Sacred Tabernacles [part 4 of 9]: The Desecration of the Land
Desecrated Landscapes
The depth and vastness of the Great Mother’s love shows up in many forms, as the glorious springtime bounty, raging rivers, majestic mountains, earthquakes, landslides, and forest fires. Being in the joy of springtime, it is easy to wonder how all is not right in the world.
Yet, when the floods, fires or earthquakes destroy homes, humans grieve the loss of what was always impermanent. Some shake their fist at the sky. We often fail to recognize nature’s way, the natural cycle of death and rebirth that fire, flood, and earthquakes bring.
The Coronavirus is the new ‘enemy’, with many elected officials using war terminology in terms of defeating it. Man versus nature scenarios rarely turn out in Man’s favor, even in our temporary conquering of natural resources that we tend to overuse and deplete at our own expense.
Man is nature, but in our denial of this aspect of ourselves, we turn on ourselves.
The sudden uptick in hurricanes and earthquakes is certainly connected to the long-term destructive human behavior that is harming ecosystems. Mother Nature’s cycles provide balance and restoration, perhaps at the peril of humans. Even in her destruction, Nature offers us rebirth, a chance to change our ways.
Portage of Crises and Loss
Sometimes, it is only when we are forced through the uncomfortable portage of great crisis or devastating loss that we find a willingness to change. The Coronavirus pandemic has offered us both crisis and loss of global proportion.
Honestly facing what we have done to our planet, generation after generation, is an important catalyst toward change. We have missed out on the Great Mother’s love isolating ourselves from nature and trading in our conscious connection for spiritless matters.
Jung, in response to the lack of humanity in modern culture, says that the original image of matter was one “that could encompass and express the profound emotional meaning of Great Mother" (Jung, MHS, PP. 94-95, 2016, p. 85).
Jung points to the dehumanization that scientific progress has created, leaving human beings feeling
“isolated in the cosmos. …no longer involved in nature and has lost his emotional participation in natural events, which hitherto had a symbolic meaning for him. Thunder is no longer the voice of a god, nor is lightning his avenging missile. No river contains a spirit, no tree means a man’s life, no snake is the embodiment of wisdom, and no mountain still harbors a great demon. Neither do things speak to him nor can he speak to things, like stones, springs, plants and animals. He no longer has a bush-soul identifying him with a wild animal. His immediate communication with nature is gone forever, and the emotional energy it generated has sunk into the unconscious.” (Jung, CW 18, PAR. 585, 2016, p.79-80)
Seeing ourselves as separate from the web of life puts us at odds with participating fully and claiming our sacred place. This chasm allows us to turn our backs on Mother Nature, cutting off our own limbs to the medicine we need.
In his book, Awakening the Soul, Michael Meade describes how the build-up of issues like global warming are creating a collective trauma and existential crisis of worldwide proportion. Meade goes on to describe the threats we must respond to that affect both nature and culture, threats we can no longer ignore (Meade, 2018).
Meade speaks starkly of our current circumstances:
“The world has fallen asleep and is suffering a loss of the dream of life, leaving us with nightmares that produce pollution in nature as well as poisons in culture. … a flood of rapid changes can cause everyone to become disoriented and feel disillusioned by the daily conditions of life. Traumatizing agents include the rise of mass culture and the subsequent diminishing of the individual soul, the spread of rampant materialism and the rise of connective technologies that contribute to deep disconnections while linking people at the surface levels of life.” (2018, p.32)
This dissociation permits us to destroy ecosystems, contaminate waterways, and annihilate forests. In our absence, we desacralize hallowed ground and dishonor divine mystery with our irresponsible actions and inactions.
Ego as construct of culture. Poisons include all the ways we desecrate ourselves and the rest of the natural world. Profanity and desecration begin within each of us. When we fail to recognize our own purpose and contributions to the world, we do not notice our reflection in the natural world. Modern humans, in the momentum of all our egocentric progress, split off from ourselves, dismissing our inheritance.
In Living in the Borderland, Jerome Bernstein addresses this issue of our fragmentation within the context of modern culture. He describes the evolutionary phenomenon of ‘Borderland personality’ as a person
“who psychically straddles the split between the developed, rational mind and nature in the western psyche, … who holds and carries the tension of that split and an emergent reconciliation of that split at one and the same time. The Borderland is a recent evolutionary dynamic that appears to be rapidly gaining momentum and liminality in the western ego. It is manifested through the collective unconscious – a natural evolutionary dynamic – that is moving the western psyche to reconnect its present overspecialized ego to its natural roots.” (Bernstein, 2005, p. 16)
Within each human being, the internal space that connects with the collective consciousness, is also a liminal space, a portage for transformation. If the destruction of the earth begins within each of us, so does its creative potential.
