Hello Marcie,

Though it's well past a month since Imbolc, the message of conservation of energy speaks volumes to me. A year ago, I was working on a large canvas depicting the view of the Earth at sunset from orbit. I'd planned a series of 16-20 large format oils to make my viewers fall in love with the Earth, with her ineffable beauty. Like the Chinese tale of some men sent to harm a young girl, who upon seeing her beauty, become her protectors rather than her violators. “That's how I felt seeing the Earth for the first time,” wrote the Chinese astronaut  recounting this tale. “ 'I could not help but love and cherish her.' ”

How to make people love their mother? Love the feminine? Keep them from raping and despoiling her? Such a strange question. That it even needs to be asked signals what trouble the “race of men” is in. And the task became too much for me as I myself became ill. A little organism made its way into me because I cleared my land, prepared the soil, brought it back from neglect to a state of fecundity, amending, fertilizing, pruning, raking -- by means of a tick I never saw. My autoimmune system, like that of the Earth is now in the process of attacking itself. I used to joke that since we have no more large predators to threaten us, it's the micro organisms that will get us, reduce our numbers, that something has to reestablish balance and cleanse the Earth of the malignant process that has taken hold of her.

My great ambition to create this new body of work has been “laid down” as the Quakers say. My energy must be conserved for other things. For getting well, or at least seeing the meaning in this illness and coming to terms with a parallel condition that has always kept me from bringing to life my greatest visions. In fact, this illness has brought me gifts: a slower pace of life, a realization that I can stop running the marathon with this injured foot, the marathon I was conscripted into before I could walk, that I now have no choice now but to take the time to truly heal.

A scene from the movie “The Last Station” comes to mind, the film about Tolstoy and about all forms of love: eros, philia, agape. There was one love in the film that outshone all the rest. It was conveyed in the gaze and wonder in a young man's face when he sees his love as if for the first time, as if the scales have been removed from his eyes and he beholds the beauty and power of the feminine, embodied in the woman he has had his first sexual encounter with.

It's that kind of opening, that kind of revelation, metanoia that is needed, of all of us. That we come to see the power and magnificence of Life itself, that we recognize it in the Earth, ourselves and in each other, in the very nature of Being itself. The message for me personally is to open to myself, the miracle that is me. I was not given this message as a child. Quite the opposite. It has been noted that autoimmune disease in women (at least 80% of all autoimmune disease occur in women) has its roots in childhood, in the relationship with the mother when the child received messages that it was on some level unlovable. “The immune system,” writes Dr. Christianne Northrop “simply carries out that belief and attacks the body.”

My “work” now is personal now, one of learning to love what was deemed unlovable by a mother who did not love the feminine in herself. This project carries great promise as it always does when the individual attempts to heal. “Each individual in the universe,” writes Herman Green of the Center for Ecozoic Studies,  “is unique, ultimately significant and of intrinsic value, and the health of the universe and every society rests on the health of the individual.”  

As I dream about new paintings, those that come from my dreams, images of the wounded heart, the sacred heart, the two heart murmurs recently detected in a sonogram (I want that image!), something is taking shape. Not just the paintings I will create, but perhaps the courage (another heart word) to do what must be done to protect Mother Earth. A propos, readers may now know that many of the environmental organizations that in the past did good works are taking positions that are blocking legislation to effectively mitigate the consequences of climate change (see the article in The Nation, “The Wrong Kind of Green”). The environmental movement is dead -- as it should be. What's needed and what is on the rise is an Earth Restoration Movement, a movement in its title that suggests no separation of humans from “the environment.” It's all one and the immune system of the Earth is awakening in this new movement. I wrote my first piece about this movement in a Quaker journal after reading Scott Ritter's book Waging Peace: The Art of War for the Antiwar Movement.

To “restore” is to give back to, to build up again, to repair. Illness – even death as Marcie well points out-- often comes with depletion if restoration does not occur. Two things are occurring at once on this planet—the dissolution of the malignant thinking that has violated the feminine throughout history and the rise of veriditas,“ right order,” the dream of the Earth, to use Thomas Berry’s term, in the consciousness of men and women. In this disease process, creativity is reshaping the stuff of nightmares. Like the process inside the chrysalis:

"The caterpillar's new cells [after it has built its cocoon] are called 'imaginal cells.' They resonate at a different frequency. They are so totally different from the caterpillar cells that his immune system [that is the immune system of the worm] thinks they the new imaginal cells are enemies... and gobbles them up . . . But these new imaginal cells continue to appear, more and more of them! Pretty soon, the caterpillar's immune system cannot destroy them fast enough. More and more of the imaginal cells survive.

 "And then an amazing thing happens! The little tiny lonely imaginal cells start to clump together, into friendly little groups. They all resonate together at the same frequency, passing information from one to another. Then, after a while, another amazing thing happens! The clumps of imaginal cells start to cluster together!... a long string of clumping and clustering imaginal cells, all resonating at the same frequency, all passing information from one to another there inside the chrysalis.

 " . . . . Then at some point, the entire long string of imaginal cells suddenly realizes all together that it is Something. Different from the caterpillar. Something New! Something Wonderful!… and in that realization is the shout of the birth of the butterfly!"

 from The "Butterfly Effect" and Societal Transformation 01/12/2007.

The economic collapse is a pause in the relentless devouring of the Earth. It holds out the opportunity for restoration, for a retooling of our entire economy and industrial process. The conservation of energy has many, many rewards. Not just in the form of “negawatts” to use Amory Lovins' terminology, but a resurgence of the Life force itself.

May it be so. May the message of candlemas burn bright into the days ahead, that we may discern, using that same light, the lies that would lead us down a path of ecocide and know what actions to take on behalf of Life, of veriditas, of the dream of the Earth that is yearning to be born.