8

COCREATING

Caring for Our Mother the Earth

opening

She is your Mother. Maybe you’re the sibling who never left home. Well, not for long, anyway. Perhaps you are one of those kids who heads off to seek your fortune, lasts about five minutes out on the dirty city streets, and then moves back in with your mom. And she’s one of those mothers that nods supportively when her offspring claim we are ready to make it on our own, and then when we drag our dispirited asses back home, she welcomes us with strawberry rhubarb pie.

       She is your Mother the Earth, and you belong to her. She nurtured you in her dark belly, birthed you in joy, and sustains you at great cost to herself. You have slept in her forests, beneath the safety of her canopy. You have cupped her snowmelt in your hands. You have investigated the life hidden beneath the surface of her deserts, skied her alpine slopes, and biked her slickrock canyons. You have reveled in her generosity and been grateful.

       She has never asked much of you in return. Up until now, your gratitude has been enough. Your delight has been her reward. Up until now, she has not needed you as you have needed her. But that is shifting. You have grown up, and your Mother the Earth is in peril. She cannot hide her distress from you, and you would not want her to. You are mature enough to handle the truth.

       “Tell me what is troubling you, Mama,” you whisper, exactly as she always spoke to you when you were small and frightened and bleeding from some injury (real or imagined).

       “Pretty much everything, honey,” she answers. Her smile is rueful.

       She sits up against the sky, the clouds of her hair in beauteous disarray. The mountains of her breasts still tumble luxuriously, and the ample valley of her lap is as accommodating as ever. Her cloak is showing signs of wear: the fabric of trees is threadbare where old growth forests have been clear-cut, and the woodlands that remain are on fire. Her hot flashes that began years ago have not abated, though she has tried every concoction of herbs; in fact, they are growing more intense, making it difficult to sleep at night. The rivers and creeks and waterfalls of her bloodstream flow more sluggishly, brackish and fetid in places where they used to be limpid.

       “I’ll get through this,” she says. “You’re not getting rid of your old Ma so easily.” She reaches down to smooth the crease between your brows. “It’s you kids I’m worried about.”

       It’s not you in particular. It’s your wayward siblings and their guileless offspring. Some of your brothers couldn’t get away fast enough from your Mother the Earth. They made their home on the moonscape of urban America, ran for public office and forgot why, got drunk on power and privilege and struck backroom deals that squandered your inheritance while their Mother the Earth still breathed and ached and shook her head in bewilderment.

       You have tried to intervene, but your prodigal siblings won’t speak to you. The boys, mostly. The girls who align with their brothers against your mother have become boys themselves, for all practical purposes. They have abdicated their sensuality, forsaken their vulnerability, learned to play the boys’ games, and learned to play them well. They have convinced themselves that they do not need their Mother the Earth.

       But when they cannot breathe and they have nothing to eat, they will stagger their way home to her, and she will welcome them with a feast in their honor. You will help her in the kitchen, humming as you chop the onions and stir the stew.

Incarnational

Instead of engaging spiritual practice as a contraption to catapult us up and out of this relative world, the feminine mystic shows up right here, in the center of the incarnational experience. We bless the messy wonder of it all, the experience of being human.

This is where we encounter the face of the Holy One. We are not infatuated with transcendence; what we want is authenticity. We’re not worried about the senses, with their appetites and inconsistencies; to us the body is sacred. We’re not striving to reach the Pure Land of desirelessness. This makes no sense to the feminine, for whom desire is neither evil nor unspiritual, for whom pleasure can be another form of prayer. The sacred shines from the naked heart of what is, in this manifest miracle, in this very shape.

The solutions to the environmental crises that threaten to eradicate life lie in the feminine response. Rather than delineate perpetrators and victims, sacred and profane, physical and metaphysical, the feminine welcomes everyone to the table. Like the Great Mother herself, the feminine mystic does not view creation as a damaged object in need of repair but rather as a beloved child in need of care.

Effective activism arises from unconditional love.

Mending the World

There is a kabbalistic story in which the boundless, formless, unified Holy One wished to know its Holy Self, and so it contracted and poured itself into vessels. But the Divine Radiance was too much for these limited containers, and so they shattered, scattering shards of broken light across the universe, giving birth to all that is.

