Spirituality and Ecological Hope

Today from Margaret Swedish:

My cabin sits in the woods of central Kentucky on what is really a large farm.  The group of 7 cabins is spread thin through the woods in a hollow.  This morning, as I walked down the road to get to this computer, I strolled through half a dozen or more deer who were not certain they wanted this disturbance.  However, knowing they were safe, they mostly stared, snorted, tapped their front hoof on the ground, and watched me go by, a large smile on my face.

Folks that live here have a strong commitment to an earth spirituality, and it is part of daily life, from the wood stove for heating and the proper use of the stove, to composting our food scraps, hanging clothes out to dry rather than running an energy-wasting clothes dryer, recycling of as much as possible, and using recyclables for things like building cabins and sheds. 

It is wonderful to be this in touch with the basic life we have largely left behind — but to which we will all be returning soon, given the level of resource depletion, peak fossil fuel realities, climate change, and more. 

We will need to re-learn so many things. 

There is a little cabin for meditation, and in the evening anyone who wants gathers for quiet meditation in community.  One of the folks here had written a Celtic prayer left in the chapel, entitled, “Emptying the daily poop can.”  She said it arose out of a one-day workshop on Celtic prayer devoted to praying about the most mundane, daily realities of life.  She had been 20 years in Latin America living among the poor, and so knew something about the subject matter. 

I am reading, writing, meditating, trying to find the best way I can contribute to creating a new way of life in this society, one that can get us through the hard time that is coming.  Simplicity will do us all good, I think, and the more quickly we begin to live simply, the less suffering there will be as our world changes all around us.