Sitting by the Stream in Taos

Sitting here in the woods in Taos watching a little mama hummingbird perched in her nest on a branch overlooking a rushing mountain stream, I’m falling in love with Mother Earth for the billionth time. I breathe my way into her and I tell her I love her.

In nature I find the perfect bridge between my individual life as Phyllis and the the life of the planet that holds me in her vital embrace. But I have yet to fully reconcile being one small speck of humanity and, at the same time, having so much global information on a daily basis. Some days I don’t know if my brain can hold the fact that I can sit undisturbed by this beautiful stream while the CO2 levels are skyrocketing, species are going extinct, and millions of people are hungry, cold, traumatized and fleeing oppression or standing in the rubble of the last earthquake, looking for loved ones they will never find– and tomorrow I could easily be one of them. I don’t know if our hearts and brains were made to hold such massive disparity or if we will have to actually mutate pronto to survive the onslaught of the human virus. I know my own heart and brain are trying to adapt as fast as they can.

It seems obvious that we are going to have to do a lot more than hold this kind of overwhelming knowledge if we are going to “outrun” these predators, just like survival for any animal starts with sensing danger but ends with doing something—running, fighting back, freezing. The key of course, is sensing danger. I’m so afraid we are evolving away from that critical survival skill. I think overwhelm can do that to you. What can I, this one little human speck, actually do?

Is it possible that we are now in the unique position that our innate survival mechanisms are completely outdated? We are our own predator. I think we’ve tried running from ourselves, fighting with ourselves and freezing in the face of ourselves, and I don’t see any of it working.

Sometimes I just have to block it all out. But at other times I let my mind wander to the very edge of the abyss we are standing on and I am dumbfounded by the homicidal and suicidal extremes we are manifesting as a species. Maybe it’s that the news focuses so heavily on destruction and hatred, and maybe it’s that “it has always been this way” since humans were created, but perhaps it’s the savagery that is so globally witnessed and witnessable that gets to me. Maybe it’s the pleasure that seems to be so publically derived from so much pain that is bending my brain into a new shape. And maybe it’s the fact that my own grandchildren might not have clean air or water or the freedoms I still take for granted.

I want to do everything I can to speed up my evolutionary process. I want my own mind and heart to mutate faster. While I know we’re all aware that the problems we face cannot be solved at the level of thinking that created them, it is clear to me that they also cannot be solved at the level of being that created them and perpetuates them. Just as I personally cannot solve the problems I face with beliefs and strategies I learned in childhood, ten years ago, or sometimes even yesterday.

It seems pretty clear that the level of being we need, the next real evolutionary leap away from the edge of that smoking abyss, must go way beyond what we’re already doing. No one I know, including me, wants to use a rotary phone when they can pick up their IPhone and do Face time or buy-buy-buy online instantly. Technology is mind-blowing. Every day I hear of something that would have been inconceivable when I was a child, whether it’s a robot that can land on a comet, an implant that can give you another 10 years of life, or a weapon that can murder you in your house 3000 miles away from the one sending the signal.

And that’s just it. Our global capacity to extend and enhance life is exploding, and our global capacity to destroy it has exploded, too. The stunning irony of it is that many of the ways we think we are extending and “enhancing” life are actually now helping destroy our lives and the lives of so many other life forms. Except in world of cartoons and sci-fi, I don’t imagine catapulting ourselves into outer space and populating other planets holds out much hope for us as a race.

Not new news.

And so, sitting here by the stream in Taos, I breathe into my own heart and I breathe with our Mother, the Earth. I want her to feel my love. I feel hers. I want to be one with her. I want her to show us the way back, the way Home to the home we already have.

It’s time, she says, it’s time to take a pause from spacecraft and Hubble and analysis of the origins of the universe, as valuable, exhilarating and illuminating as those explorations are. It’s time to pull back from mass production and mega weaponry as possible answers to human pain and suffering. It’s time to explore inner space, with the same zeal, the same sense of adventure, and even greater urgency than all our other explorations combined. I know you think you’re on a wave, She says, and I know how intoxicating that technological high can be. So if you’re into new technology, great. Create the technology of Return to yourself, your Divinity and your At-Oneness with ALL living things. If ever there was a time to explore the inner space of your own soul and the Divine within you, it is now. That is the only technology that will save you.

And there ain’t no app for that!

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But let’s create one, let’s create many!– together. In the Road Home: A Light In The Darkness, soon to be published, turn with me to the inner world we can begin to explore from a new perspective.