Miscellaneous Meanderings — 02: Becoming Gaian: A Personal Journey
It’s been eight months since I began this series and somehow the time slipped away until now, as I resume by a cozy fire in the wood stove on a wet, cold day in southern Indiana. During the Global Coherence Pulse at the start of the third World Unity Week in June, 2022 Michael Lindfield shared these words:
On Becoming Gaian
What is the difference between living as a human being and living as a Gaian? As humans we go about our lives looking at the world as an external reality — something outside of ourself.
As a Gaian we think, feel and act within a deeply sensed knowing that the whole Earth lives inside of us and we live inside the whole Earth. A Gaian is a conscious fractal of the multidimensional ecosystem that constitutes the Living Planet.
A Gaian is a microcosm of Gaia — a sacred space of synthesis where Life meets Life and knows itself to be at One with All.
My own journey to becoming Gaian began, perhaps, in the spring of 1967 when I was visiting my high school sweetheart at Bennington College before returning to Antioch College after a work term in Washington DC. I was supposed to write an educational aims paper and declare a major. I had always assumed that I would become a social scientist like my father and mother, yet spending the morning at a typewriter and rereading the ten-page draft that I’d written, I realized there was no passion behind that choice. I tossed the draft into a waste basket and walked outside to a low stone fence looking over the Green Mountains, trees shyly revealing the spring green of their leaves under a cobalt blue sky.
I sat on the stone fence and asked myself: What am I going to major in? As I remember it, a voice (Gaia?) spoke out of the blue: Why not become a geologist? I laughed at the incongruous idea. I hadn’t taken a science course since my sophomore year in high school. I had little aptitude for math. Nevertheless, I decided to give it a go. Becoming a geologist transformed my view of the world. I delight in observing the rocks and landscape wherever I go and having a sense of their history. Encountering James Lovelock’s Gaia Hypothesis in the 1970s gave me a deeper appreciation of how the dance between biological processes and geologic processes has created the astonishing biological diversity on our blue-green planet. Thirty years later, I was delighted by Robert Hazen’s work on Mineral Evolution that shows how biogeochemical processes have made possible the evolution of mineral diversity as well.
In the Introduction to these miscellaneous meanderings I mentioned a grand geological tour of the world that I took in the early 1970s. Those travels included several important mileposts on my way to becoming Gaian:
· The winter of 1971–72 I lived in a little-known fairy-tale-like castle south of Vienna, Austria called Schloss Eichbüchl, which then housed the Transnational Research Center. I slept in an unheated tower room, thanks to my down sleeping bag, and worked in exchange for room and board on a background document for the first United Nations Conference on the Human Environment schedule to be held in Stockholm. There are many stories I could tell about my time at the Schloss, but what’s relevant here is that Ernst Winter, director of the Center, was good friends with J.I. Rodale, founder of the organic gardening movement in the United States. The library at the Center had all the classic texts in organic gardening, a complete set of Organic Gardening magazine going back to 1942, and much of the food we ate came from the free-range poultry and large organic garden on the castle grounds. I relished immersing myself in the literature, and helping tend the garden. This was my first introduction the making a connection with Gaia through gardening.
· Spring of 1972 I hitch-hiked from Schloss Eichbüchl to Norway to make a connection with my Norwegian heritage. Enroute, one morning I found myself standing by the side of the road on Fyn, Denmark’s third largest island, waiting for a ride. It was a beautiful spring day. The sun was shining, and I felt an ineffable sense of contentment and feeling at home. I looked around, realized that the rolling glacial terrain was much like where I grew up in southern Michigan and had an epiphany: I was a Midwesterner at heart and however far I traveled that was where I wished to make my home on Gaia.
· Another milestone on the way to becoming Gaian was coming face-to-face with the prospect of my own death in Uganda, as described in Making Peace with the Prospect of One’s Death. The Gaian dance of life and death is writ large in geological processes as mountains and oceans come and go, in ecosystems, and fractally in our individual lives.
Returning from Africa to Colorado, where my family then lived, in early 1973 was a pivot point in the journey. I fell head-over-heels in love with a pretty geologist named Bonnie, a Hoosier whose family roots in Indiana went back to the early days of settlement. As much as we loved the Rocky Mountains we found that we were both Midwesterners at heart. When I proposed marriage to Bonnie on a rocky mountain trail she immediately asked: Can we have a garden? Thanks to my time at Schloss Eichbüchl, I was able to answer without hesitation, Yes! We were married under a large White Ash tree in Bonnie’s parents’ back yard in Bloomington, Indiana and in 1981 we were able to purchase 36-acre/14.6 hectare Windgather Homestead with my brother-in-law and his wife near Bloomington. Since then my connection with Gaia has deepened through gardening, adding to the biodiversity of our native hardwood forest with prairie plantings and getting to know the plants and animals.
I may not a fully conscious fractal, but as a mostly-conscious fractal I identify myself as a Gaian. Observing what’s happening in the larger world it seems that people generally are behaving as unconscious fractals of Gaia. I feel fortunate that I have been making new connections with other Gaians, and with the new connections I have a feeling that we Gaians are akin to the imaginal cells in a chrysalis that mediate the transformation of a caterpillar to a butterfly.
Are enough of us becoming Gaian for humanity to make a quantum leap in consciousness that would make it possible to us to stop killing and oppressing each other, and start healing the planet to create a safe and just space for humanity and all of life on Earth? I don’t know, though my sense is that we will know one way or the other in the foreseeable future.
For a list of other articles in the Meanderings series, see Miscellaneous Meanderings — 01: Introduction.
For lists of blogs and articles in my other Medium publications, see: Shifting the Trajectory — 01: Introduction and Spiritual Practices for a World Falling Apart — 01: Introduction.
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