What if we came back to life? Part 2 - with John Seed of the Rainforest Information Centre

An episode from the 2022 archives with John Seed, founder of the Rainforest Information Centre and pioneer of deep ecology, discussing the topic - "What if we came back to life?" Part 2. 

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:00

That if there is a separation between the living earth and ourselves, it's all of our doing. It it the earth never rejected us. And the moment that we make some gesture of reconciliation, the moment we um acknowledge that we want to heal that illusion, it's like the earth comes flooding back in again, and that's the experience that we have in the workshops.

SPEAKER_03 0:25

Hi, I'm Sophie. Welcome to Big Things Little Things, a podcast series where I sit down with inspiring change makers to discuss the big things they're doing, the little things that make them who they are, and together we vision pathways towards a better future. I'd like to begin by acknowledging the traditional owners of the land on which I'm recording, the Gethabo people of the Bungalung Nation, and pay my respects to elders past, present, and emerging. Welcome back to the podcast. My name's Sophie, and I'm your host. Today we are continuing on diving into the question, What if we came back to life? which investigates the work that reconnects a body of knowledge that helps to support activists in their practice, developed by Joanna Macy and now contributed to by many different individuals around the globe. So one of the contributors is John Seed, and that is who I'm speaking with today. So John is the founder of the Rainforest Information Centre. He dedicated his life to the protection of rainforests and their biodiversity since 1979. He's been awarded the Order of Australia Medal by the Australian Government for Services to Conservation and the Environment. So John is a real wealth of information. So I wanted to speak to him today about his knowledge relating to deep ecology and also how he has contributed to the work that reconnects. And I also wanted to talk to him about burnout because he's been an activist for a long time and he's had a lot of intense experiences. So I thought he would be a wise and informed person to speak to about burnout and how to prevent it and what to do to help to get back to a place where you're feeling resourced and uh healthy and whole and able to continue with your activism in your day-to-day life. So I hope you enjoy this conversation. I really loved speaking with John. If you do enjoy this conversation, it would be fantastic if you could leave a five-star review on Apple Podcasts. And don't forget to share on social media so that other people can also benefit from learning more about the work that reconnects. So at the beginning of this interview, we jump right into the conversation with John telling us a little bit about his history and how he came to be an activist and how he came to identify the path that he walks in protecting the rainforest. So enjoy. I'll talk to you at the other end.

