As we are constantly reminded these days, humans have the capacity to destroy nature by manipulating its natural components in toxic ways and by over-consuming and wasting. Yet an article in the current issue of Smithsonian offers some wonderful new science about how life once actually created nature:

Mineralogist Bob Hazen of the Carnegie Institution for Science, is an expert on the evolution of minerals on the Earth. Over the years his own thinking has evolved as well. Hazen has discovered that, before the formation of our solar system only about a dozen minerals, including diamonds and graphite, existed. Another fifty or sixty formed as the sun exploded into being. Erupting volcanoes produced still more, such as basalt, while tectonic plates colliding beneath the planet's surface created copper, lead, and zinc.

Then, as life arose on the planet, the new organic beings released oxygen into the atmosphere, and that phenomenon made possible a range of previously unknown minerals, including turquoise, azurite, and malachite. Of the approximately 4,400 known minerals, more than two-thirds came into being because of the influence of life on Earth, and many were created exclusively by living organisms.

Grand Isle, LA May 2010
 © Matthew D. White

Saturday, October 30, is Gulf Coast Rising, a day of solidarity, healing, beauty, and yes, even joy for the Gulf of Mexico and its people.

Since this project burst into being, impelled by the terrible devastation to the Gulf and the bayous as a result of the BP oil spill that began on April 20, a lot has happened. Now we have made it even easier and more personal for people to participate.

As with the Global Earth Exchange on June 19, people are invited to make beauty for the Gulf in whatever way they wish.

"Beauty" is simple and individual: people are putting a wreath of flowers on the beach, tying a ribbon on their boat, and inviting neighbors over for coffee, playing music, reading poems.

• Tell your friends in the Gulf about Gulf Coast Rising!
• Become part of the Gulf Coast Rising Support Network and make beauty of your own for the Gulf on October 30--no matter where you are! Just tell us what you plan to do and we'll put a pin on the map for you.
  
• Volunteer to help us get the word out by sending emails to people and groups on our list. We'll give you everything you need!
• Contribute. We need to raise $10,000 to make Gulf Coast Rising happen. So far we have received contributions in the amount of $1,750. That means we need to raise $8,250 in just 24 days! Any donation is very welcome. If you contribute you'll get a green Partner's pin on our website map.
  

The Fourmile Canyon fire, that began in the hills above Boulder, CO on Labor Day of this year, burned more than 6,000 acres in ten days and destroyed 169 homes.

On the weekend of September 24-26, I was in Boulder for the 8^th annual Wilderness Therapy Symposium, where I gave the keynote speech and presented a workshop on Finding Beauty in Wounded Places. My workshop group and I were honored to be invited to do a Radical Joy for Hard Times Earth Exchange up at Gold Hill, a 150-year-old former mining community, where the neighbors are particularly close-knit and where the fire destroyed many homes.

We gathered with our host, Melissa Shanahan, and four of her neighbors, under a circle of surviving Ponderosa pines, sitting on the stumps of trees that Melissa's husband Mike had cut down in order to save the house. The residents talked about how quickly the fire had consumed the dry vegetation, how some families had had less than two hours to gather their belongings before evacuating, while others had not been able to return to their homes at all.

The Shanahans had already evacuated when Mike decided to return, telling his wife that he would not leave unless the house burned down. He and two friends worked for 48 hours, raking brush, hosing down the house, cutting trees. And they succeeded. Although the house just down the hill from theirs was completely burned (except, poignantly, for a small statue of St. Francis, still holding a lamb in his arms and guarding the burned place), the Shanahans' house remains untouched, although blackened grass reaches right up to the foundation. One woman at our gathering talked about the survivors' guilt she felt, since her home still stands, while the houses of some of her friends were completely destroyed.

