3/20/23 – Equinox NH Spring/SH Autumn.  Both hemispheres experience the same balance of light and dark. What a precious moment…a globe unified by cycles of seasons.
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Insecurity destroys relationships.
For approximately the last 2000 years, our dominant, Eurocentric, Northern Hemisphere culture has been driven by insecurity.
Insecurity by any other name is Separation.

We humans have been splitting ourselves into many pieces since before this common era (CE) began. We have separated ourselves from all other life and called ourselves superior. We have even ravaged other humans who refused to buy into the story of separation.

A major severance arrived in history’s nearby memory with St. Augustine in the 4^th century AD (CE). He broke with Christ’s original message of divinity belonging to us all, of loving and including all creation in the miracle of life.  I haven’t studied Augustine’s life well enough to understand his motivation but it made great sense to the people of that time and continues to dominate humanity now, though we are beginning to wake up to his story’s failings. Augustine proposed that our bodies were dirty and holiness demanded purity and perfection. He, and others, split spirit from matter, sent heaven up and hell down, made man more important than woman, light better than dark, etc. He promoted the sin and redemption form of Christianity, which is not how Christianity began but which mainstream Christians chose to forget. ( See Appendix B in Matthew Fox’s Original Blessing.)

A thousand years later or so, Copernicus upset European culture by discovering and declaring that Earth was NOT the center of all things. This “un-centering of Earth (left) Europe’s educated citizenry in a precarious state of distrust,” according to Martin Lee Mueller on page 164 of his illuminating book: Being Salmon Being Human – Encountering the Wild in Us and Us in the Wild.  Along comes Descartes in the 1600’s with a “desirable counternarrative…Every new achievement of the rational intellect would bring Europeans a little closer to…’restored perfection’…the rational intellect…would create an immaculate world…no longer vulnerable to outside forces.”

As young children, we revel in being alive. We express our feelings as we feel them. We savor everything we can see, hear, smell, touch and taste. Our imaginations take us where our parents can no longer follow.

And we are punished for it…curbed, constrained, restrained, doubted, and diminished. Our splitting has almost completely severed us from all to which we should belong –
our bodies, our souls, our spirits, our creativity, our air and water and soil and sun, our plants, our animal kin, including each other, our imagination, our reason, our feelings, our night AND daytime dreams, our ability to commune with the unseen and the inaudible. We have narrowed the range of senses we experience to a mere five or maybe six if we include the amorphous sense of intuition. Our ancestors may have had a hundred…( See anything written by Laurens Van der Post.)

So I ask you: can you imagine who you will be when the infection of separation has run its course and you are whole?

May the virus of insecurity that plagues humanity today find the good medicine of love, kinship, and whole brain/mindbody embodiment!