We Are From the Earth

I read this today via a community healing page that I follow on Facebook. It connects with something my teacher of shamanism posted earlier this week suggesting that we are all made of the same organic matter and therefore not as special as we might think.

Whenever people ask me what I really want to do with my life, I just talk around it, saying I’m “more interested in the arts” or I “want to do some form of therapeutic work but not traditional psychology any more”. How can I tell them that I want to work with the earth’s energies, that I feel her vibrations talking to me on a level that is beyond the mundane? How can I tell them about this invisible world that I always perceive behind the veil, subtle and yet so powerful that it makes daily life as we know it seem completely futile? I cannot and I don’t, unless they can perceive what I see.

I was raised Christian and it made me think of a verse in the Bible in Ecclesiastes: we are all dust and to dust we shall return. I never understood this verse as a child (like many other things in the Bible) and I found it very depressing. This week everything came together beautifully. The message I get is that I shouldn’t be ashamed of being in touch with the organism that we live on. Maybe it is not so absurd after all that I feel her flowing through my veins. It is perhaps more senseless to think that she is a dead piece of matter, only useful for providing us with food and stability so we can maintain our position at the “apex of creation”.

We have lived close to nature for millennia. Being in touch with our imagination and the organism we live on was an integral part of our survival. Economy and civilisation as we know it are still very new compared to our ages old spiritual traditions. Yet they have become the gods of today – different, duller, unimaginative gods but gods nevertheless.

Maybe the writer of Ecclesiastes understood that the earth and everything on it is sacred and that the same life force flows through all of us. There is an entire Universe that is far too large for us to fathom. How unimaginably massive is that compared to our little structures of meaning.