EARTH & US

O Humans!

An appeal to prioritize racial justice and earth restoration

Hopi Elders’ Prophecy

You have been telling people that this is the Eleventh Hour, now you
must go back and tell the people that this is the Hour. And there are
things to be considered. . . .
Where are you living?
What are you doing?
What are your relationships?
Are you in right relation?
Where is your water?
Know your garden.
It is time to speak your truth.
Create your community.
Be good to each other.
And do not look outside yourself for your leader.

To my fellow swimmers:
There is a river flowing now very fast.
It is so great and swift,
that there are those who will be afraid,
who will try to hold on to the shore,
they are being torn apart and will suffer greatly.
Know that the river has its destination.
The elders say we must let go of the shore,
push off into the middle of the river,
and keep our heads above water.
And I say see who is there with you and celebrate.

At this time in history we are to take nothing personally,
least of all ourselves, for the moment we do,
our spiritual growth and journey come to a halt.
The time of the lone wolf is over.
Gather yourselves.
Banish the word struggle from your attitude and vocabulary.
All that we do now must be done in a sacred manner and in celebration.
For we are the ones we have been waiting for.


What is a sane response in the face of the huge challenges we’re living through?
If we react in fear, contraction and separation, imagine the collective energy field we generate. …there are those who will be afraid, who will try to hold on to the shore, they are being torn apart and will suffer greatly. The anxious, grasping ego-mind, each person feeling alone and separate, creates competition, contraction, scarcity, and conflict. To evolve, we must let go and access the power and wisdom of our hearts.

What if the most important things were the least visible: the quality of our heart energy fields? When we are anxious, frustrated or angry, our energy fields are chaotic and incoherent, we can only act from our “reptilian brain” with fight/flight/freeze and cannot really use our higher thinking abilities. When we’re in a state of appreciation or caring, our hearts naturally calm, expand and open, creating a coherent rhythm that allows us to access insights. The heart’s messages to the brain can get through, and we can receive our highest wisdom.

When we slow down and breathe, we have choices about how we manage our energy fields. Will we choose fear, or love?

Where are you living? What are you doing? What are your relationships? Are you in right relation?

I believe that now is the time to get out from behind our computer screens, listen to Indigenous people, and seek a different way of living — one that is more connected to Earth and people, not clinging to the dysfunctional status quo. Prior to colonization, and even to this day, Indigenous peoples have lived for thousands of years with reverence and respect for nature and all creatures. They honor and protect the water and ecosystems, taking care to leave a good place for future generations. Those whose culture the colonists tried to destroy hold much of the wisdom we need to live harmoniously with the Earth and all creatures.

Visionary communities:

Soul Fire Farm in Peterburgh, New York, is a community of 491 diverse volunteers who grow food to help feed those living in food deserts. They have co-authored a book, Farming While Black.

From their website, www.soulfirefarm.org:

“Soul Fire Farm is a BIPOC*-centered community farm committed to ending racism and injustice in the food system. We raise and distribute life-giving food as a means to end food apartheid. With deep reverence for the land and wisdom of our ancestors, we work to reclaim our collective right to belong to the earth and to have agency in the food system. We bring diverse communities together on this healing land to share skills on sustainable agriculture, natural building, spiritual activism, health, and environmental justice. We are training the next generation of activist-farmers and strengthening the movements for food sovereignty and community self-determination.”

“We use Afro-indigenous agroforestry, silvopasture, wildcrafting, polyculture, and spiritual farming practices to regenerate 80 acres of mountainside land, producing fruits, plant medicine, pasture-raised livestock, honey, mushrooms, vegetables, and preserves for community provisioning, with the majority of the harvest provided to people living under food apartheid or impacted by state violence. Our ancestral farming practices increase topsoil depth, sequester soil carbon, and increase biodiversity. The buildings on the farm are hand-constructed, using local wood, adobe, straw bales, solar heat, and reclaimed materials.”

*BIPOC = Black, Indigenous, and People of Color

Ecosystem Restoration Camps around the world teach people how to restore soil, catch precious water in the landscape, and reclaim desertified land. Their website states: “Half the Earth’s topsoil has been lost…We choose to work together to restore the fundamental ecological integrity of the Earth and to train large numbers of people to do this so that methods learned can be adopted throughout the world.”

Their goals:

1. “To train people in techniques for restoring land and provide practical opportunities for people to practice new approaches to landscape restoration.
2. To build research, training and innovation centers to engage people in ecosystem restoration.
3. To manage a flow of volunteers of all ages to restore agricultural and natural ecosystems.
4. To increase the organic matter, carbon content and water retention capacity of the soil, for large scale carbon sequestration.
5. To improve the livelihoods of farmers, landowners and local communities around the camps.”

