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| We Two Together: a sculpture by Michael Alfano, currently on display at the Mill Brook Gallery Photograph:: CC Jean Stimmell |
We Two Together pulls at me, drawing me in deeper and deeper, a visual manifestation of
recent thoughts and feelings. We Two Together is a sculpture by Michael
Alfano, currently on exhibit overlooking a lush garden pond outside the Mill
Brook Gallery and Sculpture Garden in Concord, NH. The sculpture depicts two
lovers, joined as one, surrounded, in turn, by the greater whole of nature’s
embrace.
We Two Together resonates with me in the same manner as an ecstasy poem I recently read
by the Sufi poet, Rumi:
Your Love lifts my Soul from the body to the Sky
And you lift me up out of the two worlds.
I want your Sun to reach my raindrops,
So your heat can raise my Soul upward like a cloud.
It also triggered thoughts about a provoking piece
by Paul Kingsnorth in the current issue of Orion Magazine1,
suggesting we deal with climate change by awakening our sense of the sacred and
practicing a new animism. His thoughts correspond with my own thinking.
I was converted to the notion that our Earth is a
living, breathing organism since the 1960s, after first viewing that iconic
photograph from space of our heavenly blue spaceship earth, and later read
James Lovelock’s Gaia Hypothesis, which outlines how all of us as living beings
interact with our inorganic surroundings to create a self-regulating system – a
giant living organism – maintaining and perpetuating ideal conditions for life.
That notion still fills me with awe: it blows my
socks off! To my way of thinking, indigenous folks around the world have been
right all along: the Earth is a living being; She is our Mother.
I am engulfed in that same soaring sense of awe when
I view We Two Together. Not surprisingly, I have diametrically opposing
feelings for both our government officials and mainstream consumer society who
laugh at the idea of a living earth and sadly, as a secondary result, poopoo
the threat of climate change.
Who can deny, in our technological society, we take
the earth for granted, treating her like an inert object: either a storehouse
of commodities to be used and discarded, or as scenic, background prop to our
lives, as if we were staging a movie.
Increasingly, however, in this age of man-made
climate change, we pollute at our own
peril. While more of us perceive the danger, most offer as solutions only new
government regulations or technical fixes. But, like the domestic abusers we
are, I fear we will continue to defile the earth until, if and when, we recognize
her sacred nature.
We have no choice but to change. The question is,
will it be in time? Our survival – along
with most life forms on planet earth – depends on us stepping up in time to
reclaim our primal forbearer’s reverence for our home.
Kingsnorth,
in his essay, is not sure if we need a new religion, but he makes a
powerful case for a renewal of the sacred to re-awaken in us a sense of awe and
wonder for something bigger than us:
What could that something greater be? There is no
need to theorize about it. What is greater than us is the earth itself—life—and
we are folded into it, a small part of it, and we have work to do. We need a
new animism, a new pantheism, a new way of telling the oldest of stories. We
could do worse than to return to the notion of the planet as the mother that
birthed us. Those old stories have plenty to say about the fate of people who
don’t respect their mothers.
In the spirit of Rumi, poetic teller of the oldest
of stories, we must reclaim our Earth for who she really is: a living,
breathing body, our beloved other. She is our Mother, supporting and cradling
us, the source of all life.
xxx
1 https://orionmagazine.org/article/the-axis-and-the-sycamore/
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