Remembering the world and each other is part of our job as twenty-first century human beings. When we allow animals to go extinct, let me suggest, we are guilty of forgetting them way before their extinction, dismembering them from our reality, as if we didn't need them anymore. This is coming up with lions and tigers and Right whales and Monarch butterflies, all very high-profile creatures whose last days are looming and whose absence will leave huge gaps in mother nature for many years to come. We are like magicians playing God. It is as if we have convinced ourselves that we are creators of worlds just because we seem to have created our own world, but all we have really succeeded in doing is creating the illusion of a viable world based on the idea the human spirit is enough and everything else is superfluous. We decide what belongs and what doesn't through our power of focusing on what seems important at the time and letting the rest fend for itself. But when we forget to honor the living spirit of something, that spirit begins to fade, and then, all of a sudden, it is irretrievably gone. Every species on the Earth is the embodiment of a spirit that is unique to that species, which is why everything in creation is more than just the sum of its parts. Humanity has a spirit, tigers have a spirit, as do dogs and honeybees and the humble dandelion.
Matthew Fox(American priest, theologian, exponent of Creation Spirituality) begins his The Hidden Spirituality of Men with a big dream of watching a caravan of cars from a mountain top, like a wedding procession. In each car, in the back seat, is a bride and groom but, instead of people, the couples are a tiger and an elephant. It was a joyous dream, as if something miraculous was happening. The cars were driven by human chauffeurs. (Fox interprets this arrangement as compensatory for our one-sided domination of nature that has defined the human-animal relationship since the beginning of time.)
It is as if, when Matthew Fox was gearing up to write about the hidden spirituality of men, his deep psyche upped the ante with this dream of the marriage of the tiger and elephant as if saying, this is where you begin, with the coming together of the spirits of these great animals, these archetypes, and not as a novel and isolated phenomenon but showing him that every car in the endless caravan has a tiger and elephant bride and groom. It is a continuity, a conjugal chain from horizon to horizon, so it is placing our spirituality in the context of something that has no beginning and no end, but we just keep forgetting to honor and celebrate that continuity. Now, with big dreams like this, we are being invited to remember that these great creatures (now endangered) carry a divine and archetypal spirit that we do well to faithfully serve rather than dominate.
Keeping journals is one way of amping up our daily experience of owning a sliver of the full context of our Earth-walk. Remembering our dreams is another way. As we mature, we must find our own ways of remembering archetypal continuities, some of which we participate in and some of which we were born to witness, keeping in mind that we are capable of being conscious of far more than we will ever realize. Luckily for us, the way it works is, the more we remember, the more there is to remember.
to be continued. . .
(Article changed on January 24, 2019 at 18:40)
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