On Wed, 22 Mar 1995, Bertina Miller wrote:
> What seperates people is the way one chooses to live and the way one
> chooses to interact with others. Saying that people are desecrating our
> Mother because people are in denial of the spiritual is the same as all
> the Christian Coalition going around saying that the only way crime,
> violence, and teen pregnancy can be slowed is through family values.
Is that what people have said on this list? Or, have they said that
*they* find talking about their experience of connection (which may be
quite similar to your own experience of connection) using a spiritual
language/spiritual concepts and/or a metaphor such as "earth is mother" a
*meaningful* and *empowering* way of speaking?
You clearly speak of yourself as sharing some form of a connected (as
opposed to separated) experience. Can you *describe* that experience for
us? I think it might be interesting for all of us to hear another
language to describe connection. Perhaps there are similar experiences
underlying different conceptual expressions?
> On Wed, 22 Mar 1995, Coyote1 wrote:
>
> > Faith and Rose and whoever else -
> >
> > I agree wholeheartedly with you on the issue of denial of the spiritual
> > as being a root of the desecration of our Mother. This concept is
> > something we must re-learn and resurrect from our group memory if the
> > Earth is to continue to be habitable. Traditional peoples everywhere
> > (yes, your ancestors and mine and all our relations) live(d) by this
> > concept, and the wisdom (a female concept in the Hebrew Bible and
> > elsewhere) is out there for us to grasp - look back far enough and your
> > own ancestors can give it to you.
I would just point out that the phrase used above is "*a* root of the
desecration of..." I don't think the implication is that anyone who
declines to use spiritual language is guilty of desecrating the earth.
As for the rest of the paragraph, I think there is quite a bit of
evidence that earlier civilizations did have a different concept of the
sacred. Although I would also caution against glorifying what we really
know little about. Not all "traditional peoples" *always* respected the
environment. There were unhealthy "traditional" cultures which
brutalized people and the environment, as well.
Jayne