John Liu, soil scientist and filmmaker who documented the restoration of China’s Loess Plateau, is the founder. Camps exist in Africa, Asia, Australia, North, South, and Central America, Europe and the Middle East.www.ecosystemrestorationcamps.org.

Damanhur is an amazing community in northern Italy with underground Temples to Humanity of brilliant artistry, dedicated to the awakening the divine spark present in every human being. In a 15-kilometer area surrounding the lush, green valley of Valchiusella lives a very active, international, multilingual ecovillage community of some 600 people.
Damanhur is a federation of spiritual communities, with its own Constitution, culture, art, music, currency, schools and uses of science and technology. Its citizens are open to sharing their knowledge and research with other groups and cultures of the world, with anyone who is interested in exploring these themes.

A “nucleo” is a group of 12–15 people living together who share a common interest or enterprise: a farm, a bakery; a group of artists or musicians or tree dwellers. Some 25 of these exist. Every citizen is led through a lifelong process of self-exploration and search for the meaning of existence. They have unique healing practices, too. Damanhur residents share deep respect for the environment as a conscious, sensitive entity and are committed to co-existing with the plant and animal worlds (as well as intelligences that inhabit this universe) in a reverent and nurturing way.

Tamera Peace Research and Education Center in Portugal is “working for a global system change: from war to peace, from exploitation to cooperation, from fear to trust.” In what was once a dry dusty region, using permacultural water collection and ecosystem restoration, this international community now has several lakes, and grows abundant food. That food is cooked with advanced solar cookers and biogas digesters running off of waste. They are generating a nonviolent human culture, with advanced systems for conflict resolution. Their holistic peace research focuses on establishing a field for nonviolently inhabiting the Earth, based on cooperation and trust.
www.tamera.org

These examples show what Earth-centered communities can accomplish.

What if the time to “get our act together” were shorter than we think? There is a river flowing now very fast…

Overcoming white supremacy
I believe that dismantling white supremacy needs to be our primary focus, because we humans are a colorful, diverse family — not a mostly white family. The original sin of our nation was the theft and genocide committed against the Indigenous, Native inhabitants of this land, followed immediately by enslavement of Black people. In permaculture, when a major error is made in the very design of a system, that “type one error” must be rectified, which usually means rethinking the entire system built upon it.

Our consciences demand we stop the injuries to People of Color, which have gone on far too long — 500 years — and are escalating. The injustice and cruelty are unspeakable, and cause waves of trauma that afflict everyone, victim and perpetrator alike. Perpetrators suffer soul loss.

It’s essential to reclaim our full humanity; we must grow our hearts enough to feel the injury of oppression and injustice to our brothers and sisters of color. As long as racism divides us, the vast majority of the people in this country can be easily controlled by the rich and powerful.

It is only with justice and unity that we can be effective in taking on the building of a better, more egalitarian society and care for the Earth. It’s proven that when we care for those who have been marginalized, everyone’s needs are more likely to get met.

The shadow
The president is like a cartoon character, an orange figment of the collective imagination, the disowned shadow of America. That’s why he is so outrageous as to look unreal. We White folks have parts that are hostile, disrespectful, cruel, violent, racist, misogynist, dishonest, and mentally unbalanced, because we have grown up in a White supremacist society. We have mostly denied and disowned these parts, and therefore projected them onto the screen called the presidency.

We have also been trained to project the parts of ourselves we judge onto People of Color. We Whites have a lot of work to do.

Good intentions do not cancel negative impact. Well-meaning White “progressives” can injure People of Color as surely as overt racists, with our “White saviorism“ (belief we must speak for or rescue people of color), our “White fragility” (falling apart if we are called out on our racist actions or attitudes), or our “optical allyship” (showing up when it makes us look good). I’ve certainly been guilty of all three. It’s time we look within, own the shadow we are projecting, and stop the harm. Overcoming white supremacy is the task of White people, not People of Color. (See: Me and White Supremacy by Layla Saad.) https://www.npr.org/2020/07/06/887646740/me-and-white-supremacy-helps-you-do-the-work-of-dismantling-racism

How do we dismantle white supremacy?