This sounds like modern cosmology, which also asserts that the universe expanded from an exceedingly high-density state, resulting in the full spectrum of material phenomena. I’ve dubbed this vessel-shattering version of the origins of the universe “the Jewish big bang.” It comes from a teaching Rabbi Isaac Luria offered in the sixteenth century to illustrate how form arises from formlessness, how light gets trapped inside darkness, and how the Holy One needs us to participate in the unfolding goodness of creation. Humans, as the teaching goes, were created to excavate and lift the shards of light from the dense predicament of existence and restore the vessels to wholeness.

In mystical Judaism, this teaching is known as tikkun olam, the mending of the world. How are we to do this? The answer is: with every act of chesed (loving-kindness) and tzedakah (generosity). It means observing the directives found in the Torah (which we can view not only as the compendium of Hebrew scriptures but as the essence of all the sacred teachings of all the world’s great wisdom traditions). It means cultivating a contemplative practice to nurture intimacy with the Divine, making an effort to welcome the stranger and care for the Earth. It means bending close to listen for what it is our sisters and brothers on the margins might need (and being willing to forgo our notions of what “helping” looks like, since our preconceived ideas of service sometimes get in the way of authentically serving). It means pressing our ear to the land to hear the heartbeat of the Mother, learning to read her pulses, diagnose her ailments, intuit healing remedies. It means slowing down enough to let the pain of the world all the way into our hearts, allowing our hearts to break open, and acting from that broken-open space. It means stepping up with humility, with curiosity, with love.

EMBRACING THE FEMININE IN ACTIVISM

Our global climate crisis demands that we break our habits of overconsumption and engage in voluntary simplicity. This is the antithesis of the dominant culture’s emphasis on power through acquisition and the primacy of the individual. Yet it is the quintessence of the feminine values of cooperation and generosity. The masculine paradigm is predicated on scarcity, while the feminine is rooted in abundance for all. When I speak of masculine and feminine values I do not mean the literal male and female. I am not blaming environmental degradation and economic injustice exclusively on men and suggesting that women are neither materialistic nor greedy. I am invoking deeper, indwelling qualities reflected in conventional gender disparities and showing up in both women and men (and in girls and boys). Because both religion and politics, historically intermeshed, have been dominated by systems that empower men and oppress women, essential feminine values have been subverted, and this imbalance is reflected in the way we treat nature and one another.

If encountering this challenge to meet the needs of the environment elicits a vaguely guilty feeling in you, accompanied by a white-knuckled intention to tighten your belt, I invite you to relax. That’s the shadow of the masculine paradigm designed to blame you for not being perfect. The feminine is not about some preconception of purity, which we could never hope to attain and which is therefore destined for failure. The way of the feminine mystic is to adore the presence of the sacred in all things. It’s about celebrating life—food, sex, beauty—not denying life.

So how do we claim this life-affirming birthright without sucking our Mother the Earth dry? By engaging the very feminine values that have been missing from our religious and political institutions: the willingness to be present, to listen, and, most of all, to allow our hearts to be moved by the suffering of the world. The great gift of the brokenhearted is a deepening of care. When we have fully faced the injustices that rage like wildfires on the margins of society and across the wildernesses of the planet, we cannot help but offer ourselves in service. We bleed for our bleeding Mother. We spontaneously rise to tend her.

HEALING VESSELS

While the cosmological story of mending the shattered vessels of the universe serves as a parable for compassionate action, my friend Cynthia Jurs is literally offering vessels filled with healing prayers to the Earth. She calls this practice the Earth Treasure Vase Global Healing Project. Almost thirty years ago, when Cynthia—a practitioner of Tibetan Buddhism—was in Nepal, she climbed high up into the Himalayas to meet a 106-year-old lama who lived as a hermit in a cave at more than 13,000 feet of elevation. “What can I do to bring healing and protection to the Earth?” was the way Cynthia finally formed the amorphous question burning in her being as she walked.

Heartbroken by the looming climate crisis, Cynthia, like most of us, would have done anything to tend the wounds of the Mother. The Rinpoche (a recognized reincarnation of a very high religious leader) shared an ancient practice that involved offering prayers and intentions while filling a clay vessel with sacred objects and then burying it in a region in need of healing. With the Rinpoche’s support and connections, Cynthia and her sangha, her spiritual community, commissioned the creation of thirty earthenware vases and had them hand delivered the following spring to Cynthia’s home in Santa Fe, New Mexico, by friends who had been visiting Nepal.

