James Lovelock, Father of Gaia Theory

I've not had much time to write lately.  An update to the massive Wallow fire that is threatening Anima Sanctuary in New Mexico - it continues to approach Reserve, N.M., but hasn't arrived.  All the folks there are busy around the clock clearing their land, and preparing for evacuation if necessary.  We continue to pray for them, and to pray for rain.  I think of the many Kachinas I've seen that represent the thunderclouds of New Mexico monsoon season, dark threads of rain flowing beneath them.  Nothing, in the desert, is more precious than rain.

James Lovelock, the Father of Gaia Theory (with collaborator Lynn Margulis) is 93.  I was pleased to find several recent interviews with him on UTube, and felt like sharing them here.  As Dr. Harding comments, James Lovelock should have received the Nobel Prize long ago.

N.M. Fire Threatens Anima Sanctuary

 As those living here in the Southwest know, this has been a terrible season for fires.  I wrote about  Jesse Wolf Hardin, Loba and Kiva and the Anima Nature Sanctuary and Herbal School just a week ago - tragically, they are currently threatened by a huge forest fire in Western New Mexico, and may be forced to evacuate.  For more information, here is Jesse's Blog.  At the urging of friends, Anima has set up an emergency fund.  I've copied from the latest post on their blog below - and I know that prayers are welcome from their many friends.

 Anima Emergency Fund

A fund has been set up for Anima Sanctuary and School, at the insistence of many.  Contributions will be accepted for land protection and repair, which will also help make possible our continuing publication and healing work.

We have already had to shift funds from home repairs to evacuation preparedness, extra fuel for the vehicles and supplies, while our paid workers and gifting friends shift their emphasis from the water project to clearing the ground of flammables in a perimeter around the main cabins.  This Emergency Fund will help fund these preparations, and in the event the fire does indeed overtake and engulf us, it will be used to replace and repair the infrastructure of the sanctuary and school, and to pay for what will be a huge reseeding and restoration effort.

Donations to the Anima Emergency Fund can be made at http://animacenter.org/donate.html and indicate in the message box that it is intended for the fire fund. Or a check or m.o. made out to

Gretchen Geggis (Loba)
Anima Emergency Fund
P.O. Box 688, Reserve, NM 87830

Thank you!


NonMonetary Donations

To those of you offering to send foods, herbs, tools and so forth, we ask that you send a letter to the above addresses with a list of what you can provide, and then IF and when they’re needed we’ll get back to you.  If the fire moves through this canyon and takes our living structures, a travel trailer will be the first item we look for.

Physically Assisting With Our Evacuation

Only a few of the many folks offering to come here and help, are even from the Southwest!  We will only accept the assistance of those who live close enough for it not to be a great hardship, and only in the last couple days before we need to be fully evacuated.  This could happen a week from now, several weeks from now, or in only a few short days depending on what the winds and blaze does.  If you are determined to help with an evacuation, please write us with your availability and how to reach you quickest.

Wallow Fire Satellite Image showing Anima Sanctuary

More Green Men

  Photo copyright Murray Fortescue (From "The Company of the Greenman")

 Couldn't resist sharing these visitations of the  Green Man, thanks to Chris Walton and his blog "The Company of the Greenman"!  Suddenly the Green Man seems to be popping up everywhere - I think it's a good sign. 

http://thecompanyofthegreenman.wordpress.com

The Green Man's Visitation Renaissance Faire 2011

The Anima Sanctuary & Earthen Spirituality Center

'The Prophetic Heart explores the true frontiers of consciousness, where past, present and future meld seamlessly into activist art, an inclusive pulsing web of which we are both but a single inextricable strand and one of the crucial conscious weavers..... We see that our personal struggles are part of a shamanic process of falling apart and being remade, much as the tumultuous Earth Changes tell the story of a living planet restoring balance through dramatic transformation."

