23 Oct Manifesto

In all of us lives a story. A story of our unique gifts, a story of wandering, wondering, searching, finding, becoming, giving, receiving, and transcending. A story of what it means to be alive and how it happens that one comes alive.

It is a universal story. A story that is deep in our very soul in every culture around the world. It is our hero or our heroine journey and it is unique and precious and it involves not only our individual selves but the universal cells of all that surrounds us – our loved ones, our home, our community, the stars and moon that grace our night, the living breathing trees that nourish our lungs the seas that feed our rhythms, the sun that soaks our skin. each piece is not perhaps in us, but they are all of us and we are them.

Mighty earthling is about this story. This universal story that we are all living whether we are present to its reality or not – we are yet still aware of it perhaps deeply buried but there it is in our hearts, producing singing and uplift, sometimes despair and emptiness, other times deep fullness and boundlessness.

We are of the earth, we are of the planet, we are of one another and we are of every other living creature we share our home with – this beautiful blue and green globe that gives of its sweetness every morning in the color of dawn and every evening in the first bright star amidst the blue. It and ourselves are there – shining out at us all the time and sometimes we can stand still long enough to feel it. Most of the time we can’t. or don’t’.

It might be ok if we all went along like this for the rest of eternity. if only we could. The rest of eternity is rapidly approaching and we seem to want to keep running faster in ever greater desire to get to the end to make all of the money so we can sit at the end of the world where we will hug our things and say so long to the skies and the waters and the creatures who we can’t possibly even understand because we have not bothered to meet them.

It may be that we are running so fast and hogging up so much stuff that we will not swerve in time to miss the blank slate of the end. but my job until that last breath is to wave my arms and say ‘hey wait a minute! Look over here! check out this ladybug! See how it scurries to and fro? What’s it doing? So cute! And say hey – see that moon – that bright elegant globe, how its light seers my heart with its potent life-ness. See how my heart calms in the unpredictable light of it, so different from the predictable and unnerving glow of the digital. the not alive.

Mighty earthling is about being alive and staying alive – about keeping more of our world alive. Most of all – the precious creatures called our children – not just our very own flesh and blood but the ones to whom this very small and very endangered home will be given. It is up to us to create that future, that vision of great aliveness where we dance with awareness of the shared life-ness of all beings.