Since then, the treasure vases have been buried in conflict zones and areas of environmental devastation all over the world—from Liberia to South Africa, from the Amazon jungle to the American Southwest, from New Guinea to New York—creating a global mandala of restorative prayer. Cynthia shared with me that only after carrying many of these vases around the planet did it dawn on her that this practice of bringing protection to the Earth was addressing her own need for healing as well. Having been abused as a girl, with the associated loss of her family’s support, Cynthia quietly carried her own brokenness into her spiritual quest. Although she clearly perceived that the ways in which women are abused is reflected in the ways we exploit the Earth, Cynthia was less connected to her own story of violation and disenfranchisement. Her recognition of her own vulnerability has deepened—and more deeply integrated—an already profound practice, grounding her Earth activism in the full reality of the human experience.

At first, as she fully faced the suffering of the Earth, Cynthia’s heartbreak felt like almost too much to bear. The wreckage, after all, seems unending. Toxic waste is dumped into the watershed. Young girls are abducted and sold as sex slaves. Multinational banks are getting bigger at the expense of those who have nothing. Meanwhile, Cynthia’s personal losses compounded. When she discovered that one of her most beloved teachers had a history of using his position to procure and abuse fifteen-year-old girls—the same age Cynthia was when she was raped—she severed her connection with him. Now not only had she lost most of her family of origin but she had lost her primary spiritual family, too. Unfettered by lineage, Cynthia was launched into the unknown with nothing but her treasure-vase practice and her longing to be of some use in this precious, fractured realm. The Earth herself became Cynthia’s source of authority—both the teacher and the teaching (the Buddha and the dharma).

As it turns out, the Great Mother has a lot to say. “The earth is not just calling, she’s screaming,” Cynthia told me. “The treasure-vase practice is changing from something we are doing to something we are being. We must all become the vessels for healing in this world.” Cynthia emphasizes that one of the most important elements in this process is dropping our preconceived notions of what healing is supposed to look like. “The conceptual mind can’t figure it out,” she says. “The need is too great. It’s overwhelming.”

And so we let our hearts guide us. We let our bodies guide us. “When we align ourselves with our deepest prayer, the next right thing unfolds,” Cynthia discovered. This is the way of the feminine mystic. We cannot be expected to be sanctioned by the hierarchical structures that have let us down and left us out. But neither should we reject them. Each tradition carries wisdom jewels we can gather and plant in the earth.

Some Buddhist practitioners, like Cynthia, believe that as the teachings of the Buddha ripen in the garden of community, they become more universal. Cynthia is excited to see the dharma unfolding toward a collective awakening. This shared task of awakening is infused with the Sacred Feminine, grounded in the knowing that we belong to the web of interbeing and that it is only by surrendering to this belonging that we can hope to mend the world.

Stewardship

Sometimes it’s embarrassing to be an American. The United States is among a handful of countries to pull its support out from under the already flimsy Paris climate accord. But the government and the people are two different entities. Inspired by the feminine ideals of community and hospitality, increasingly larger circles of us are coming together to develop solutions to the imminent threat of global extinction. We are scoping out ways to jump off the train of overconsumption and simplify our lives. We are growing food in small gardens and sharing the bounty with our hungry neighbors. We are buying and trading and making what we need and learning to say, “No, thank you” to the endless stuff society tries to tell us we have to have but which we could easily live without—and finding the deeper satisfaction in doing so.

One of the most comprehensive documents I know of that promotes sustainability is the Earth Charter, drafted at the turn of this new millennium, in 1999. Like the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which was developed in the wake of the Nazi Holocaust of the mid-twentieth century, the Earth Charter is considered to be a “soft legal document”—morally, if not legally, binding to governments that embrace the core tenets. A collaboration of many different nations, the Earth Charter was born as a United Nations initiative and brought to fruition by civil society.

