Gaia Voices

I am just now sending invitations to view this website to over 400 of my closest friends.
I write this in anticipation that, even now, some of you are showing up.
Welcome,
Welcome,
Welcome,
Thank you for visiting!

You are really quite a varied group, with a wide range of interests. Talking with you I find myself considering:

*Natural Beauty * Charismatic Christianity * US Foreign And Domestic Policy * Nonviolent Conflict * Housing & Homelessness * Eastern Religion & Philosophy * Quantum Physics * Global Economics * Quakers * The Arts * Co-creation * Natural Systems Like Rivers, Forests & Child Development * Climate Change * Geology & Plate Tectonics * Right Livelihood * Evolution * Prayer * Personal Spiritual Development * Computers & Internet * Appropriate Technology * Ancient Cultures *

Given your wide range of interests, I’m suggesting two possible paths of exploration.

1) You might Dive into the outline
by perusing my “table of contents,” over on the right ->
It’s a rough outline of my thought.
I suggest you start with an area that interests you to see if I’m saying anything about it yet.
Then maybe sample a couple of other Table of Contents headings.

2) You could follow the Chronology
I started posting to this website in October of 2006, and this software I am using allows you to scroll down immediately below this article to see what I put up last week, and the week before, etc. (It’s a weblog, or “blog.”)
Or you could start at the beginning of the chronology, by clicking here: Invitation, and working forward.
For you visitors who have not heard me say much about Gaia, the Invitation is probably a good place to start.

My Audience
These years, most of my friends are Quakers, and as I have tried to find words to express myself, I have decided to use the language of my faith community. Those of you who don’t have a Quaker background will have to compensate, realizing that you are following a bit of an “insider” conversation. I don’t think that will be much of a problem, and it can’t be helped, as I found it impossible to “say everything to everybody,” at least at this stage in my work.

Keeping In Touch With This Site As It Develops
I encourage you to check back, from time to time. I’ll have summaries posted so you can easily see what’s new. If you think you’d like to keep an eye on what I’m thinking about on a near-monthly basis, I recommend replying to the email I sent you, and I’ll put you on an email list. Around the turn of most months I plan to send a summary of my recent work to folks on that list. If you see something intriguing listed in the summary email, you can click over to the website to see what it is; if not, you can just delete the email.

Or, you can keep track of my efforts with an RSS feed, if you are familiar with that.

Comments and Interaction
All these years of working with my Gaia vision I have been holding inner dialogs with you, my friends. Now that I am getting my words out in public I very much want to have a real conversation, hearing your reactions to my ideas.
I actually started a similar website two years ago. It was hijacked by people using the “comments” feature to promote drugs, sex and gambling. My web-advisor, James, says this current software is generally immune to such spammers, and I do want to open the site to comments in the future. However at this point, it is enough of a challenge for me just to find the right words to say and I don’t want to address that technical issue yet.
Still, I DO want to hear your reactions. If you see me regularly, please talk to me. Or feel free to email me at the address from which I sent you the invitation, or send comments to “richard”, at this domain name.

My Eventual Goal
I do want REAL conversation, face to face. Of course that will be mostly with folks in the Twin Cities.
Eventually I plan to hold a seminar, meeting over several weeks, where people with the time and the interest can gather in the lower level of my Quaker meeting house and exchange enthusiasm and ideas, and perhaps develop a shared project.

How do we think about “spooky action at a distance” besides calling it “God’s will” or “The devil at work”?
Our culture has a long tradition of talking about “the power of prayer” and “magic.” Here’s some of my thinking about magic and prayer.

In last week’s post I retold Ralph’s story of hooking into divine guidance and support.

How do I describe such guidance in my life? I have had many times when I have felt urged or nudged to make a choice. As a young adult, I was seldom willing to admit the sense of urging to others, because it didn’t seem rational. If pressed, I probably would have said, “I have an intuition.”

An example of this was in 1967 when I thought I might be drafted and I decided to claim Conscientious Objector status. There was no tradition of pacifism in my family, and I labored for several years in college with issues of military service, starting with, “You are just a coward, because you don’t want to serve.” That was probably about 1964. In 1965, I was surprised to learn I might qualify as a conscientious objector, even though my association with one of the “historic peace churches” had only been for the past couple of years. I asked myself, “If this avenue is open to me, am I willing to claim it? Is it really true that I believe war making is never justified and it would be destructive of my moral fiber to participate in it, or even to help with preparation for it?

