James Lovelock and Gaia

https://nyti.ms/3vgQJcb#permid=119537907

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/07/27/climate/james-lovelock-dead.html?smid=url-share

Wendell Berry: I Go Among Trees

 

I Go Among Trees 

by Wendell Berry

I go among trees and sit still.
All my stirring becomes quiet
around me like circles on water.
My tasks lie in their places
where I left them, asleep like cattle.

Then what is afraid of me comes
and lives a while in my sight.
What it fears in me leaves me,
and the fear of me leaves it.
It sings, and I hear its song.

Then what I am afraid of comes.
I live for a while in its sight.
What I fear in it leaves it,
and the fear of it leaves me.
It sings, and I hear its song.

After days of labor,
mute in my consternations,
I hear my song at last,
and I sing it. As we sing,
the day turns, the trees move.

~ Wendell Berry from Sabbaths

offered by Hugh Byrne today, feb 27, 2022...makes me think of 'interbeing', moving beyond fear.

Interbeing

Although we are in different boats, you in your boat and we in our canoe, we share the same river of life. ~ Chief Oren Lyons

The art of living lies less in eliminating our troubles, than in growing with them. ~ Bernard M. Baruch

The other is me

When feeling imposed upon,
I vow with all beings
To remember that Interdependence
Means that for others the other is me.

--Robert Aitken

Responsible Grown-up

Responsible Grown-up

We are not innocent children victimized by a big bad world; if our world is big and bad, we made it that way. This is what the Buddha taught. The "other" is the child's boogeyman, the projection of our own fears onto a terrifying object of our imagination, which in turn terrorizes us. Our ignorance is not seeing that we are the other. We cannot afford to confuse innocence with this ignorance. Violence is not a permanent, immutable, fixed object. It is a state of mind, an expression of ignorance, with no more solid substance than a cloud. We cannot make a frontal attack on violence. Even protecting ourselves from it fuels its boogeyman existence. But the Buddha taught that we can change. This was his good news: that there is a way to alleviate suffering by freeing our minds from greed, anger, and ignorance. Yet until we apprehend the ways in which we are Oklahoma City, the bombs and the baby bears, the victims and the violators, we will continue to blame "them," all the while proclaiming our innocence and evading our responsibilities.


--Helen Tworkov, Tricycle: The Buddhist Review, Vol. V, #1