The Earth Charter is an inclusive response to the climate catastrophe and associated social justice issues. Its core principles include respect and care for the community of life; ecological integrity; social and economic justice; and democracy, nonviolence, and peace. It invites us to imagine a new way of living together, in harmony with the planet we share. This global agreement is grounded in the recognition of what the Holy Feminine has always known: we are all interrelated and interdependent. We are children in the midst of a perilous adventure, and we are responsible for one another. Both unity and diversity are equally sacred realities. Finding our rightful place in this glorious web of mutuality is a cause for celebration.

A few years ago I was invited to accompany a team from the Global Peace Initiative of Women to a conference in Costa Rica called “The Inner Dimensions of Climate Change.” The gathering was convened to help encourage youth activists struggling on the front lines of Earth activism. Mature climate scientists, environmental professionals, and spiritual teachers served as mentors for youth activists from all over Latin America and the Caribbean. “Mentoring” largely consisted of cultivating a stance of loving listening rather than imposing our own notions of what these superheroes should be doing differently.

Most of the young people were indigenous, and many were in danger for their lives as a result of speaking out against colonialism and the industrialization of their natural and cultural heritage. From Honduras to Venezuela, these youths had witnessed the disappearance of loved ones who dared to challenge the imperialist agenda of multinational corporations, and almost all of them knew of someone who had been found dead after attempting to organize their communities to keep their sacred lands unspoiled.

We met in a remote jungle lodge for five days of conversation and meditation, sharing meals and music and laughter, sitting together in a safe and sacred space that allowed these brave beings to tell stories and share ideas, to celebrate and grieve. My task was to lead a circle of lament, in which each young person had the opportunity to express both her pain and her hope. It is one of the great honors and inspirations of my life to have been able to bear witness to the broken hearts of beings so close to the core of the Earth’s distress as they took refuge in a circle of loving elders and allowed themselves to fully feel their pain.

What I came away with is this: in spite of the mounting evidence to the contrary, there is ample cause to be optimistic about the future. Despair comes easy when we set up a duality in which human beings are reduced to the categories of perpetrator or victim, the ones who make a mess and those of us who have to clean it up, those who care and the “others” who never will. Hope is kindled when we remember that we belong to one another. By dropping our impulse to otherize, reclaiming our kinship with all life, and embracing the Earth as our Mother, we can collectively awaken from this dangerous dream of dominance and take up the privilege of stewardship that all the great wisdom traditions remind us is our true task.

GAIA

In Greek mythology, the primal energy of the universe is embodied in the Earth goddess Gaia. Wide-Breasted Gaia created herself from the goddess Chaos, and all that we know came into being with her. Deeply rooted in the land itself, Gaia embraces and nourishes all life. Everything arises from her and returns to her. Gaia is more a power than an entity. She is life itself. She is Mother Earth.

In the 1970s a group of scientists developed the Gaia theory, which proposes that the earth is a single organism and that all life is interdependent, forming a synergistic system. This living being is self-regulating and is always seeking balance. The Gaia hypothesis allows us to visualize ourselves as an integral part of the whole and can impel us to stay connected with nature and do everything in our power to tend to and heal her.

Gaia, the mythic goddess, spontaneously came into being, without being created by some external force or driven by some utilitarian agenda. This is the feminine principle. She is being for the sake of being, beauty for the sake of beauty. We are entwined with the Earth. We belong to her, and we are her. If the Earth is sacred, then so are we. The material of our existence is fundamentally blessed.

HOLY WATERS

The feminine gets that stewardship of the Earth is not merely a matter of developing technological solutions. It is about deep attentiveness to the Earth herself. Attention with love. My friend Pat McCabe is a spiritual leader from the Diné (Navajo) Nation, where she is also known as Woman Stands Shining. Aptly named, Pat is rising up and radiating, unapologetically speaking on behalf of the Mother. Her advocacy begins with relationship. She listens to the fractured land, talks to the broken water, communicates with the aching air.

One morning a few years ago, Pat awoke to a flood in her high desert yard. The water was rapidly rising and heading for the house. Anticipating the damage and associated costs she could not afford, Pat started to panic. She tried ignoring it, hoping that it would go away, but it only grew bigger. Finally, she recognized what was happening as a sacred event. She decided to engage the water in dialogue. First, she formally introduced herself, and then she welcomed the water. “What do you need, sister?” she asked. “Do you have something to say to my community?”

