I devoted the first weekend in May to participating in the first Global Earth Repair Conference in Port Townsend, WA. The many speakers from all over the planet lit a fire in me.  I literally experienced being one of hundreds of Imaginal Selves moving forward shoulder to shoulder as Shane Koyczan so eloquently raps about in his seven minute video,  “Shoulders”. Together hundreds of us experienced being among like minded others all standing for,  speaking for, singing, dancing, laughing and crying for a new way of being a modern human.

We live during the first time in the evolvement of our species when we can experience a whole brain – left and right hemispheres working in tandem at last – as well as a brain that is inextricable from the body’s brain. I call this bodymind. What glorious potential. But we have to choose to explore those possibilities. We have to choose to regain our capacities to listen to the rest of the world around us.

And we can.

 In fact we must.

And we must RE-MEMBER now, not next year, but NOW… We must remember our indebtedness to the complex web of life that weaves our ecosystems, which connects to all our other ecosystems, ad infinitum, and behave accordingly…Science makes it clear we have to change our lifestyles NOW or we perish with all the other millions of life forms who can no longer rebound from our assaults.

Spirit makes it clear HOW we need to live…
curb our desire to own belongings when all we want to do is belong,
honor our inherent creativity and give gifts of our beautiful selves back to the world, get out of our heads and drop into our hearts,
step back, listen, pray, witness, follow,
support the natural cycles of everything else living,
stop – STOP our attempts to manage nature but instead manage ourselves.

It’s hard for us modern, urban humans to experience humility, to be grateful, to move gently and with respect for the others who know how to be in their habitat.

TODAY, walking with my precious adult children, my elder son and my daughter in law, parents to two grandsons now 14 and nearly 18, who will be inheriting the earth I leave behind, TODAY as we walked on a beach on the island where we live, an eagle’s shadow graced us. We looked up. Less than six feet above us, an eagle clearly on a mission flew directly out toward the seven miles of water between us and the mainland. His steady wing beat suggested purpose as did his straight trajectory. My son thought he was headed toward that distant mainland, but as we watched, maybe two or three football fields out from shore, the bird suddenly plummeted, kicked up a frothy splash, and rose again, heading straight back to the beach on which we stood. As it flew above us again, I couldn’t see that it held anything but I knew it did. Sure enough, it landed on the top of a nearby tree and after looking at us, looking around, then back to us standing on the beach far beneath him or her, it began to eat.

Such eyesight. Such timing. Such knowing. Such clarity of purpose. No wasted energy.

Listing those qualities reminds me of tracks in the snow. Hiking in snow when I lived in Montana with my two dogs, we crossed  coyote’s tracks. His or her tracks caught my attention, so different were they from my domesticated canines. My dogs frolicked – nosing around, zigging & zagging in their playful curiosity, not hunting for food, with purpose or survival in their awareness – but for fun. Their tracks were a hodge-podge.  Paws of coyote left a single-minded line, straight as an arrow with hind paws falling into the depressions made by the leading paws, wasting nothing, clearly moving with intent.

Witnessing wild purpose humbles me, drops me into my heart with awe.

And I wonder how our culture would change if we knew our own wild purpose?