{"id":360,"date":"2010-05-04T14:47:07","date_gmt":"2010-05-04T14:47:07","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/jennydeupree.com\/?p=360"},"modified":"2020-01-26T09:34:13","modified_gmt":"2020-01-26T14:34:13","slug":"hope","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/jennydeupree.com\/?p=360","title":{"rendered":"Hope"},"content":{"rendered":"

I have just come back from Rowe for a weekend with Deena Metzger<\/a>. Deena is a poet, a therapist, a shaman, and an elder.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 She spoke immediately about the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, and that was in the forefront of our writing work.<\/p>\n

One of the women in the group sent us a link to an animation of the oil spill<\/a>.\u00a0 It was eerie to watch it.\u00a0 The thing looks like a living creature that is dancing.<\/p>\n

One thing that gives me hope in these days of darkness is the work of Elisabet Sahtouris<\/a>.\u00a0 I have been rereading EarthDance, subtitled \u201cLiving Systems in Evolution\u201d.\u00a0 She is a systems biologist, who left academia and went to live on a Greek island.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 I can\u2019t begin to quote her, her language is wonderfully simple and eloquent, but every sentence depends on information given previously.\u00a0 She tells us that the first great pollution disaster on our planet was the oxygen crisis.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 But oxygen is lethal to many bacteria, that\u2019s why we use it as a bleach.\u00a0 As the amount of oxygen grew larger, all the living creatures on earth were in danger of being wiped out.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n

Here\u2019s a quote from Elisabet:
\nShe describes something she calls the FIRST World Wide Web, the communication process of these early bacteria.\u00a0 \u201cThus the genetic plans for many variations on their organization were kept available, to be borrowed and copied from one another.\u00a0 ….\u00a0 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.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 We also observe, in the frequent failure of our genetic engineering, that organisms recognize and remove\u2014edit out\u2014 implanted genes.\u201d\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 EarthDance, p90<\/p>\n

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.\u00a0 The 27 replies that I got in 2 days, heartened me enormously.\u00a0 I cobbled them together into a document I called \u201cCircle of Hope<\/a>.\u201d<\/p>\n

Here\u2019s the final entry:\u00a0 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:\u00a0 there\u2019s a business called Ocean Arks<\/a>, that designs systems to deal with various kinds of water waste \u2014 like the Living Machines in Burlington and at Findhorn that deal with sewage.\u00a0 John Todd designed a system for a candy company, to handle 10% of their waste\u2026
\n\u201cOne Friday a computer malfunctioned and sent 100 percent of the waste in to the eco-machine, overloading the system.\u00a0 \u201cA godawful mess \u2014 foam, fats, oil, dead fish \u2014 everywhere,\u201d says Todd.\u00a0 Disgusted employees turned off the pumps and went home for the weekend.\u00a0 But when they returned on Monday, the eco-machine had rebalanced itself.\u00a0 \u201cThey were so startled by this self-healing; that’s what turned the tide and allowed us to continue with other projects,\u201d says Todd, who confesses surprise himself.\u201d\u00a0 (from story in Hope Magazine, Jan\/Feb 2004, written by Sarah Tuff)<\/p>\n

This is Gaia, in small, an eco-system that\u2019s capable of handling an overload of toxic stuff.\u00a0 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\u00a0to deal with the mess. Guess what, everybody \u2013 WE ARE NOT ALONE.\u00a0 Even the algae are fighting to save planet earth. Nature is on our side and ready to help the moment we open the door \u2014 remember the 40 pound cabbages at Findhorn, and the rainforest that\u2019s regenerating under the pines of Gaviotas.\u00a0 There\u2019s this huge process working toward health, awareness, consciousness, compassion \u2013 and it\u2019s 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.\u00a0 We are part of how the human community re-balances itself \u2014 we don\u2019t have to know how, all we have to do is keep on doing what we do.<\/p>\n

So KEEP DANCING EVERYBODY.<\/p>\n

Vast amounts of love to all of you from Jenny at Neskaya<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I have just come back from Rowe for a weekend with Deena Metzger. Deena is a poet, a therapist, a shaman, and an elder.\u00a0 I have been with her a number of times and I love her fierceness, her warmth, … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,19,11,14],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-360","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-activism","category-interesting-link","category-present-day","category-spirit"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jennydeupree.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/360","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jennydeupree.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jennydeupree.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jennydeupree.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jennydeupree.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=360"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/jennydeupree.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/360\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jennydeupree.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=360"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jennydeupree.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=360"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jennydeupree.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=360"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}