Opening a Way through the Hedge of Thorns
What is the message of this virus that is affecting people in every country on the planet? I think it is an urgent call for us to wake up to the small window of opportunity we have to change course before it’s too late.
We are on the knife edge between two different kinds of existence: one that blindly continues to consume the resources of the planet and one where we live within the ecological constraints set by climate change.
Locked into a Darwinian Fantasy
This means change in every sphere of life: politics, economics, the very concept of what it means to be fully human. We cannot continue on the same path, thinking only of the needs of our own species, locked into a Darwinian fantasy of competition and the struggle for survival, locked also into a cosmology that tells us that we live in a dead universe without purpose or meaning, that consciousness begins and ends with the physical brain. We need to recover the awareness that we live on a sacred planet and that we are part of its life—something that we knew long ago but have forgotten. We need to bring ourselves back into alignment with the Cosmos. The virus is both a warning to us and a symptom of distress from the planet itself whose life is threatened by our ever-increasing numbers, our addiction to power, unsustainable growth and consumption that is out of control
It is a shamanic descent into the underworld of loss, grief, depression and death, prior to an ascent as an awakened humanity that knows that its life and wellbeing are inseparable from the life and wellbeing of the planet
This time of planetary lockdown reminds me of the fairy tale of the Sleeping Beauty where the princess and the whole court lie under a spell cast on them by an old woman sitting in a castle turret.
Who is this old woman but Nature herself, suffering from the devastation we have inflicted on her to the point where she can barely breathe? What is the hedge of thorns but all the habits of behaviour, the redundant beliefs that stand between us and the rescue of the Sleeping Beauty, the forgotten feminine principle — Nature herself — who waits for the Prince who could restore her to her rightful place in our consciousness
And what better way to halt the unwitting pattern we call progress, than for Nature to cast a spell on the whole of humanity so that, even briefly, we cannot pollute her air with our planes, cut down her forests or contaminate her oceans with the plastic detritus of our lives?
The deeper meaning of this fairy-tale could open a way through the hedge of thorns created by centuries of unconscious patterns of behaviour and stir to life the slumbering court of humanity. It could have the power to awaken our soul and arouse in us a deeper capacity for relationship with each other and love for our planetary home.
Blog for Ubiverse 20/4/20 – My View of the Current Situation