SPEAKER_01 3:28

And then in um 1973, my wife and I traveled overland through India, coming back to Australia after I'd been away for five years, and in India ran into Buddhist meditation, India and Nepal. In Nepal I did a month-long retreat with Lama Zopa and Lama Yeshi, and then soon afterwards in India, I did uh a 10-day Vipassana retreat with uh Gawenka. And this uh totally changed everything for me, and um my wife and I determined that when we uh got to Australia we would uh see if we could find or create uh a community of people who were interested in this and uh build a meditation centre and organise meditation retreats and so on. And uh this we did that in um 1975 we started work on uh the meditation centre at the Channel, um sort of halfway between Byron Bay and Nimbon in northern New South Wales. Um the first half a dozen retreats that we organized there, we found about 20 people who all contributed a thousand dollars each for us to buy a piece of land nearby, which we called Bodhi Farm, and which is uh you know one of the most successful communities up on the North Coast. It's still thriving. Um and I thought I was going to spend the rest of my life um growing organic veggies, building houses, organising meditation retreats, delivering babies, and so on. When in August of 1979, I found myself, just by chance, I think, participating in what years later we realized was the first direct action in defense of rainforests, not only in Australia, but as far as we know, anywhere in the world. And um, I was only there because some neighbors had appealed for help, saying that the Forestry Commission was coming in the next day to log the rainforest at the end of Tyrania Creek Road. And although we'd been living for years only a few kilometers from the end of Terranial Creek Road, I'd never visited the area. I didn't know there was a rainforest there. I didn't know that there were rainforests in Australia, I didn't know what a rainforest was. But I was interested in neighborliness and the neighborhood and community, and so I went along to help my neighbors, and then something happened to me there which um I don't really understand, and I I guess I haven't still haven't recovered from, where I felt that I heard the trees calling to me to come to their assistance. And um this was a bit of a shock because I didn't believe that trees could do that, and I I I doubted um you know my sanity, but uh it turned out to be so persuasive and so compelling that within a few weeks I'd had another dramatic sort of about turn in my life where I ran away with the ecology circus and um left behind the life that I'd been living and became part of the movement. That two years later in 1981, uh an opinion poll showed that more than 70% of the people of New South Wales wanted an end to rainforest logging. Uh, our actions had been tremendously influential. I think because at that time nobody had ever seen people chaining themselves to machinery or climbing up into trees or things that are a bit ho-hum now. But back then it was easy to be the first item on television night after night. And the time was clearly ripe because the people joined us. And an opinion poll found that most people wanted an end to rainforest logging, and Neville Rand's uh government uh legislated with a string of national parks in 1981 that uh stretched from the border ranges down to Barrington Topps and included the um few hundred hectares where we'd been, you know, doing our theatrics and getting arrested and so on. It was during that campaign that um some friends and I started the Rainforest Information Center because although we'd started knowing nothing whatsoever about rainforests in the course of that campaign, studying what are rainforests, uh, we discovered that the rainforests are the very womb of life. They're home to more than half of the species of plants and animals in the world. And the satellite photographs at that time were showing that the rates of destruction were such that less than a single human lifetime remained before they were utterly annihilated. And so we began to try and find out what was happening elsewhere in the world and to try to join forces with other people that were uh similarly concerned. And um so in 1982, we were invited down to Tasmania by a group that was then known as the Tasmanian Wilderness Society, and um who uh some of their members had joined us in our blockades in northern New South Wales, and they decided to do a blockade of the Franklin and Lower Gordon Rivers to stop the damming of those rivers and the flooding of the temperate rainforest wilderness in that area. And you know, a bunch of us went down there a couple of weeks before the planned blockade and helped to set up the base camp at Strong and got involved in the nonviolent action trainings and things like that down there. That turned into the largest such action in Australian history. More than 3,000 people came from all over the country to this remote wilderness in the southwest of Tasmania. More than 1,500 people were arrested.

SPEAKER_02 9:27

Wow.

SPEAKER_01 9:28

And um the blockade had been timed to coincide with the federal elections that were taking place in early 1982. And uh, less than a fortnight before those elections, the leader of the opposition, Bob Hawke, seeing the writing on the wall, uh, announced that if elected, the ALP would stop the dam. At that point, more than a thousand people left Tasmania and fanned out to um, I think it was 11 marginal electorates around the country, and we went from door to door in those electorates trying to persuade people to vote for the ALP to stop the dam from being built. Each of those electorates swung to the Labour Party, and his first words upon being elected, Bob Hawke said, the dam will not be built. And so, once again, a tremendous uh victory. Umilarly, a couple of years later, up at um Cape Tribulation in far north Queensland, we were part of the blockades to um protect the tropical rainforests. And as in the temperate rainforests of Tasmania and the subtropical rainforests of New South Wales, national parks eventually followed and eventual um World Heritage Listing. So this was a, as you can imagine, a very empowering start to life as an activist, but at the same time, learning what was going on all over the world, it became clear that for every forest that was being protected in the first half of the 1980s, a thousand forests were being destroyed, and clearly there was no way to save the planet one forest at a time, that unless we could do something to address the underlying psychological disease or dare I say, spiritual disease that afflicts modern humans and allows us to imagine that we can somehow profit from the destruction of our own life support systems, clearly, these actions, um, as uh exciting as they were to the participants, would be of no particular significance to the future of the world. And so it was in the search to try to understand how we come to behave in such a self-defeating fashion that I came upon the philosophy of deep ecology, which uh was what um for the first time I felt that uh there was an explanation that that made sense.

