🌍Earth Day Meditations: Renaissance Dream

Happy April 22nd (AKA Earth Day). I feel like Earth Day is a great example of something that starts off with good intentions, but ultimately rings hollow when we compare it to the other 364 days of the year. After all - it’s just another day, right?

For me, it’s yet another reminder that alignment is key. Take what you want from it, and apply it to your life. I’m certainly in no position to judge, so I’m not. For me, today, this time around, Earth Day is more than just about recycling more of item A and consuming less of item B. I feel like a lot of Earth Day platitudes are just a list of things that we have the option to do as a result of a the rest of the world coming together and harming the planet. It doesn’t exactly put people in a position of power, let alone with the ability to make a meaningful difference. It kind of feels like blaming the brakes failing in a plane crash.

I read the book Ishmael last week, and I think the main idea of the book is what I’m channeling here. It’s not a book about the environment - there’s no recycling guide or climate policy breakdown. It’s deeper. More mythic. It asks the big question:

What story are we living by?

Because according to Ishmael (a very wise, telepathic gorilla, by the way), we’re living by a dangerous one:

That the world was made for us.
That we are not nature — we are its rulers, its managers, its saviors.

We’re not just in a crisis. We are the crisis. Not because we’re evil, but because the story we’re acting out doesn’t align with the laws of life. And this is happening because of the story we’ve come to believe to be true, instead of seeing it as a matter of perspective. What I believe is, we are not heroes or the enemy, but we’re just a part of the whole that has forgotten that we are OF the Earth, not simply FROM it.

A Renaissance, Not a Holiday

My self-imposed task this Earth Day is to share a dream I have for how we can live more in harmony, in ALIGNMENT. As always, for anything I wish to see happen in the world, the change starts with me. Alignment with nature requires a deep understanding and appreciation for life, taking it as it is, and relishing in it. It’s not a life lived in constant agony, fearing that the bills won’t be paid, that I will be forcibly removed from my home, always coming up a day late or a dollar short. And arriving at this state of mind isn’t a matter of making more money, being more efficient, or having contingency plans for every possible outcome.

The renaissance is proven in the works of beautiful art and creation that are left behind as collateral, but all that is only possible because of the subtle shift in perspective that has occurred in the creators themselves. Likewise, a return to the garden of Eden is possible only if we know that we’re already there in our hearts and minds.

Reaching this understanding has an immense impact on the individual, so there’s no doubt in my mind that the spreading of this perspective can only result in the kind of change we are so hungry for. It’s not the top-down, “wait for the president to come out with a grand idea to save the world” type of bullshit.

It’s the new religion of no religion. No stories with a beginning, middle, or end. No details to get right or wrong. Of knowing that all I can do is to love myself and my neighbor - because we are one! - and letting that love dictate what it is I’m wanting to do for my community in each successive moment. Acting out of love. Not allowing fear of death to dictate the terms of the game, because the only fear that exists is the one in our mind about what may or may not happen in the future, because the present is all we truly have!

The Invitation

What if we stopped asking how to “save” the Earth, and started asking how to belong to it again?

What would your life look like if your story wasn’t about escape or control, because you know all we’re really doing is walking each other home?

What would change if we all remembered:

The world wasn’t made for us.
The world IS us.

Let’s stop celebrating the Earth like it’s a holiday.
Let’s start living like it’s sacred.