Earth Day - "Green Hands"

I will sing of the well-founded Earth, mother of all, eldest of all beings.She feeds all creatures that are in the world, all that go upon the goodly land,all that are in the path of the seas, and all that fly; all these are fed of her store.

Homeric Hymn to Gaia

Earth Day, but truth be told, all days should be Earth Day, because our Mother Gaia is the greater life we live within, the greater life we have the privilege of being each a tiny part of.  

I found myself thinking about the many "Green Hands/Earth Hands" sculptures I've made over the years, an image that occurs over and over for me.  Rooted in the Earth, greening and flowering in our creativity and the works of our hands.  I guess, after all, each of them is a kind of blessing and a prayer.

“'What is life?' is a linguistic trap. To answer according to the rules of grammar, we must supply a noun, a thing. But life on Earth is more like a verb. It is a material process, surfing over matter like a slow wave. It is a controlled artistic chaos, a set of chemical reactions so staggeringly complex that more than 4 billion years ago it began a sojourn that now, in human form, composes love letters and uses silicon computers to calculate the temperature of matter at the birth of the universe.”

Lynn Margulis, Ph.D., collaborator with James Lovelock in the Gaia Hypothesis

“Psychologists have not begun to ponder the emotional toll of the loss of fellow life.  Nor have theologians  reckoned the spiritual impoverishment  that extinction brings. To forget what we had is to forget what we have lost.  And to forget what we have lost means never knowing what we had to begin with."

Mark Jerome Walters, The Nature Conservancy (1998)

"Wildness we might consider as the root of the authentic spontaneities of any being. It is that wellspring of creativity whence comes the instinctive activities that enable all living beings to obtain their food, to find shelter, to bring forth their young: to sing and dance and fly through the air and swim through the depths of the sea. This is the same inner tendency that evokes the insight of the poet, the skill of the artist and the power of the shaman."

Thomas Berry

"This is a dark time, filled with suffering and uncertainty. Like living cells in a larger body, it is natural that we feel the trauma of our world. So don’t be afraid of the anguish you feel, or the anger or fear, because these responses arise from the depth of your caring and the truth of your interconnectedness with all beings."

Joanna Macy