SPEAKER_03 12:05

So I'm quite interested in deep ecology, but I'm new to the term. So would you be able to flesh out for the listeners what deep ecology actually means in practice?

SPEAKER_01 12:16

Well, the term was coined by the late Arnie Ness, who was the uh professor of philosophy from Oslo University, and according to Ness, underlying all of the symptoms of the environmental crisis was the illusion of separation between human beings and the rest of the natural world. And this illusion of separation was itself a consequence of anthropocentrism or human-centeredness, the idea that the human is the center of everything. So we are the crown of creation, we are the measure of all being. And the earth was created as a kind of a moral playground for human beings, that we are here to subdue and dominate nature, and nature is to be in fear and trembling of us. And so these quotations from the Old Testament indicate how long this anthropocentrism has been part of our cultural heritage, and it's for this reason that Arnie Ness uh famously said that ecological ideas aren't enough to save us. We need ecological identity, ecological self. That these ideas have for so such a for millennia have been corrupting the um the psyche of of human beings and all of our cultures, every institution of the society is based upon this anthropocentric misunderstanding. That the reality is that the world is not a pyramid with human beings on the top, that rather a better metaphor is that the world is like a web, and we humans are just one strand in that web, and as we destroy the other strands, we destroy ourselves. So this um, you know, reading Arnie Ness and some of his followers um hit me like a tongue, ton of bricks, and I took to deep ecology with the same kind of uh energy that I'd been doing, activism, where I just um reproduced hundreds of uh, you know, that I guess they were mimeographs in those days, hundreds of copies of the seminal papers in deep ecology and sent them to every politician and sent them far and wide, and really felt that um that this was uh uh an important part of the solution that if we could that if we could develop the ecological identity that Arnie Ness was calling for, um this might help to solve our problems. When he was asked how we are to nourish our ecological identity, because it's not a matter of creating it, this is who we always are. You know, when he says illusion of separation, it might sound you know a bit mystical, but to understand what he means, all we have to do is hold our breath for ten minutes while we think about it. And then we understand that normally when we see the environment, it sounds as though it's over there somewhere. And the atmosphere, what's that got to do with me? But when we hold our breath for ten minutes, then we come to understand experientially that there is no out there, it's all in here, it's all cycling backwards and forwards through itself, and there's nowhere to out there to put the waste and the garbage and the pollution. That it's all we are part of this vast ecological system, and that um to the illusion of separation that allows us to destroy parts of it in order to further what we wrongly imagine to be our self-interest is our downfall.

SPEAKER_03 15:58

So, John, could you tell the listeners how you came to become involved with Joanna Macy and to contribute to the body of knowledge known as the work that reconnects?

