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Essay 12: An Ecology of Devotion by Dennis Rivers |
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Like day and night, summer and winter, the nature that lives and
breathes through us is full of polarities. I come into the fullness of MY
personal being in relation to many YOUs. To cherish life at a deeper level
is to accept this web of interwovenness, of land and sea, yes... of lake and
forest, yes...but also, of
you and me! This fragile human co-arising is as
much a part of nature as spiderweb, wildebeest or waterfall.
The life that emerges between us... The partnership of bodies brings
forth new bodies. The partnership of minds, brings forth new minds.
Hearts joined in love invite everyone to love more. "Love one another,"
Jesus said, "as I have loved you," not only counseling his followers but
also describing the path love travels down the generations, if we let it,
because we let it. So also do hatred and oppression travel down the
generations.
And how beyond the circle of our human lives, one well might ask, is
this related to ecology and reverence for life? In more ways than one
would imagine. Perhaps the most dramatic link is that our human
conflicts are having catastrophic
impacts on other species. Driven
by greed and unskilled in sharing,
human beings are emptying the sea
of fish and emptying the mountains
of trees. Elephants in the jungles
and forests of Indochina step on
land mines just as people do. Our
fears of our enemies, and their
fears of us, have left the world
awash in nuclear waste, which
damages the gene-pools of human
and animal alike. Ultimately, as
Wendell Berry observes, we treat
the natural world with the same love
or disregard that we bestow on one
another.
To cherish the web of life, to protect life, it is now clear that we must
necessarily face the shadow side of our own temperaments and our own
cultures, the life that unfolds between us. For it is we humans, moved by
The Kiss Constantin Brancusi
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