-Jesse Wolf Hardin 

 I posed the question, "How do we talk to the Earth? " and immediately thought of Jesse Wolf Hardin, Loba, and Kiva Rose, who have created the Anima Sanctuary in Reserve, N.M.  For many years they've been living off the grid in their magical canyon near the Gila wilderness.  Jesse is a philosopher, writer, teacher and artist, and Loba and Kiva Rose are herbalists and Medicine Women.

The high deserts and hidden canyons of New Mexico, layered with cottonwood trees and rock sites inscribed, like some ancient book,  with petroglyphs, have been famous for attracting artists and spiritual seekers.  It's Spider Woman's Country, the shimmering, transparent strands of her Web seem especially lucid and visible.  There is a particular kind of person I seem to meet there I call the "New Mexico Mystic ".  A couple of years ago I wrote about the ecologist, philosopher and magician David Abram, and Wild Ethics. New Mexico also hosts eco-psychologist Bill Plotkin's Animas Valley Institute.  And the Lama Foundation, with its World Indigenous Peoples Conference.  And the  Cuyamungue Institute, founded by Felicitas Goodman, and Greg Bradon........new Mexico mystics, people who speak with the land.

For a long time I've been aware of the Anima Center in Western New Mexico.  I've corresponded with Jesse, and met him and Loba one wonderful summer at Brushwood, where he came to teach at the Starwood Festival, and Loba, who is a fabulous cook, created special feast for the women.  Jesse has been a prolific writer, with hundreds of published articles and 6 books.  He was also a  visual artist who left his life in Taos to become caretaker for the land in the Gila Wilderness he fell in love with, where he later established, with his partners Loba and Kiva  Anima.
 

"There at the base (of the cliff)  the impulse is always to look up, and it must have been so even for those first human inhabitants of the canyon trained to seek spirit in the ground as much as the sky. And craning my neck towards the forms and fissures above, through choking tears, came these unexpected words “I promise, no matter what, I’m yours. Even if I end up penniless with no one here to love me....” Then, in almost a scream, “I will never leave you!” And in turn, I accepted the canyon’s assurance that I belong.... and that as lonely as I might be, I would never be alone."

Loba

 ----------------------------

"Contracted: receiving the support of the land and pledging the self in return. There was of course another contract as well, whereby I– then a young man with more attitude than common sense– signed my name on a set of papers that indentured me for fifteen years. As with most or all real estate agreements, it stipulated that if I was more than thirty days late with any of the semiannual payments, the land would automatically revert back to the seller. In order to stay close to the land I’d gone from selling expensive paintings in our gallery in Taos to working minimum wage jobs doing everything from spreading seeds on logged acreage to making adobe bricks, with friendly immigrant workers I could barely understand. My part of the bargain involved doing whatever it took to get up the money for the land payments, and the seller was likewise bound to turn over control of a most special place.

......Nonetheless, the most important contract is not that between two people.... it’s the reciprocal commitment between human and land, made and fulfilled in particular places. As with contracts between individuals or entities, both parties make promises in exchange for specific benefits. For centuries the land has kept its part of the bargain by offering up nourishment, shelter and instruction while we’ve largely defaulted as a species on our reciprocal obligations. We’ve largely failed our task to be the planet’s most sensitive receptors, to temper knowledge with humility and wisdom, or to properly give sacrament to, give thanks for, preserve or celebrate that land we as a species have evolved in contractual partnership with.

With every gift comes a responsibility to its spiritual and physical “care and feeding.” This goes for the soil itself, elemental to all life, and all that grows from its bosom or calls its rocks and trees home. Responsibilities to the plant and animal species we consume, to the water we drink and the air we breathe. The responsibility to insure that which we take is neither diluted nor despoiled, to give back equal to that which we are given. And whether we choose to call it that or not, it includes a responsibility to engage in some form of prayerful communion. 

Responsibility: the ability to respond."

From "Selected Writings", Jesse Wolf Hardin

 Jesse's Blog:   http://animacenter.org/blog/?cat=10

Kiva Rose

How Do We Speak to the Earth?