SPEAKER_01 16:09

In 1984, I think it was, Joanna Macy came to Australia and held a series of workshops, which she was at that time calling Despair and Empowerment. And I intended one of those workshops, and it was the next big turning point in my life. I I fet I had found, you know, a great teacher. What what Joanna what Joanna was showing us was that we live in a culture where there's a profound denial of many of our feelings, that the the so-called bad feelings, so uh grief, rage, terror, despair, and that we we're taught to be afraid of these feelings and that if we want to feel good, then we need to find a way not to feel these feelings. But what she claimed and what she demonstrated to us was that when you create a safe space, uh, when you create a safe container and invite people and encourage people to share their deepest feelings of dread and horror and rage and despair and terror about what's happening to our world, far from being crushed by these feelings, which is what we've been taught to be afraid of, um, empowerment follows that. And a tremendous sense of empowerment and a tremendous sense of hope just arises spontaneously out of that experience. And however, what I noticed was that as people spoke about their despair about what was happening to the world, it was really always just the despair about what was happening to one species, human beings. And so I introduced my deep ecology perspective to say, actually, I despair about what's happening to the 10 million species with whom we share the world, and um that if we were able to extend our sense of concern and compassion and caring to all of those species, that I thought that we'd have a better chance of saving ourselves. And Joanna um responded to that, and she was very interested in deep ecology, and actually we went for a walk together straight after that workshop in Turania Creek, and on that walk we designed uh the Council of All Beings, which was the first of the experiential deep ecology workshops, because Arnie Ness had said that in order to nourish our ecological identity, he thought what we needed were community therapies to heal that illusion of separation, community therapies to allow us to join back into that widest of all communities, that of all living beings. And so Joanna and I decided that we'd try and create some of those community therapies, and the Council of All Beings was the first of those. And I think it was only the following weekend Joanna was booked to do a uh a training for would-be facilitators of despair and empowerment, and she invited me to come along, and we held the first Council of All Beings workshop there. And she went back to America, and I I was in Australia, and both of us were exploring this work. And I think it was a couple of years later I wrote to her and I said that I was a bit disturbed by this peculiar thing that I was noticing where I kept designing new processes that seemed to be um interesting in in terms of nourishing ecological identity, and everything seemed to work. And that just didn't make any sense. And she replied that she thought that what was going on was that any time a group of people gets together with the shared intention to heal that illusion of separation, it hardly matters what you do after that, that it's that intention and spending that time together giving voice to that intention that does the work. That the that if there is a separation between the living earth and ourselves, it's all of our doing. It it the earth never rejected us. And the moment that we make some gesture of reconciliation, the moment we um acknowledge that we want to heal that illusion, it's like the earth comes flooding back in again, and that's the experience that we have in the workshops. And so uh that was a big weight off my mind because Joanna had been facilitating workshops for years, but I was had never done anything like that before. And um, you know, uh, but luckily for me, it didn't, you didn't need to be a great facilitator, all you needed to do was to have the good luck to discover that sharing that intention with a group of people always resulted in um transformative experiences for everyone present.

SPEAKER_02 21:32

John, could you explain for the listeners how the Council of All Beings works when you're doing that in a group situation?

SPEAKER_01 21:41

So um the work that reconnects is is seen as a spiral, and it starts from gratitude and then moves to honouring our pain for the world, which is the name now for what Joanna called despair and empowerment. It's that uh process where we're encouraged to Feel and share our deepest feelings about what's happening to the world. And then the third part is seeing with new eyes, and that's where the deep ecology comes in. And so one of the seeing with new eyes processes is the Council of All Beings. And in the Council of All Beings, each of the participants first there's a process to find an ally from the non-human world, and then we give voice to that ally. So in the first person, I am Koala, I am Micro Rhizia, I am the Milky Way galaxy, anything at all. We make a mask to represent that being, and then we just put aside, you don't have to believe anything. It's not like you really think it's the spirit of, you know. All that you need to do is to get into a childlike space where you're playing with these other people, and you wait and just see what happens. And always a conversation develops which no one present has ever heard before. A conversation develops among these different beings, and uh that this experience extends our ecological identity, and we see that uh there's much more going on than our normal waking consciousness um understands.

SPEAKER_03 23:31

So I was interested to ask you as a person who is starting to emerge from a period of burnout, like since you had your kind of ecological awakening and started doing the activism work, did you ever um did you experience any periods of burnout like throughout the years of as an activist? And if you did, what were your main like what were the things that helped you the most to to bring yourself back to a place where you felt you know nourished and and resourced to keep going?