Our Response
The overwhelm of devastation, shame, guilt and fear can render modern persons frozen to respond to the loss of relationship with the natural world. Even those waking up to the deep connection to Mother Earth must address the overwhelming grief and loss of how we have harmed her.
Cultural norms nearly require us to consume to survive, even regularly purchased common necessities are packaged in earth-damaging containers. It is easy to understand feeling frozen to act when we recognize ourselves standing in the shadow of overpowering mass consumerist culture.
The big machine of progress disenfranchises individual efforts to restore nature to its vitality. Progress includes our need to make noise incessantly, silencing the rest of nature with the power of our horns speakers, and volume of devices.
Human consumption of oil—the fuel of progress—wreaks havoc on our planet as we drill everywhere we can for more, often at the cost of land and marine life. It is this feeling of powerlessness against mass culture and progress that continue to exacerbate our isolation from nature.
Turning Our Backs on Nature
Western progress is responsible for the loss of native lands, culture, history, and way of life. All that is left of the ancient presence of indigenous tribes, who lived much more lightly on the land preserving and honoring relationship with nature, are the Native American Reservations.
We have sequestered and disenfranchised Native Americans from their lands and culture. The land where I live is the stolen, desecrated land of the Tonkawa. Their ritual spaces, tribal communities, and burial grounds were once where my home and many others in my area now stand. The epigenetic burdens and responsibility of my ancestors weigh heavily with the shame of a long history of transgressions.
Ian McCallum, in Ecological Intelligence, speaks to the disconnection of human beings from nature. McCallum asserts that humans “are the only animal who can turn our back on our animal nature and it is then…that the bars come down on our world” (2008, p. 97).
In an interview with Krista Tippett (2016), poet David Whyte drills down on this uniquely human ability to turn our backs on nature:
“We’re the only part of creation that can actually refuse to be ourselves. As far as I can see, there’s no other part of the world that can do that, you know? The cloud is the cloud; the mountain is the mountain; the tree is the tree; the hawk is the hawk. … But we, as human beings, are really quite extraordinary in that we can actually refuse to be ourselves. We can get afraid of the way we are. We can temporarily put a mask over our face and pretend to be somebody else or something else.” (np)
We have been off course for a long time. Yet, there are entry points that can put us back on the road home to reconcile with ourselves and nature.
Tears and Soil
We can only imagine an inkling of the devastation that Mother Earth has witnessed over time, particularly since the beginning of the modern age. The best we can relate is through our own experiences of witnessing various acts of destruction humans have committed against each other, creatures, plants, and land.
The closest relatable experiences I have are in witnessing the terrible heartache of my own children's pain. Beings who once grew in the safety of my womb have at times disconnected from themselves, others, and nature. Healing from destruction, self-inflicted or otherwise, is possible, but not without connection.
Having our children impacted by substance abuse or suffering in their own isolation is painful for all involved. This is the same disconnection and turning away most of us in the modern world suffer on various levels and intensities as we step away from our true nature and our planet that holds us for temporary solutions to pain.
The disconnection and destruction nests within our very being, rippling into relationships, community, and the world. When we choose to connect during difficult times, particularly with nature, those ripples are filled with healing that move beyond our individual experience.
Very near the portage of crisis and pain is the doorway of desperation. Desperate for relief and healing is a passageway that requires we vulnerably turn toward nature and our pain.
In one of these moments of witnessing my child’s self destruction, instead of disconnecting or turning on myself, I stepped out into the gardens at my home. I offered the land fresh soil and various salvias. I poured my fears, sweat, tears, and grief into the ground beneath my bare feet as I planted hardy, protective, fragrant plants. Mother Earth, our ultimate caregiver, received it all, and held me in my pain of disconnection from my child. The gifts of surrendering to Great Mother’s unconditional love unfolded in ways I could not have anticipated.
In this moment of standing in dirt and tears with salvia rising up from the ground and surrounding my body, the unfathomable loving hand of Mother Earth cut through my pain to hold me, to see, hear, and witness me. This was a moment of desperation that pushed me through a portage into the ultimate connection with Mother Earth.
The experience made clear how our ego and pain isolate us from each other and from nature. There came a knowing that it is not until we die, returning to the earth and becoming the soil itself, that we are once again fully part of this great unconditional holding.