The moment Pat showed up in this way, she became aware that the spirits were speaking to her. They told her that her people were getting very good at praying but that this was not enough. Now we had to make ourselves available for the answers. This meant opening space for the unexpected and potentially accommodating dramatic change. It could involve what looked at first like loss, for the solutions our souls are crying out for are drastic ones. But we had to be brave and humble enough to allow the truth to reveal itself.

The spirits let Pat know that welcoming the water was a step in the direction of right relationship and that her task was to teach the world about cultivating dialogue with all of life. This, Pat understood, is the feminine way. It is about embracing spirit in form. Here is where the holy dwells: in the cells of our own bodies, in the veins of water that course below the surface of the earth, in the clouds that lift and carry our prayers, mingle them with the prayers of our ancestors, and release them where they are most needed.

After Pat’s conversation with water, she had to go out of town to give a lecture in a distant city. When she returned home, the water had divided into two streams, bypassing her house altogether. Not an iota of damage had been done to Pat’s home. “This was her solution,” Pat says, clearly impressed with the ingenuity and generosity of her sister, Water. Pat had the courtesy to ask and the patience to listen. Water spoke, adjusted her course, and went on her way, leaving her human sister with the honor and responsibility to show others how to enter into a personal relationship with the elements that sustain us.

Luminous Web of Interbeing

While we need to make our individual voices and our actions count, we can also call for guidance and inspiration from our ancestors. There are precedents for this reverence and care. There are legends to awaken us and archetypes to guide our steps.

In many indigenous traditions, the feminine face of the Holy One takes the form of a spider that weaves the world into being, affirming our mutual dependence with one another and the planet we share. In the Pueblo Indian tradition of the Rio Grande Valley of northern New Mexico, where I live, her true name is secret, so they refer to her simply as Old Spider Woman. The people of Acoma Pueblo believe that when the One Who Made the World created all that is, he left it unfinished. So he commissioned Old Spider Woman to complete creation. He entrusted her with baskets filled with the necessary ingredients, and she handed the baskets to her sisters, who were blinded at first by the radiance spilling from these sacred vessels. Old Spider Woman taught her sisters the prayers to nurture life, and they sang them to the sun and to the earth. When they were finished praying, their sister told them to look in all directions before taking it upon themselves to rule over creation.

Take a breath and look in all directions before stepping up to mend the world.

In the Hopi tradition of Arizona, she is Spider Grandmother, cocreator and sustainer of the world. It is her task to create life to clothe the naked planet. She molds all living things from the ground, mixing earth with her spit, covering creation with her mantle of wisdom. In the Diné tradition, spread throughout the American Southwest, she is Spider Woman, who sings the web of the universe into being. She teaches us to walk the Beauty Way, seeing and celebrating beauty in all directions, all the time. In the tradition of the ancient Maya of Mexico and Central America, she is Ix Chel, goddess of the moon, water, weaving, and childbirth. One of Ix Chel’s titles is Spider’s Web Catching the Morning Dew. She is often depicted with a spindle and loom. Like the Diné creator goddess, Ix Chel introduced the art of weaving to the people.

The essence of these spider stories lies in the truth of interconnectedness. When the Great Weaver spins the yarn of physicality and weaves the tapestry of creation, she is fashioning a web in which every link connects to every other link. Everything is vitally, extravagantly interconnected.

Consider the story of Indra’s net from the Flower Garland Sutra of Mahayana Buddhism. Indra is a male deity with the feminine task of maintaining the web of interbeing to which we all belong. In his heavenly abode there hangs an exquisite net that stretches infinitely in all directions. A luminous jewel has been placed at the center of each intersection of threads. Each one of these jewels reflects all the others. So not only is the net infinite, but the reflection of the net extends to infinity. Just as tikkun olam anticipated the big bang theory by five hundred years, so too does Indra’s net predate the holographic principle in physics by a couple of millennia. Our souls have always understood that everything is interconnected. And radiantly beautiful. And good.