 "speak to the earth, and it shall teach thee"  [Job 8]

I've been  re-acquainting  myself with  the people, and their work,  who have informed and inspired my life.  It's a kind of backtracking I feel I need to do, to "archive" and "update"  these sources.  To Celebrate those who have been touchstones on the path might be a better way of expressing it.

Recently I posted a little interview I did with Frank Barney, at the Brushwood Folklore Center in  New York state.  My question to Frank was "How do we talk with the Earth?"

Since then, the question has hung around me like the mythic floating mountains of Avatar's "Pandora", long roots dangling in the  atmosphere.  What does it really mean to talk with the Earth?  How would we live and act if we experienced the World, as  Joanna Macy famously put it, "As lover, as mother, as self"?  How does the Earth "speak to us"?  How did people from other cultures and times do it?  How are people in contemporary settings "talking to the Earth" now, in this time of great crisis? Where and how are they engaging the conversation?  What have my own ecstatic, and sometimes inexplicable,  experiences been?

Now that I think about it, this question has been fundamental to my art and spirituality ever since I blundered into a workshop in 1982 on ancient sites of New England, and Sig Lonegren taught me to dowse at a cairn, and ley crossing, site in Vermont.  Come to think of it, he and his wife Karyn live in Glastonbury as well!  Circles!

 
 So, friends who may be reading this blog, forgive me if  I use it for research for a while.  With my trip to the UK coming soon, I realize that this question, as I visit sacred calendar sites, meet Goddess women who invoke the Deities of their homeland,  as I perhaps visit crop circles and listen to speakers at the Glastonbury Symposium......under it all, that's the question I ask.

How do we interact more consciously with the mind of Gaia, our mother earth?

"Today we suffer from Geomantic Amnesia, forgetting that our planet is interactive with and responsive to consciousness." 

John Steele, GEOMANCY: CONSCIOUSNESS AND SACRED SITES
 
So here I sit, surrounded by books and links to UTube.  I re-visited the  writings of Starhawk.  I re-visited James Lovelock and the Gaia Hypothesis, which is now Gaia Theory. I pulled out articles about Vision Questing, and wonder anew what that question might mean within the practices of traditional cultures, shamanic cultures, and ancient cultures.  I watched Avatar again, delighted with the way Cameron  introduced the idea of  "Tewa", the "Anima Mundi" of the planet Pandora.  Among my books I find Earthmind, remembering a conversation I had with one of its authors, John Steele, so long ago. I looked up Michaela Small Wright and Perelandra, and the Book of Findhorn. I re-read an article by eco-feminist Gloria Orenstein,  in  Re-Weaving the World,  and checked out what's happening at the Source, founded by contemporary shaman Jewell, and the Anima Nature Sanctuary in New Mexico as well.

Sure enough, within a day of doing that, I received an email from Jesse Wolf Hardin, founder of the Anima Sanctuary.   Threads.......

Most of all, I had an "ah ha" ...... I'm going to Glastonbury, and Findhorn,  this summer, to encounter people who, in their own ways, have been asking this question themselves, and like my friend Frank, have found their answers.

So......now  I know why I'm making this trip.  Let the adventure begin!

"Earthmind 5" (2009)

I AM, Movie by Tom Shadyak

"We're really geared at a primordial level to feel what another person feels....this is the emergent story. We are far grander than we've been told." 

I wanted to post this new movie  by Tom Shadyak, which is coming soon to Tucson.  We are hard wired to cooperate, share, co-create  - so very good to find the message shared by this successful Hollywood director.  I can't wait to see it!

Playing June 17, 2011  in Tucson  at The Loft on Speedway!

Spider Woman's Web - Gregg Bradon on a Conversant Universe

 I wanted to share a brief program by New Mexico teacher Gregg Bradon talking about  the Conversant Universe, non-locality, and some fascinating recent experiments with the "dialogue" of DNA and human emotion.  My friend Charlie sent me to see it here:

  http://zone-7.net/v3/videotheque/la-science-des-miracles

and I found the program again on UTube below.   He is also featured in a full length film,  The Time is Now.