Spirituality and Ecological Hope

Fostering Ecological Hope
Today from Margaret Swedish:

We need voices, voices that can reflect our grief back to us, what we have done to ourselves, to our Earth. Joni Mitchell was one of the song-writers of an earlier generation that did that, with haunting melodies and poetic lyrics that were often heart-rending and sometimes a whole lot of fun.

So I was drawn to the article on the front page of today’s NY Times Arts and Leisure section about her new musical and dance ventures. I will leave you to read it if you wish. After not recording for a decade, she is preparing a new album, and much of the music of this award-winning songwriter and musician from Canada will focus on the mess we have made with the war in Iraq, second only to our war on nature.

She says of the ballet on which she is working, choreographed to her music, that it is:

“A red alert about the situation the world is in now. We’re wasting our time on this fairy tale war, when the real war is with God’s creation. Nobody’s fighting for God’s creation.”

Well, some of us are, but I get her point. Ain’t much of a fight yet, as Nature is altered, destabilized, fragmented, all around us by how we live.

And on this Sunday, when most of the culture will be focused on a football game that will attract far more passion in this country than any defense of the planet, I wanted to share this quote from Joni, as she makes reference to one of her earlier and most popular songs, “Woodstock:”

“The West has packed the whole world on a runaway train. We are on the road to extincting ourselves as a species. That’s what I meant when I said that we’ve got to get ourselves back to the garden.”

And this:

My heart is broken in the face of the stupidity of my species.”

Yes, we must get ourselves back to some semblance of a garden. How did we manage to destroy something so beautiful as this?