I might talk rationalistically about “choosing this option,” but that is not true to my experience, and “rational” does not apply to the TIMING of my choice to claim Conscientious Objector status. My experience is that I was saying:
.: OK, I COULD claim CO status, but would this be a true?
.: And, what if I name this as MY reality, but the draft board denies it? Will I accept their definition of my reality or will I move to Canada, or go to prison?
.: If I just go on to graduate school I can probably keep my student deferment, and I don’t have to say anything.
.: Yeah, but, if your deferment changes, claiming CO status at that point is weaker than claiming it when you are not in immediate risk of being drafted.
This internal committee meeting went on for what seemed like years, along with talking to other people about the issues, and watching world events. Then suddenly, finally, I felt the urge to “go ahead, claim CO.” At the time, I would have called it an “intuition.” I certainly had no way of knowing that only a few months after I submitted the lengthy form claiming CO status that the Vietnam War would heat up significantly with a big troop commitment from the U.S. Suddenly thousands of college kids with student deferments were doing anything they could think of, to avoid the draft.

You could call my timing “just luck,” and I think sometimes I did. Still, looking back on it from years later, I felt that there was something larger involved, that the tide came in and lifted my boat at the same time it was lifting many other boats. I believe my “yes, I need to claim CO” came from more than me, and that my timing was not just a personal decision, although it was also a very personal, life-changing decision.

I would not say, “God spoke to me,” but I do feel I was in touch with something larger than myself, or larger than what I might call ‘my personal self.’ And I have felt this repeatedly in my life, especially at important times, when a lot is at stake. Sometimes I felt, like Martin Luther, “I can do no other.” Also, there have been times when it was not so clear what I needed to choose. Still, very often in my life, as I look back at the consequences of a particular choice, I feel I have been guided, that “I was on to something” which led to a life direction more favorable than I could possibly have foreseen.

I am now willing to use Quaker language, “being led by Spirit.” And I am willing to trust in “being on to something.” Kind of like what I thought I heard Ralph saying, I feel I can turn toward something larger than my personal self, and that when I do, I step into some kind of “flow,” where things go relatively well, where my choices and my acts put me in harmony with many things I could never have planfully taken into account.
I also know, experientially, several things I’ve read about in a wide vareity of religious writing. For instance, I can be “led” to do something for a while, and then that “leading disappears” or I am led to change course dramatically. This does not negate the original direction, but–to my mind–suggests I am in tune with something larger than my particular self, and the needs or priorities on this larger level are changing.

I know that I can have a sense of leading and be very wrong.

I also believe strongly that people can properly be led to do opposite things and can even be properly led into opposition with one another. In the body there are many metabolic processes, like moving sugar across a cell membrane. Often there are processes that move sugar in BOTH directions, for instance, from within the small intestine to the rest of the body, and also BACK across the cell wall into the small intestine. Both processes are happening at once, and it is events at a larger level within the body that determine whether the net movement at any given time is “more sugars in, or more sugars out.” Just as neither process is “wrong,” so I am content to be led to work against war-making, and can also respect someone who is led to join the military. I will work as skillfully as I can, trusting my leading, my intuition, and also trusting that I and the enlistee are part of a larger process which will one day bring us all to a world with less bloodshed in it.

While I do not claim guidance from God, I do think my leadings emanate out of a mystery, and that my place is to be humble and attentive to that mystery, always ready to discover the winds of Spirit swinging around and blowing from a different quarter.

Tomorrow is Early Winter Harvest at Sandhill. Six to a dozen of us will spend a sweet day on the land. Here’s what’s promised:
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We’ll be gathering on Sandhill, 40 acres owned by Cynthia Bartoo and Ralph Jacobson for almost 30 years, north of Menominee, Wisconsin.
Join us anytime between 11AM & 3PM

• Harvest quirky Jack Pines for Xmas trees or cut yourself some firewood. Donations accepted.
• Or get away on a tromp through woods and prairie.
• Check out the three acres of “logging for tax-breaks” that happened in 2004.
• Hot cider.
• Kid friendly: warming tipi & porta-potti available on site.

We will likely also:

• Talk about the Quaker Community Forest vision and our hopes for this land.
• Drag wood scraps (slash) out of the woods to the road and cut some of it up.
• Discuss and implement some of Ralph & Cynthia’s DNR-approved forest maintenance activities.

– – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – –
We know how to dress. We’ll have fun. But it’s about a lot more than that. Sandhill is part of our vision of a Quaker Community Forest. This is a “boots on the ground connection with Mother Earth.” We aim to bring our spiritual context to the care of a bit of ecosystem.

“Care” is good, of course, but core is the CONNECTION to Gaia that is built, in the course of that caring.
Sandhill & Quaker Community Forest are concrete steps I and others are taking to enact our understanding of humans’ proper place within Gaia.