OUR MOTHER, THE EARTH

When Christianity collided with indigenous religions around the world, a kind of nuclear fusion unfolded between the Earth Mother and the Mother of Christ. The apparition known as Our Lady of Guadalupe, from the Valley of Mexico, is a particularly potent example. This hybrid of Mother Mary and Tonantzin, the Mother of the Corn in the Aztec tradition, appeared on the exact spot where the Nahuatl people had been worshiping the fertility goddess for millennia, and she spoke first to an indigenous farmer in his own language. Her skin was dark like their own, yet her features were European. She wore the traditional pre-Columbian maternity sash and also a mantle of stars, like the Virgin Mary. She made it clear that she was the Mother of All People and that her task and her delight was to love us, to give us shelter, to comfort our hearts, and to protect us.

The appearance of Our Lady in the sixteenth century in the Valley of Mexico coincided with the height of the Spanish Conquest, when the colonizers were systematically eradicating indigenous culture, murdering dissenters, and strangling the rights of the native people. The tender mercy of Mother Mary alchemically melded with the fierce power of the Mother of the Corn, and a glorious advocate emerged. Our Lady of Guadalupe bypassed the fear and suspicion engendered by the oppressors and offered a reconciling love that has continued as a wellspring of support for the people of Latin America for five centuries. Some refer to her as the Goddess of the Americas. For many believers, she is as important as Jesus, if not more so (though most Catholics would not proclaim this out loud). Her image—standing on a crescent moon, encircled by stars—adorns the walls of barrios and the hoods of pickup trucks, roadside shrines and flower gardens, from Los Angeles to the Yucatan.

In the Andes, Mother Earth is known as Pachamama. Like Tonantzin, she was both revered and feared by the ancient people. When the conquistadores (Spanish colonizers) imposed Christianity, Pachamama absorbed some of the qualities of Mother Mary, fusing the wild and benevolent aspects of the Great Mother into a single, generous Earth goddess. Unlike the concept of tikkun olam, predicated on the assumption that the world is torn and we need to mend it, the Andean peoples of South America see the universe as a place of lavish abundance, symbolized by the ever-giving mother of us all, Pachamama.

Still, we belong to a cycle of reciprocity, and we must not take more than we offer. The people of the Andes pay close attention to the needs of Pachamama and engage in elaborate rituals to give back for the abundance she lavishes on us all. My friend Annamarie, who leads women’s groups to the Peruvian Andes, tells me about the principle and practice of ayni, “the reciprocal exchange of living energy that occurs through giving offerings and receiving gifts from Mother Earth [Pachamama].” The indigenous Andean people are taught from a young age that all living beings are connected and that we must dwell in balance with the Earth and each other. This is not so much a suggestion about how to live but a recognition of natural law: all life seeks to be in a state of harmony and will inexorably flow toward equilibrium.

The people of the Andes recognize that we all come from Pachamama and that everything belongs to her. “We breathe her air,” Annamarie says. “We drink her water and live on her land. The people take care of her animals, which feed and clothe them.” They revere the Mother by making offerings. When a baby is born, the family will wrap her in a blanket and place her in a shallow hole so that Pachamama can hold her first. Sick children are placed in a similar hole so that Pachamama can heal them. In the spirit of ayni, the Andean people offer simple gifts on a daily basis: seashells, flowers, feathers, candy.

Along with her Andean sisters and brothers, Annamarie believes that by voluntarily simplifying our lives and sending love and gratitude to Pachamama, we can meaningfully contribute to the healing of the Earth. “As humans move into the practice of ayni,” she tells me, “Pachamama will thrive again.”

And so we of the Global North question our inherited Western values, which are largely masculine values, that encourage us to acquire and hoard whatever we can before it’s gone. We give ourselves over to the more feminine impulse to share resources, share wisdom, share joy. We plant ourselves again and again in the fertile soil of our connection with Mother Earth. We walk lightly. We give thanks.

HILDEGARD

The medieval Rhineland visionary Hildegard of Bingen got away with worshiping Mother Earth in the midst of running her Benedictine abbey because she showed her to us through the church-approved lens of Mother Mary and Mother Sophia. Otherwise she would likely have been marked as a pagan and condemned as a heretic. According to Hildegard, it is Mary who spins earthly matter into being and weaves it together with the heavens so that all of creation is interpenetrated with the sacred. In Hildegard’s theology, Mary merges with Sophia, Mother Wisdom, who dips one wing to earth while the other soars to heaven and, in her ecstatic flight, quickens life. She imbues us with yearning for her. This is not heresy; it’s orthodoxy. It may have taken a thousand years for the church to see the light (the “Living Light,” as Hildegard referred to the Divine), but Hildegard was finally canonized in the early twenty-first century, and proclaimed “Doctor of the Church”—a rare honor bestowed on those saints who meaningfully contribute to Roman Catholic theology.