SPEAKER_01 24:06

Well, I can't say that I ever experienced something that I would call burnout because as the facilitator of these workshops, and usually I would be doing 20 or 25 of these workshops a year, I was also a participant that the facilitator in this workshop issues the invitation, invites, you know, finds the space to do it in and puts out the publicity and then um introduces people to the work. But once, say, the process of despair and empowerment, honoring our pain for the world, once that circle is introduced, then the facilitator just becomes another participant in that circle. And the um the result of doing that work is the cure for burnout. And so eventually the word of this spread, and so more and more activists, especially in the United States and Australia, were coming to the workshops because burnout is such a um such a chronic problem in the activist community that we are the ones who don't turn the page to avoid the bad news, and so unless we have some way of actually um of actually looking after ourselves, burnout seems almost inevitable. But because I was facilitating these workshops and therefore participating in them over and over and over again, I never had that experience. But there was a funny thing that happened, which perhaps might be similar to burnout, I'm not really sure, but I'll tell you the story. And as I mentioned, the spiral of the work that reconnects starts with gratitude, moves on to honouring our pain for the world, to seeing with new eyes, and then it goes on to going forth. And so that is how do we take this that we've just spent the weekend doing together, and how do we incorporate it in our lives? How do we integrate it into our lives? And so one of the processes that I um was using a lot during the 1980s was something that I called letter from Gaia. So Gaia is the name of the Greek goddess of earth. Uh, James Lovelock popularized that with his Gaia theory, and um, you know, the the idea that the earth itself is a living organism and uh that all the different species are like um uh cells within that body. And so um, if we have an ecological identity, then we understand by Sunday afternoon in the workshop, we all have a kind of an experience that my personality is just the tiniest veneer over my actual identity, and that um in some sense I am the universe itself. At that moment when the universe has become conscious in the human, but every cell in my body is descended in an unbroken chain from the first cell of life on earth. Every particle in my body was there at the Big Bang and has just been weaving itself into countless different forms ever since. So we understand this as scientific facts, but the processes that we do over the weekend allow us to experience this as our identity, that this is actually who I am, not just where I live. And so this process that we would do on Sunday afternoon, maybe the last thing before our farewell circle, everyone would get a sheet of paper, and at the top of the sheet you would write, um, you know, Sophie, this is your mother guy. And you'd write that, and I would write, hi John, this is your mother guy. Everyone would write this, and then the instructions were just to keep writing without lifting your pen from the paper for ten minutes, and just allow anything to come out, to trust try and allow this to come out as automatically as possible, and then there wouldn't be time for everyone to share what Gaia told them, but there'd be time to say, if there's time for two or three people, if you if Gaia said anything to you that you feel is important, then share it with us so that we can hear about it, and there'd always be people where this was the highlight of the whole weekend because they would get incredible instructions for their lives and what they should do next. And you know, I've had feedback from people years later that this was the turning point in their lives was this letter from Gaia. So that had never happened to me. But one day, from one I because I was doing this workshop every weekend, I wasn't getting instructions about the rest of my life. I was getting instructions about the next week. Do you know, like this is what this is your mother Gaia, and you know, she would just give me strategic instructions for the next week, and I would follow those instructions. And whether it was, you know, just some part of my unconscious mind, I didn't care. It worked.

SPEAKER_03 29:23

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 29:23

So one day, one Sunday afternoon, Gaia said, Dear John, this is your mother Gaia. Please stop everything that you're doing. Don't start anything new, and wait for further instructions. And I was like, No, no, this must be some kind of a mistake. No, no, impossible. You know, I was going at such a tremendous speed. I had this program. And um, and over the subsequent Sunday afternoons, I would get the same thing. And the only thing that was added to it was that I was to do it in such a way that I didn't break anything, that I was to complete things and hand them over to other people, but that I wasn't to start anything new and that I was to be moving as quickly as I could towards a place where I didn't have anything on my agenda at all. And I was furious, I just was like, I just could not accept this, but there was no way around it. And so over the next maybe it took nearly 12 months to hand everything over to other people to stop everything that I was doing, and then um my partner at that time was doing her PhD in ecological identity at James Cook University in Townsville, and I just um um cooked her food and cleaned the toilet. Do you know? I just uh I just um went to the stacks at the library and read things that I'd never read before, and I just refused to do any activism or anything because I was just I was like on strike, and it was like she's got my number, and if there's anything for me to do, she knows how to call, and so I'm not gonna do anything until I'm instructed. And almost two years of this, my partner and I were in a beautiful old growth forest, the threatened forest in Chile, and all of a sudden, just as mysteriously as the as the enthusiasm for activism and deep ecology had vanished, it just flooded back in again. I don't know what it meant. I just it was just clear to me that following orders was what I had to do, that none of this was coming from me, none of this was a result of personal decisions or personal virtue or anything like that. I was I had hitched my wagon to a star and I'd held on as tightly as I could. And when it took an unexpected turn, I still had to hang on. So sometimes I wonder if that was burnout.

