness to face uncomfortable truths and to help us face them. She spoke immediately about the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, and that was in the forefront of our writing work.
One of the women in the group sent us a link to an animation of the oil spill. It was eerie to watch it. The thing looks like a living creature that is dancing.
One thing that gives me hope in these days of darkness is the work of Elisabet Sahtouris. I have been rereading EarthDance, subtitled “Living Systems in Evolution”. She is a systems biologist, who left academia and went to live on a Greek island. She sees the Earth as a single living creature, she goes farther than the Gaia Hypothesis and says that even the rock is part of the living creature. She talks about the history of the earth, and of the first organisms that grew in the primal sea, and how they self organized into larger and larger creatures. I can’t begin to quote her, her language is wonderfully simple and eloquent, but every sentence depends on information given previously. She tells us that the first great pollution disaster on our planet was the oxygen crisis. The primal atmosphere did not contain oxygen, but was made up of carbon dioxide and other gases. Among the first one celled animals were some that developed photosynthesis, and could make use of the carbon dioxide as fuel, giving off oxygen as waste. But oxygen is lethal to many bacteria, that’s why we use it as a bleach. As the amount of oxygen grew larger, all the living creatures on earth were in danger of being wiped out. But some one celled animals figured out how to use oxygen in metabolizing food. Earth was saved, and many more new creatures could evolve because oxygen is a more efficient source of energy than carbon dioxide. I had been taught in geology, that the first geologic age, the Cambrian, was marked by the first fossils, made by these tiny creatures who now had enough energy to create shells. Nobody told me about the oxygen crisis.
Here’s a quote from Elisabet:
She describes something she calls the FIRST World Wide Web, the communication process of these early bacteria. “Thus the genetic plans for many variations on their organization were kept available, to be borrowed and copied from one another. …. The bacterial population as a whole could therefore respond to emergencies such as chemical changes in the environment by drawing on and quickly spreading the genes that best helped them cope with those emergencies. Nowadays, part of their coping in this manner is their developing resistance to man-made antibiotics, or learning to digest new foods in changing environments. We also observe, in the frequent failure of our genetic engineering, that organisms recognize and remove—edit out— implanted genes.” EarthDance, p90
In February 2004, I was feeling hopelessly overwhelmed by the number of causes I was trying to support, and I sent out a plea to the Circle Dancing elist. The 27 replies that I got in 2 days, heartened me enormously. I cobbled them together into a document I called “Circle of Hope.”
Here’s the final entry: I was reminded yesterday of something that gave me great hope at the time, but there was a further lesson to be drawn from it: there’s a business called Ocean Arks, that designs systems to deal with various kinds of water waste — like the Living Machines in Burlington and at Findhorn that deal with sewage. John Todd designed a system for a candy company, to handle 10% of their waste…
“One Friday a computer malfunctioned and sent 100 percent of the waste in to the eco-machine, overloading the system. “A godawful mess — foam, fats, oil, dead fish — everywhere,” says Todd. Disgusted employees turned off the pumps and went home for the weekend. But when they returned on Monday, the eco-machine had rebalanced itself. “They were so startled by this self-healing; that’s what turned the tide and allowed us to continue with other projects,” says Todd, who confesses surprise himself.” (from story in Hope Magazine, Jan/Feb 2004, written by Sarah Tuff)
This is Gaia, in small, an eco-system that’s capable of handling an overload of toxic stuff. Humans created the mess, but humans also designed the solution and when they did something magical happened: nature joined the fight. One-celled creatures and plants and fish somehow cooperated to deal with the mess. Guess what, everybody – WE ARE NOT ALONE. Even the algae are fighting to save planet earth. Nature is on our side and ready to help the moment we open the door — remember the 40 pound cabbages at Findhorn, and the rainforest that’s regenerating under the pines of Gaviotas. There’s this huge process working toward health, awareness, consciousness, compassion – and it’s bigger than we are, big as the planet, maybe even big as the universe (Today I believe for sure as big as the universe) and our circle dancing community is part of it. We are part of how the human community re-balances itself — we don’t have to know how, all we have to do is keep on doing what we do.
So KEEP DANCING EVERYBODY.
Vast amounts of love to all of you from Jenny at Neskaya