Healing Ourselves and Mother Earth (H.O.M.E.)
It's Solstice time again -- June 21, 2010 7:28 AM EDT -- the shortest day of winter here in Brazil and the longest day up north. Soon the arc of the sun will reverse and start its journey toward the balance of Equinox. Its been hard to follow world events lately -- the gusher in the gulf, new oil exploration across Peru, dams and roads planned across Amazonia, massive oil-drilling off Brazil's coast, and now a threatening movement in the Brazilian Congress to dismantle the forest code that has just begun to reduce deforestation. We can count on Nature to manage its cycles and return to balance but what about us humans?
It's obvious that we need all the help we can get, from good-hearted people here on earth and from the helpers of the spirit realms. Below is a slideshow of some of the powerful visionary art of Charles Frizzell. It's short, only about 10 images. Perhaps you will have a few moments to watch it and offer a Solstice prayer -- a call to the helpers of your tradition, asking that they guide us all toward balance and harmony with each other and with Nature.
And if you would like to do more, 20 years ago Wendell Berry addressed a college graduating class and offered a set of 10 precepts that still seem to me as the best set of guidelines that I've seen.
May we all be fortunate to find our place, our community and our good work.
1. Beware the justice of Nature.
2. Understand that there can be no successful human economy apart from Nature or in defiance of Nature.
3. Understand that no amount of education can overcome the innate limits of human intelligence and responsibility. We are not smart enough or conscious enough or alert enough to work responsibly on a gigantic scale.
4. In making things always bigger and more centralized, we make them both more vulnerable in themselves and more dangerous to everything else. Learn, therefore, to prefer small-scale elegance and generosity to large-scale greed, crudity, and glamor.
5. Make a home. Help to make a community. Be loyal to what you have made.
6. Put the interest of the community first.
7. Love your neighbors--not the neighbors you pick out, but the ones you have.
8. Love this miraculous world that we did not make, that is a gift to us.
9. As far as you are able make your lives dependent upon your local place, neighborhood, and household--which thrive by care and generosity--and independent of the industrial economy, which thrives by damage.
10. Find work, if you can, that does no damage. Enjoy your work. Work well.
May we all have a HAPPY SOLSTICE and many more.
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