SPEAKER_03 32:08

Wow, that's so cool. I love hearing that story. Um, and I hearing you talk about, yeah, those kind of I mean, I haven't ever had a structured practice, you know, like writing letters or or following the spiral. Like this is something so new to me. And I'm so happy that I've come across it because I think it's so beneficial to to learn about this. And um, but just that that sort of practice of like asking the question and having guidance given to you is something that I have also experienced. Like everything that's led me to be doing what I am doing today, you know. Um it just has, I guess it started out I had a home birth with my second daughter, and and I think that something about that experience was so like profound, you know, taking back that that sort of like personal, like monumental rite of passage of just like having a baby in my home, you know, outside of the system and having such a beautiful outcome and experience just opened something like in me. And literally from when I had my daughter, you know, just within months uh after that, I just was getting I would come out in the morning and I'd say to my husband, like, yeah, well, last night I just had these instructions that I have to do this. And so my first instructions were, Well, you need to create a community group to share garden produce. And it had a name, like it had a name, and it had what I had the name broke down what I had to do, and then I just went and did that. And then that led into me meeting certain people that um then I had instructions, you need to start a podcast. So I started a podcast, and yeah, like so this entire process, which you know, um, even though it's very random and has been very weaving, I felt really supported in it, and I haven't also felt like I've driven it. Like I felt as though this was some force greater than me that I literally cannot explain, has come and has carried me on this journey. And and it has been the most sort of um like just rewarding and um I don't know, like just it gives me so much vitality, like as a person doing this work, but it's also so like I can't define it. It's very hard to explain how I got here, why I'm doing this. But I hearing you tell that story about receiving those instructions um really reminds me of that and also reminds me that I can trust as well that even though I am experiencing this period where I'm feeling, you know, more despairing, more grief, that I can rest and trust that the instructions will come again when the time is right. And a great thing too, just learning about the work that reconnects is like and hearing what you say about how those circles, like meeting in the circles and running those workshops, like gave you so much uh vitality and like helped you to avoid burnout. You know, that really pinpoints to me what's been missing in my own practice is, you know, while I do engage with a lot of people, you know, online and some people in my community, you know, we don't have those meaningful kind of sort of circle situations where it's people coming together to to share um and to like debrief their emotions. And um, I think that's what I'm missing is that that community, people-to-people connection with with like-minded, you know, others. So thank you for reminding me of that.

SPEAKER_01 35:40

Well, what I think of listening to you, um, Sophie, is that um, you know, if if we see that we are in fact not just a metaphor, but that we are in fact like cells in a much larger body, then metaphors of the body become very useful. And the thing about, you know, like if we look at the way that a human being comes into existence, you know, one egg cell, one sperm cell, and then the proliferation, the dividing, the growing and dividing, and so on. And then this cell migrates in a certain direction to eventually become part of the liver, and this cell migrates in another direction to become part of the brain. And it's like each of those cells is just surrendering to this the wisdom of the larger whole within which it's contained, and that so that if we can learn how to surrender our ego-driven agendas to the to this larger, you know, if we can just trust that by surrendering we will be instructed. You know, people often ask me, you know, well, you know, what should I be doing? And there's no answer to that because there are so many things that need to be done. You know, when Joanna Macy talks about the great turning, she talks about the the different roles that people can play. You know, there's the people who are needed to just do the blockades to stop the damage and so on, and then there are others who are needed to create the new, even while the dinosaur is still thrashing around. We need to be creating the future, uh the the models for and so many different things that need to be done, and that if we could just surrender and allow ourselves to be guided, then something coherent and integrated will emerge from that, you know. Anyway, I I I just feel that you know very uh excited to hear your story. Thank you.

