Once upon a time, we all lived in close contact with nature.
Nowadays, human society is engaged full time in a war on nature.
In the green corner, people understand their relationship to other creatures, to local habitats, to more-than-human realities, to our kin in the forests, the rivers, the mountains and deserts and seas.
In the red corder, they take everything they can, enrich themselves at the cost of other life forms, ignore the damage done and feast on the corpse of the planet as they party towards death, gleefully.
In the middle, taking punches and rebalancing ourselves, dancing barefoot and trying to act out of compassion for all life, while enmeshed in a capitalist system that is destroying the planet, voting with our dollars doesn’t work, growing some veggies and recycling, knowing we make so little difference, even civil disobedience not shifting the machine or its gears more than an inch a year, never enough change in a world of too much change.
Winter solstice in the northern hemisphere white washed by Christianity, pagan lovers of country hounded out, witches burned, calendars revised, mathematically worked out in alliance with the business of colonisation, emperors and popes alike lording it over the earth, we came with god to take the gold.
What hope left?
Listen to the life coursing through your veins, the breath entering your body, inhale, exhale, heartbeat, mind … consciousness came from nowhere, resides in nowhen, always available, animal and plant kin, elements make up our body and the planet and the stars and wind and trees and insects and serpentine energies of the earth and the winged ones and we all sing and dance through space and celebrate embodied awareness even when we don’t know we are doing it.
Dance, uphold, resist, infuriate, enlighten, shadow, box, unfold, forever.