An invitation to a Council of All Beings
We don't like how we are living in the world. With each day that passes, with each new incident that confronts us with the myriad different ways we are destroying the earth we depend on, our sense of urgency, the feeling that we must somehow change, grows more intense. Our hearts call us to another way of living. We do not want to be destructive. We want to live harmoniously; to find again our right relationship with the Earth. We can all imagine the life we wish we were living, how we would like to be. So why don't we make the changes we want to make?
"On one level we maintain a more or less up-beat capacity to carry on as usual.... and all the while, underneath, there is this inchoate knowledge that our world is on the verge of destruction. Awesome and unprecedented in the history of humanity, it lurks there, with an anguish beyond naming." Joanna Macy wrote back in 1983. It is this anguish, or rather our attempts to deny it, that lies at the root of the problem. We are afraid of what will happen if we let in what we feel on behalf of the planet. We don't want to be negative, scare-mongering, morbid. We feel guilty and helpless, caught up in a system beyond our control. In order to keep going at all, we find ourselves forced into denial of our deepest knowing.
The most important thing we can do is to hear inside ourselves the sounds of the Earth crying.
Once we open up to the pain we are holding inside us, an extraordinary transformation occurs. We find that by being willing to acknowledge our grief, by processing our feelings together, we free ourselves from the paralysis, the crippling sense of being powerless and overwhelmed. We discover that we do know what to do and we start doing it. We reconnect with ourselves and all the energy that was tied up in holding out grief, is now freed up for living. We become empowered to act and there is such joy in action.
A Council of All Beings is one way of engaging with this emotional process, a weekend of ritual and therapeutic "exercises" and sharing circles in which we open up to our connection with the Earth and heal the pain we hold around the current planetary crisis. At a Council of All Beings, we invite "all our relations", all the different species who live in harmony with the Earth and are suffering as a result of how we are not, to speak through us, to give voice to their experiences, to offer us their wisdom - we ask them what to do. And amazingly, they tell us.
I am Snake.
My gift to you who have listened,
You who have opened your hearts
To the ways you two-legged ones
Have wounded us all,
Is that you all have the power
To shed old skins,
Become your true selves again.
Now, when all seems dullest, darkest,
The struggle hardest,
Is the moment of emergence
Into renewal, transformation.
Remember this.
When you are itchy,
Scratchy, discontent,
In truth,
You are about to burst
Out of a skin that no longer fits.
Do not be afraid of the process.
Embrace it.
I am hosting a Council of All Beings outside Glastonbury the last weekend in May this year. There is a moment, near the beginning of that weekend, I find myself visualising. I am at Tir na nÓg, the magical location I've found, sacred and secret, host to so many wonderful Beings, holding hands in a circle of about forty people. Looking around me I am aware that what brings us together is love of the planet we live on, our desire to explore how we can be "effective agents of change" on behalf of a planet in crisis. For a moment I am simply silent, breathing in the magic of being here, now, asking for guidance for the weekend ahead. I give thanks for the great gift of these people who want to share their experience of hearing the Earth cry, to find again our right relationship with our world.
Together this weekend, I know we will share our grief for the state of our beloved planet and find the comfort there is in shared tears. Night time, underneath the stars, we will gather round the fire to sing, drum, dance and tell stories as we have done back through the ages, as we will do ages into the future. We will reconnect, with ourselves, with each other, with the Earth herself. The ever-patient allies will come to us when we invite them. They will speak with us and then through us at the Council of All Beings. We will thank them and ritually burn the masks at the end and return fully to our human consciousness.
Refreshed and renewed, we will then plant the seeds for the future, commit ourselves to small realisable steps and to supporting each other to achieve them. Every Council has the potential to become a community of people forging the path to our only possible future - the return to our rightful place in the circle of All Beings; a sustainable and harmonious way of living in the world.
I need to find my place in that community. So I hold true to the vision I have of that evening in May when we gather and I take a deep breath and open this circle as I open all circles.
May Divine Light guide us,
May Divine Love hold us,
May we do as the Goddess Wills.
So mote it be.
References
Macy, J (1983) Despair and Personal Power in the Nuclear Age New Society Publishers
If you are interested in this, please let me know. As part of the Transition Town Glastonbury movement, Jane Sanders and I are offering 'the work that connects' on an on-going basis and will at some stage run a Council of All Beings together.
