"What is the new mythology to be, the mythology of this unified earth as of one harmonious being?"
------ Joseph Campbell, The Power of Myth (1986)
Pax Gaia (the Peace of Earth) is the most compelling challenge of our time. Thomas Berry, speaking as he did for all the Relations on our beautiful planet, introduced this t,heme after 9/11, reflecting on the urgent need to embrace a cosmology of a truly comprehensive Gaian peace. It is a peace that transcends Pax Romana (the peace of an empire) and Pax Humana (peace among humans). To imagine a Peace that extends to all the interwoven, interdependent life on Gaia, recognizing that what we do to others, and not just human, we are doing to ourselves, and to those who must come after us. Co-creators, not exploiters . A great calling indeed, given the chaos and violence of our time. But as Berry wrote, if we are to survive, and meet the evolutionary challenge we now face, holding that Pax in our minds and hearts is the only way.
"We are called as an evolving humanity to the Great Work that engenders Pax Gaia. To this end we create and foster deep cultural therapies that address the deep cultural pathology of our time that has brought about such ecological damage."
Thomas Berry "Evening Thoughts" 2006)
"Only now we see with clarity that we live not so much in a cosmos (a place) as in a cosmogenesis (a process) -- scientific in its data, mythic in its form."
~ The Universe Story by Brian Swimme and Thomas Berry
The Winter Solstice was perhaps the earliest universal holy day, celebrated in different ways throughout the world from the earliest days of human culture. The Solstice is the ancient center of the Holiday Season and our New Year. When language was young, when even the gods and goddesses had not yet taken human forms within the human imagination, but they ran instead with deer in the forest, flew with the wings of crows, or were glimpsed nameless from the awed depths of every numinous pool, sensed as Presence in the womb depths of caves........ even then, the Return of the Light was a holy day, a day of celebration.
Long ago ancestors lit fires to welcome the "shining god" who was the sun returning from mysterious underworld depths to bring the life giving Sun as the nights grew so long. They built stones or made circles or created doorways to be aligned with the sun's pathway. They lit fires as "sympathetic magic", fires to light and imitate the Sun's passage (which is why we still light candles, and Christmas lights, today, although no one remembers.........)Welcoming the Sun, they left offerings of food to show their gratitude, and invented songs or danced throughout the longest cold night, encouraging, helping the Sun on its difficult journey to return to the world, and to the promise of new life. I remember at this time of the Holy/Wholly/Holidays that Holydays begin among our most ancient, instinctual roots, taproots that reach down, deeply entwined within the visible and invisible web of Gaia's life. I believe having a mythos, indeed, and experience of that taproot, is essential to our physical and spiritual health.
Planet Earth turns her face toward her star again, circling in brilliant orbit, bearing every evolving, responsive, living, infinitely intertwined be-ing within her fragile, exquisite azure skin on her long journey.
Perhaps we sensed, as the sun rose on the Winter Solstice, that pre-verbal, instinctual knowing, found hidden beneath the pages of any book written with five fingered hands, beneath each inscribed layer of words, signs, hieroglyphs, pictures in jet or ochre or sepia, luminous beneath the oldest pages. A veneer peels away, revealing a pentimento, an ancient heartbeat found within our genetic memories, shared again with all beings that keep vigil on the long night of the winter Solstice, and celebrate the Return of the Light with many different religious traditions. Or with just awe and reverence, candles in the night.
"Winter Solstice, Willits, California 2013" Photo by
Jerri Jo Idarius
to the soil of Turtle Island,
one ecosystem in diversity
interpenetration for all.
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