Prayer to the earth
“What if our allurement to particular places on Earth is an instinctive response to Earth’s inchoate and simultaneous longing for us?
For most contemporary Western people, it might be a radical act of imagination to allow for the possibility that Earth longs for us, or has awareness of us at all. This is surely not what we have been taught; this is not the worldview of a culture whose industries undermine Earth’s life support systems. But what if our cosmological view of a dead, unfeeling universe—a cosmos void of psyche—is distorted, a contraction of consciousness that perceives only a diminished world and impoverishes our imaginations?
If we inhabited the participatory cosmos of traditional people, nature mystics and perhaps our own distant ancestors—where clouds, rivers, meadowlarks and coyote interpenetrate with human affairs, where everything is perceived as alive and infused with meaning—would we be able to dishonor the body of Earth and our other-than-human companions?”
What of the devotion of this tender mantra toward a Hindu Deity? Could this longing be grounded in the devotion to the Earth?
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