"me," "Richard"

Since my youth, I have looked around at the world of my peers and thought “this is not what is going on inside of me.” I made some efforts to conform. I considered the possibility that I was crazy. Nothing seemed to work.
As I have tried to understand the kind of knowing that has been coming into my life for years, the most helpful writing I have found is about artists and the creative process. I believe, with Julia Cameron, author of The Artist’s Way, that we are all potentially creative in the way that artists are understood to be. (Quakers have our own variation on this.) For me “guidance” comes –how shall I say this– guidance comes as a “still small voice,” it comes as an intuition and, most importantly, it sometimes comes glowing with numinous meaning.
Meaning is a core concept, for me, and I believe also for our culture, as we try to find our way back to a resonant relationship to Gaia. I believe meaning exists (or can exist) for individuals and also for cultures. My favorite example of looking at the development of meaning for a whole culture is Carl Jung’s book, Answer to Job.
For myself, I see a large process unfolding in my life, starting with my rationalist upbringing and culminating with my work as a Gaia Troubadour, trying to touch your hearts with words about the divine movements in the lives of all of us, and how we need to pay attention to them. This is my core faith statement. I feel it has ripened within me, over time, as a gift. A gift I wish to share.
What do I think I’m doing? I still feel like an exile from consensus reality.
I believe that, right now, there are other people somewhere doing what history will judge to be “a better job” of saying what I am trying to say. Still, I feel I must speak. I feel I am a tiny part of a big development in the life of our planet, and that I am called to squeak my squeak, however inadequate it may seem, now or in the hindsight of history.
What I am trying to do is to influence the field, to lend what effort I can to a movement away from human domination of the rest of creation and towards the human race recognizing itself as an organ of Gaia, a nervous system which allows Her to know herself and her situation in new ways.
What I think I offer is a way of seeing, of noticing patterns. Beyond that, my gift is an ability with words, a way of speaking that helps reveal the ways in which my point of view differs from consensus reality. I hope I can help people to make new connections, see things in new ways.
I wish to make an offering of my gifts to my community, and to my Lady, Gaia.