Hildegard was smitten with the creator and enamored by every element of creation. Her mysticism is intimate—erotic, even. She coined the term viriditas to evoke the lush, extravagant, moist, and verdant quality of the Divine, manifesting as the “greening power” that permeates all that is. This life-giving energy is imbued with a distinctly feminine quality.

              The earth is at the same time

              mother,

              she is mother of all that is natural,

              mother of all that is human.

              She is the mother of all,

              for contained in her

              are the seeds of all.   HILDEGARD OF BINGEN

For Hildegard, the Son may be the incarnation of the Holy One, but the Mother forms the very stuff from which the Word of God issues forth into the world. The mystical heart of all the world’s religions affirms the profoundly feminine understanding of panentheism: that is, all the particles of the universe are infused with the substance of the Divine; God both interpenetrates the universe and is greater than all that is.

SITA

Mother Sita is one of the most beloved goddesses of Hindu mythology. Few of her devotees, however, remember that she is, in many ways, an avatar of Mother Earth. Sita is born of Mother Earth, found as an infant in a furrow where her adopted father was plowing his field. She followed her husband, Lord Ram, into exile in the forest, where they lived in simplicity, close to the earth, for fourteen years. There, she communicated with animals, crafted herbal remedies, and sensed climate shifts.

What most people think they know of Sita comes from the classic Hindu epic the Ramayana, which tells the famous story of Sita’s abduction by Ravana, the evil ten-headed demon. Ravana glimpses Sita as he rides his chariot through the sky, desires her on the spot, and carries her off to his demon abode across the sea on the island of Lanka. An epic battle unfolds in which the humble monkey king, Hanuman, rescues Sita and she is restored to her rightful place by Ram’s side.

The Ramayana is an iconic tale of love and separation, of languishing and homecoming. It serves as an archetype for the reunification of the feminine and masculine faces of the Godhead. It also relegates Sita to the status of chaste and obedient spouse and reinforces the stereotype of the helpless female. My friend Dena Merriam, who has spent a lifetime studying Hindu texts and meditating on their meaning, has a different take on Sita’s story. She says that Sita was not Ravana’s victim but rather the architect of her own fate. Sita willingly took on the karma of her incarnation to help turn the consciousness of humanity back to right relationship with the Earth. Nor was Sita merely Ram’s devotee; she was a full and equal participant in the teaching of the dharma (spiritual law).

Sita is all about connection with nature. At the end of her life, she was weary from the many tribulations of her incarnation, including a painful rupture with her beloved Ram, who, imagining his wife’s violation at the hands of the evil Ravana, eventually cast her off. Sita returned to the arms of Mother Earth, who broke herself open and, taking Sita’s hand, lovingly received her.

Our experiences of embodiment may not always correspond with idealized images of holiness, but these preconceptions derive from masculine standards of perfection. Such paradigms have caused great harm, and they are no longer valid. I invite you to abandon your efforts to fix yourself and instead reclaim your innate beauty and worth as a luminous cell in the body of Mother Earth.

deepening

Sit quietly, with your eyes closed, and allow your mind to explore the breadth and depth of the degradation of Mother Earth. Refrain from either pushing away the pain or translating it into self-righteous rage. Allow yourself to linger in the places that cause you discomfort.

       Now identify one particular issue that most deeply troubles you, either close to home or in a remote region of the planet. Be present with this reality for a few minutes.

       Ask yourself what practical steps you could take to alleviate some of this suffering in the world. Resolve to take action in some small or large way. Follow through. And if you feel overwhelmed, remember, you are not alone. Join your energy with the energy of others. And consider what Mother Teresa said: “Not all of us can do great things, but we can do small things with great love.”

       Your action may be as simple as declining to use plastic straws, knowing how discarded straws are severely disrupting the ecosystems of the world’s oceans. Maybe you will choose to bike to work one day a week, lightening your carbon footprint and contributing to your own fitness. Try reading one new article on climate change each week and use social media to educate the people to whom you are connected.