1969 was a year, much like out present era, in which many in the USA realized that we were trapped in a war which had no real purpose, could not be won, and from which we could not extricate ourselves. (The war went on for another mindlessly obscene six years!)

A major challenge of the era was how to keep one’s life from being engulfed by the tide of arrogance and stupidity represented by the war that would not stop, how to keep one’s heart from dying of grief. That was the context in which Crosby, Stills and Nash wrote and performed this song.

Ecstatic Prayer (Audio File)

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Eco-philosopher Joanna Macy explores the spiritual challenges to humanity presented by nuclear weapons.  She is filmed by Cynthia Jurs, Director of the Earth Treasure Vase Project, a Tibetan spiritual practice of filling clay jars with prayer scripts and small objects of deep meaning to the givers, and then burying the vases at trouble spots around the world.  The Treasure Vase ritual asserts the power of consciousness and intention in a world imagined as full of only inert objects.  Several Treasure Vases have been buried at nuclear weapon sites.

A one-page mini-manifesto by Dennis Rivers
and uncounted zillions of ecological kindred spirits  – 2018 revision

Most people accept that life, to at least some degree, depends on love, because we recognize that babies need food, shelter and affection, which they cannot arrange for themselves in the absence of loving parents and kin. But the idea that we have a need to care for the entire web of life and people, well known to many native peoples, is only beginning to be explored in Western countries.

The emergence of industrial society and its long-lived toxic by-products, from pesticides to leaking nuclear waste tanks, has fundamentally changed our relationship to the natural world, the ground on which we stand. For eons, wrecking the planet has been beyond human reach. But our impact on the Web of Life is now so large that I am drawn to the conclusion that complex life will only continue on Planet Earth if we care for all people as our beloved kin, and all creatures as if they were our beloved children.
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A Vision of Gaia — Artist unknown but deeply appreciated

March 1, 2018

Gaia Theory is the proposal by scientists James Lovelock and Lynn Margulis that the Earth is like a giant organism, with many balancing factors (soil, atmosphere, ocean, web of life) acting together through complex feedback loops to keep an environment favorable to life. 

This talk about Gaia Theory was presented to the Word and Life Study Fellowship in Santa Barbara, California.  Over a period of ten weeks, The Fellowship asked a variety of speakers to expand on the themes explored in a recent book, Spiritual Ecology: The Cry of the Earth.

The chapter I was invited to expand on was about Gaia Theory and the soul of the world, written by Jungian analyst Jules Cashford.