The Answer is in the Night Sky
I think I’ve always been a somewhat spiritual person. I grew up going to a Church of England school and going to Church most Sundays, and although I never really bought into the Christian religion, I always felt an underlying sort of ‘magical’ sense of wonder with the world that precluded a full-on atheistic attitude.
For me, one of the most spiritual things one can do is stare at the night sky. Growing up in the countryside meant that while we didn’t have a shop in walking distance, one thing we did have was clear skies at night with very little light pollution. I always remember, even now, that feeling I would get when I’d come home in the evenings, get out of the car, and instead of rushing inside I’d just spend a few minutes standing in the road, looking at the stars. There’s that moment, when what you’re looking at suddenly transforms from a flat black canvas full of sparkling lights to a whole vast and infinitely deep universe. You realise you’re looking out into the depths of interstellar space, and in that moment it suddenly dawns on you that are, in fact, standing on a planet — a great ball of rock, covered by vast oceans, teeming with organic life, hurtling through the universe at incomprehensible speeds. As you stare, transfixed, nothing else in your view but the majesty of the Milky Way, you start to lose yourself. The boundaries of the self begin to melt away, for a moment you become one with life, you claim your place in this giant tapestry, and you feel at home.
It is this sense of one-ness, interconnectedness, interdependence, that informs so much of the philosophy of spiritual ecology, but too often in our busy modern lives these moments are few and far between. With all the rush to get a job, make money, buy a house, have a family etc. it’s very easy to get caught up in the material world and totally reject the spiritual.
It was meeting my girlfriend, Zoe, that changed this for me. Suddenly I was with someone who believed in the energy of semi-precious stones, who had grown up in Asia surrounded by the ancient religious rituals of countries like Nepal, who had undergone Reiki treatment, and been to numerous Yoga classes. On the one hand this was all so alien to me, but on the other I kinda got it. I think it re-awakened in me the spiritual stirrings I had experienced as a child, and more than anything, she gave me permission to see the world in a different way.
At the same time, I was becoming much more interested in the plight of the Earth. Again, I think growing up surrounded by nature had instilled in me a respect for the environment and a love for being outdoors that meant that I just couldn’t help but hurt when I thought of things like rubbish tips, or floating plastic oceans, or the ever increasing number of extinct species. I knew it wasn’t right, that something had to be done, but how? It seemed like the facts and figures had been around for long enough, so why was nothing changing?
Finally, I found what I was looking for in a book - Spiritual Ecology: The Cry of the Earth, edited by Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee.
For the first time, I read and experienced the unashamed joining of the spiritual with the environmental, and it made sense. The great Zen monk Thich Nhat Hanh, describing floods, droughts, and wildfires as ‘bells of mindfulness…calling out to us, trying to wake us up, reminding us to look deeply at our impact on the planet’. But perhaps even more important were the words of authors like Mary Evelyn Tucker and Brian Swimme, who spoke of us humans as being ‘called to the next stage of evolutionary history’, a new era that ‘requires a change of consciousness and values’, a ‘greening of the self’ as Joanna Macy would put it.
Combining the spiritual with the environmental not only gives us a new understanding of our current situation, it also gives us a hopeful way forward - to re-connect with nature, to embrace our spiritual connection to the Universe, and become true guardians of the miracle that is life on Earth.
INHERITED is a tri-annual independent magazine on a mission to help our readers cultivate a radically spiritual connection to Mother Earth.
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