SPEAKER_03 37:55

Oh no, it's lovely. It's lovely to hear this. And it's just having this conversation is is really reminding me of of just some of the I'd forgotten this, you know, like in the last few months. I feel like I've just forgotten. And I'm sort of, yeah, like just having this conversation is I feel like I'm picking up those threads, like, oh of course, that's that's how I've got here. And it's sort of making sense, yeah. Just that that sort of trust and leaning into that. So that's really awesome to just to be able to discuss that with you. Um, just just to kind of wind wind up, I was really fascinated to to ask you whether through all of your learnings about deep ecology and the work that reconnects, um, I often hear, you know, I love to hear um facilitators talk about deep time and how humans can have a bit more understanding of their place in the world and the universe when they understand the context of deep time. And it can give some um comfort to those who, like myself, sometimes feel overwhelmed with, well, right now things are looking a bit bleak, you know. Um and I was wondering if you could just speak a little bit about anything you know about, you know, deep time and and the our experience of this moment in the con in the bigger context of time.

SPEAKER_01 39:16

Well, it's funny you should ask that because that is one of my abiding passions. Oh good. One of the processes that I include in every one of my workshops. I also include the Council of All Beings in every workshop uh to this day. But one of the other processes that I always include is uh a process that um basically allows us to experience deep time. And um this process was originally devised uh by um a Catholic nun from New Jersey, Sister Miriam Therese McGillis, who was a um a colleague, maybe a disciple, I'm not sure how she would see herself, of the late uh Father Thomas Berry, who was um the foremost progressive Catholic theologian of the latter part of the 20th century. And he wrote a book called Um The Universe Story, and it was his claim that the story of the creation of the universe and the evolution of the universe, and then four and a half billion years ago, the evolution of the earth, and then life on earth and all of that, that is um a creation myth, and it is the most um compelling creation myth of our age. That he said that there are um 10,000 different cultures, and each of them has a different creation myth. You know, one culture says that a giant toad vomited forth the oceans and it all started like that, and another one says about Adam and Eve, and you know, a rib and uh, you know, and an old man with a white beard directing the whole show. And he um he said that um um every human culture needs a creation myth because what do we say when the children when we're sitting around the fire and the children ask us these questions? You know, we have to have an answer, and the answer that we give is the basis of our culture. The reason why we are us and they are them is because they've got a different story in answer to that question. And each of these stories is exquisitely beautiful and is a priceless part of the human heritage, but um they tend to be antagonistic towards each other. And so the Christian story doesn't like the Muslim story, and vice versa, and neither of them like the Jewish story, and no one likes the pagan story, and so on and so on. And there's often bloodshed, and indeed, perhaps most of the bloodshed comes from these stories battling with each other. And so Thomas called for a story that will unite all of the other stories, and he proposed that the story revealed by science, the story of empiricism, was our best chance of that, because a Hindu astronomer and a Buddhist astronomer and a Muslim astronomer looking through a telescope will all agree with what they're seeing out there. Do you know that that this is that this is our our hope to find a story that unites us rather than a story that divides us? And um so Sister Miriam created the cosmic walk as a um a Catholic ritual, I suppose. And because it's the intention that creates the experience of expanded identity, of ecological identity, I um have been using the cosmic walk as a way of as a deep ecology process, although Sister Miriam didn't design it as such. But then some time ago she attended one of my workshops and uh she had the same experience as everybody else uh through doing it with that intention. And so in the cosmic walk, we have a spiral of known length. So the spiral that I use is a ball of hemp 50 meters long to represent the 13.7 billion year story of the universe. There are twenty-three beads along this spiral that are spaced to accurately represent twenty-three moments in the evolution of the universe, in the