Then everyone had time to walk or sit quietly on the burned land. Afterwards, we gathered again to tell the stories of what everyone had noticed. One of the men from the workshop said he had been unable to stop thinking of how devastated he would feel if his own log cabin in New Hampshire were to burn. A young woman described making a circle of pinecones and other found objects under a tree, each one representing one of the homes that had burned. One of the residents said she had spent the time sitting on a favorite rock that had once been surrounded by trees, but now overlooked a charred wasteland. She said she realized she would have to work hard to find places of beauty in the days and months ahead, but that she had recognized from sitting on the rock, which had itself endured, that this was possible.

Finally, we went out into a meadow on the Shanahans' land, near the tree where the young woman had placed the memorial objects. Speaking of his sense that rejuvenation was possible for both people and the land, one of the neighbors showed us the tattoo on his arm: a phoenix bird rising out of the flames. It seemed a natural response for us to create a phoenix bird out of sticks and pieces of the ponderosas that Mike and his friends had cut down to save the house.

A couple of days later, Melissa wrote me that, when she drove home after work the day after our gathering, there was a doe sitting peacefully in the center of the stumps where we had told our stories. (Look closely and you can see her just behind the nearest stump on the right.)

In my last newsletter, I suggested that it's time for a new image to depict our current, transformed human relationship with Earth.

In his 1836 essay, "Nature," Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote that the human influence on Nature is "insignificant, a little chipped, baking, patching, and washing, that in an impression so grand as that of the world on the human mind, they do not vary the result."

Today, of course, that statement is very far from true. A new image of Earth, therefore, would take into consideration the direct and profound influence that humans have on Nature, and that Nature continues to have on us.

Three people responded to the question with some interesting images.

Shauna Turner, an enrolled member of the  Chickasaw nation who has been working to reclaim an area of native groves in a deteriorated neighborhood in L.A for traditional use by First Nations peoples, writes: "When I reference my view of Our Earth Mother I am using some 'visual aids'--ancestral symbols (petroglyphs and architectural 'calendars' like Chaco Canyon), as well as a modern one--who I call 'iris' as in: if I want to hear the Earth Mother's 'voice' I 'ask Iris'.... www.iris.edu/seismon. I think that page is so visually stunning, and for me, reassuring. I visit it to remind myself that while the media is all hyped about 'woe is me, Man is so big and powerful we're killing our Mother,' that in fact, our Mother is quite alive, pregnant, and getting ready to give birth to land."

Daniel Dancer, Mosier, OR, who has long been making art of and for damaged land, and who is currently creating his Sky Art pieces for schools and other groups around the world, points to the Cool Climate Art Contest, undertaken "to raise awareness about climate change through identifying and celebrating iconic images and to inspire people to be involved in the discussion." (The image here, of the little girl with her hand over the nuclear reactor, was sent by Daniel, but I can't find it on the website, so can't attribute it.)

Farion Pearce, yoga teacher and vision quest guide from Ventura, CA, nominates an image by Sandra de Graaf  for a new image of Earth. It shows stylized people, their hands and feet touching one another,bodies circling the globe like a net. It's hard to get to on the internet, and I can't provide a direct link, but you can see it you Google Sandra de Graaf and Of Fiery Females. Click on the link for the [FLASH]1/: Of Fiery Females..., then click forward on the slide show until you get to page 31.

We all live with two inner forces that influence many of our decisions each day. One calls us forth into the mystery that beckons us to expand more fully and authentically into the world. The other holds us back and urges (often excessive) caution. This popular workshop, based on my book, focuses on the first voice, that of the archetypal Beloved, a figure that shows up in the myths of many cultures, the poems of mystics, and in our dreams as the symbol of wholeness. Brought to conscious awareness, the Path of the Lover can bring us joy, passion, and fulfillment.
 

• Connect with the archetypal Beloved in you, that knows how to say YES to what you love
• Discover how your past loves (including those that didn't work out) were essential in opening you up to a bigger capacity to love
• Learn to recognize the inner voice of the "loyal soldier" that wants to hold you back from following your heart
• See how fascination and allurement have led you onto important paths all your life
  

November 12-14: Schloss Glarisegg, Lake Constance, Switzerland (contact Silvia Figel)

November 19-21: Eschwege Institute, Eschwege, Germany