Page 5 - ECOlogic Book

You Darkness
(Winter, 1990)

It is perhaps fitting that our Newsletter’s initial issue should arrive just as
the days are short and the time of darkness has reached its zenith; a time of
the year when all of nature seems to have returned to earth. The leaves
have fallen. Animals have settled into their burrows for hibernation. The
summer songbirds have migrated to warmer climates. It’s a time when all
seems to be dead, and though we’ve seen it happen as many years as we
are old, there is always that little question in our hearts, “will the dying be
permanent this time? Will spring come again? These branches look so dry,
so lifeless. Is it possible any life whatsoever can come forth from them?
Yet, I’ve been told there is great activity under the bark of winter trees;
much preparation and huge amounts of energy being expended, getting
ready for spring’s Great Bursting Forth.

I can’t help but be struck by this as a metaphor for our own lives; for those
times when life seems to be going nowhere, the dry desert times. It’s hard
to remember at such times that something is stirring in our own depths,
beneath the level of our awareness; that something is being prepared for
our own greening forth.

It must be that way for the earth, too. From Earth’s perspective, in the
larger cycle of her development, the industrial age must have seemed like a
long, ever-darkening winter. We’re still very much in the industrial age, no
question about it; still heavily dependent on the fossil fuels that are so
damaging to the earth’s natural systems. Industrial farming is still washing
away the top soil that took so many thousands of years to build up. We still
calculate our success based on the products we produce, sell, and consume.
We have learned how to grow, but have no understanding of the natural
limits to our own growth. We still clutch our so-called nuclear “security,
though it does not make us feel more secure.

But this ever-darkening situation, discouraging as it is, is drawing to a close,
and something new is stirring under the crust of earth’s awareness. More
and more, we’re coming to the realization – to the experience that, as Naomi
Long said in an EAC Board retreat, “We are the Earth’s eyes. We are the
voice of the Earth. “

We are getting greener in our consciousness, and it’s just possible that this
very, very long dark night we have all been living through is on the verge of
giving way. We are starting to realize that, as Rainer Maria Rilke has said,

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