Читать книгу Active Hope - Joanna Macy - Страница 42

We are all thankful to our Mother, the Earth, for she gives us all that we need for life. She supports our feet as we walk about upon her. It gives us joy that she continues to care for us as she has from the beginning of time.

To our Mother, we send greetings and thanks.

Now our minds are one.¹⁸

The other verses in turn give thanks to the waters of the world; the fish life in the water; the varied vastness of plant life; the food plants from the garden; the medicine herbs of the world; the animal life; the trees; the birds, “who each day remind us to enjoy and appreciate life”; the four winds; the thunder beings of thunder and lightning, “who bring with them the water that renews life”; our eldest brother, the Sun; our oldest Grandmother, the moon, “who governs the movement of the ocean tides”; the stars “spread across the sky like jewelry”; Enlightened Teachers; the Creator or Great Spirit; and finally to anything forgotten or not yet named. Thanksgivings like this deepen our instinctual knowledge that we belong to a larger web and have an essential role to play in its well-being. As Haudenosaunee Chief Leon Shenandoah said in his address to the General Assembly of the United Nations in 1985, “Every human being has a sacred duty to protect the welfare of our mother earth from whom all life comes.”¹⁹

Different stories give us different purposes. In the Business as Usual model, nearly everything is privatized. The parts of our world remaining outside individual or corporate ownership, such as the air or the oceans, are not seen as our responsibility. Gratitude is viewed as politeness, not necessity. In their “Basic Call to Consciousness,” the Haudenosaunee tell a very different story, one in which our well-being depends on our natural world and gratitude keeps us to our purpose of taking care of life. When we forget this, the larger ecology we depend on gets lost from our sight — and the world unravels.