• Reading anti-racism books and discussing them is a start, but we need action FAST.
• Listen; follow the local, regional and national Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC) leaders and actively support their demands and priorities.
• Change requires we engage with our elected officials at all levels of government and advocate for racial justice in forms like: an end to police killings and adoption of alternatives to policing, a living wage, affordable housing, free health care for all, investment in Black businesses and communities, protection of the Black vote, and reparations. These will help all of us.
• Work to abolish ICE and reform immigration laws.
• At the core of racism is the belief that another being is there for us to exploit. The opposite belief is that all beings have rights, including nature!

The coming decline of the fossil-fueled economy
We see the looming fall of this increasingly unstable empire built on the blood of the Indigenous and People of Color, dependent on the “modern slaves” of oil, coal and gas. According to William Barber III, this economy’s exploitive, extractive relationship to humans is connected to its exploitive, extractive relationship to the Earth.

Now, we see pipeline after pipeline forced to shut down as fossil fuels become less profitable, millions are thrown out of work by the pandemic, many small businesses and jobs are vanishing. How can we prepare for the inevitable crash of this corrupt, highly unjust and centralized economic system, with its concentration of wealth and power in the top 1%? How can we begin to build a humane and conscious alternative?

As in Damanhur, we can form the nuclei of small communities. From Cuba’s example of adapting to an abrupt cut-off of fossil fuel years ago, we can learn much. A documentary called “The Power of Community” reveals how Cubans learned to compost, grew organic food without chemical fertilizer within city limits, created some mass transit systems, and built solar-powered health clinics with access for all Cubans. Exporting doctors during the pandemic, they continue to prioritize care for the Earth and our human family, over individual gain. https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0814275/

The elders say we must let go of the shore, push off into to the middle of the river, and keep our heads above water. See who is there with you and celebrate….

Key needs:
As change can happen quite rapidly in an unstable system, it’s wise to begin planning for our most important needs:

1. Create your community. We can do very little alone; we need to step past habits of individualism and create supportive, diverse, mixed age communities. The time of the lone wolf is over. Gather yourselves. In diversity there is strength.
2. Where is your water? Are we honoring and caring for our water? For clean drinking water, protection, catchment, purification and distribution are essential.
3. Know your garden. Learn ways of growing, cooking, and preserving food without fossil fuel use, while restoring ecosystems. Learn from the plants.
4. Reciprocity: Learn from our Indigenous sisters and brothers how to live in greater alignment with nature, caring for the soil, water, and air.
5. Harness energy sources independent of fossil fuel — let’s form energy co-operatives.
6. Manage our wastes through composting and extracting value from the waste stream.
7. Self-care: grieve our losses and calm our nervous systems (maybe this needs to be #1).

Stop the fighting now
Every modern war has been about trying to seize resources through violent domination. When we stop seeing the world in terms of “us” and “them” (those upon whom we project our disowned parts), we will need no more wars. Banish the word struggle from your attitude and vocabulary.

See No Stranger
I love the vision of Valarie Kaur, author of See No Stranger. Giving birth, she says, feels like dying. What if the darkness we are in is not of the tomb, but of the womb, and we are about to experience a birth? “Breathe and push!” she urges.

Brought up in the Indian Sikh tradition of seeing the stranger (or opponent) as sister and brother, Kaur also has a law degree. She notes how the “haters” cut themselves off from the capacity to love at all. “Tend to your opponent’s wounds,” she counsels. Listening to others’ stories with an open heart creates the possibility of reconciliation, she maintains. “Breathe through the pain, and don’t let it harden into hate.” To birth the “Revolutionary Love Community” she envisions, we must breathe and push through our pain and resistance. https://valariekaur.com/see-no-stranger/

When we truly perceive not only fellow humans, but every species and life entity as a brother or sister, we’ll see the world through the eyes of an Indigenous Elder, the Dalai Lama or Saint Francis.

Imagine the power of a unified humanity to create a global heart-opening and awakening, heeding the Elders, asking for guidance from our hearts and our Ancestors for these intense times.

All that we do now must be done in a sacred manner and in celebration. For we are the ones we have been waiting for.

The Ask
I would love to hear what “tend to your opponent’s wounds” might mean to you. Perhaps a group that listens with the intention of understanding, and of promoting healing? How might we practice this? What does the Hopi Prophecy inspire you to do?

I’m also seeking a few people to form a nucleus that would act in support of Black, Indigenous and People of Color, practice living in greater reverence and harmony with the Earth and one another, grow food, and dramatically reduce our reliance on fossil fuels and the industrial economy. Is all this even possible?? Please contact Cathy at: cathyfholt@gmail.com

Cathy Holt

cathyfholt@gmail.com