emerging story of the universe that um I believe are uh profound and poetic. So in the center there's a a a bead that represents the fact that anything exists at all. So this is the Big Bang or the Great Flaring Forth, Thomas Berry called it. And it could be that the parameters of physics, the parameters of the universe, would be slightly different, in which case nothing would exist. But that's not what happened. You know, what happened is everything that we see around us, you know, and so we light a candle there to represent the flaring forth of the universe, and we tell that story, and then one of our members of the of the workshop walks slowly around, they light a candle from that tea light candle in the center, so they take the flame from the flaring forth of the universe, and they and while we chant a chant called Child of the Universe, I am a child of the universe, I've been here before and I'll be here again. I am as old as the universe, a part of the a part of all women and a part of all men. And so while we chant that, he or she takes the flame from the Big Bang and lights one candle after another as the stories are told of the universe coming into existence. And two-thirds of the way around the spiral, each meter represents 237 million years. Two-thirds of the way along, we tell the story of the supernova explosion when our grandmother star exploded at the end of her life, and the debris gradually came together into what we call the sun and the solar system of planets surrounding the sun, and then the first cell of life on Earth, and so on, and we keep lighting candles and less than half a meter from the end, and we realize there's still it's still there's no dinosaurs yet, you know. It's like it it gives us this incredible sense of humility that when what we call history, you know. I mean, there's no candle thin enough to accurately represent the human, you know, and so anyway, it's it's but I can ex I can say this, and you know, it can give you an inkling, but to actually be there, to have taken that intention and to walk around that spiral gives an expansion of identity. It's not that we cease to be who we've always thought ourselves to be, but it's rather that we understand that that's just one ring of the onion and that there are all of these other rings, and that this is a particularly important one because this is one where moth and rust do not corrupt, that this is like when we identify with the universe as a whole, everything's exactly as it should be. There are no problems, you know. It's like the universe, the universe consists of a hundred billion galaxies, our galaxy consisting of hundreds of billions of stars, and there's just utter, you know, huge, you know, like whole solar systems explode out of existence. There's nothing sentimental about it at all. And we are all of that, not just, you know, what we always used to think of ourselves. So to experience that not just as a story, but as this is who I am, um, it means that we can return to life as activists without the kind of hysteria or the terror that everything is going to come to an end because this is not coming to an end.

SPEAKER_03 47:40

Thanks so much for tuning in, everyone. I hope you enjoyed the conversation with John. I found it really beneficial and very healing, and it brought up a lot of memories for me about how I've got to be doing the work that I'm doing, and that was really awesome. And I loved hearing about his letter writing practice, and I have actually done that since I spoke with John, and I found it really helpful. So I would encourage you to do that. And I think there's more about some of the um the work that reconnects and some of the exercises that you can do set out in the book Coming Back to Life by Joanna Macy. So I would recommend that you check that out if you want to do some things for yourself or in a group. Um, it's all open source, it's also online. So I'll put all the links in the show notes. So next week I'm having a new conversation, a new topic. I'm going to be diving into the realm of birth, and I'll be talking to Amy Aroja or Aroja. I don't know. I think there's like a rolling R in there that I'm not very good at saying. And um, Amy is a pretty incredible birth worker, and um, she just has some amazing um insights into the birth realm and how um rethinking the way that we approach birth could be extremely transformative for humanity as a whole, and I really agree with her. So I look forward to sharing that conversation with you next week. Hope you guys are doing well. Uh, would love to hear your thoughts on this episode, and I'm always thankful if you can share it on social media or leave a review on Spotify or Apple Podcasts. All right, I'll talk to you next week. Bye, guys.