INVOLUTION Spring Reading Preview by Eric Francis Coppolino
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Beatrice Hunter, ‘Natural Foods Cookbook’ Author, Dies at 98
By SAM ROBERTS | Link to original
Beatrice Trum Hunter, a Brooklyn-born public school teacher who transplanted herself in midlife to a sylvan sanctuary, where she compiled what was heralded as the nation’s first healthful natural foods cookbook, died on Wednesday in Hillsborough, N.H. Having practiced what she preached, Mrs. Hunter lived to be 98.
Her death was confirmed by her nephew Dr. Dan M. Granoff.
Beatrice Trum Hunter’s passion for health was inspired in high school by a book that described American consumers as unwitting guinea pigs for the food, drug and cosmetics industries. Credit Robert Granoff, via AP.
Inspired in high school by a book that described American consumers as unwitting guinea pigs for the food, pharmaceutical and cosmetics industries, Mrs. Hunter became an autodidactic apostle of whole grains, honey and vegetable oils as substitutes for refined flours, sugars and animal fats.
More prominent public health pioneers, including the environmentalist Rachel Carson and the nutritionist Adelle Davis, would seek her advice about artificial food additives and pesticides and incorporate her research and expertise into their best-selling books.
Mrs. Hunter published her prototypical “The Natural Foods Cookbook,” the first of 38 books, in 1961 — fully a decade before the movement was popularized by more widely circulated recipe collections like “Diet for a Small Planet,” “Moosewood Cookbook” and the first natural foods cookbook published by Rodale Press, which grew into a health and wellness publishing conglomerate.
Warning against the artificial additives, processed foods and preservatives that were proliferating in the American diet, Mrs. Hunter wrote, “Foods treated in this manner may appear brighter and last longer, but the people who eat them don’t.”
She for one lasted longer, she recalled, in part because she had changed her own eating habits as a teenager after feeling fatigued and suffering from straggly hair and bad skin.
Blaming a terrible diet, she had also endured a childhood bout of rickets, which can cause bone deformities, stemming from a vitamin D deficiency. Vitamin D can be derived from fish oil, egg yolks, milk and sunlight.
Mrs. Hunter published her prototypical “The Natural Foods Cookbook,” the first of 38 books, in 1961. Simon and Schuster.
Then she read “100,000,000 Guinea Pigs,” a best-selling book by Arthur Kallett and Frederick J. Schlink published in 1933 whose title refers to the size of the nation’s population at the time. The book was considered a catalyst for the creation of the Food and Drug Administration.
“The first thing I did was to cut out sugar,” Mrs. Hunter told Yankee magazine in 2015, “and then I began to use more whole grains and more fresh vegetables and fruits.”
After teaching visually impaired and intellectually gifted students in New York and New Jersey, she decamped permanently in 1955 with her husband, John, to a white two-story farmhouse on 78 acres that they had bought for $1,800 six years before in Deering, a southern New Hampshire village of about 300 people.
They were joined there by her mother-in-law, Lotte Jacobi, a German Jew, who had fled the Nazis in 1935. A renowned photographer, Ms. Jacobi opened a studio in Deering.
The couple later turned the property into an inn for fellow naturalists and photographers who, unafraid of roughing it, also got to feast on Mrs. Hunter’s recipes. (The inn was so rustic that it was nameless.)
Beatrice Josephine Trum was born on Dec. 16, 1918, a month after World War I had officially ended, in Brooklyn to Gabriel Trum, who worked as a cutter in a silk-dyeing plant, and the former Martha Engle.
Neither of her parents had gone beyond the sixth grade, she said, and after she graduated from Richmond Hill High School in Queens they agreed to send her to college only reluctantly.
She enrolled in Brooklyn College and graduated in 1940 with a bachelor’s degree in English literature. Accompanying a blind student on the subway to and from campus, she had learned to read Braille and became disposed to teaching visually impaired students.
From Brooklyn she went on to study at the Perkins School for the Blind in Watertown, Mass., and later earned a master’s from Teachers College at Columbia University. She taught in New Jersey and New York City schools until she and her husband, a fellow teacher, moved to New Hampshire.
Her marriage to John Hunter, who helped manage the inn and later became a rare-coin dealer, ended in divorce in 1977. An older sister died earlier. Her three nephews are her closest survivors.
From her house, which was heated only by a wood-burning stove, Mrs. Hunter wrote books on her IBM Selectric typewriter. They included “Gardening Without Poisons” in 1961 and “Our Toxic Legacy: How Lead, Mercury, Arsenic, and Cadmium Harm Our Health” in 2011.
She was also the food editor of Consumers’ Research Bulletin magazine, which had been published by Mr. Schlink, an author of the compelling book she had read in high school. In 1973 she appeared on the Boston public television station WGBH, delivering mini-lessons on nutrition on a program called “Beatrice Trum Hunter’s Natural Foods.”
After her mother-in-law became incapacitated and Mrs. Hunter inherited her camera collection, she learned photography and captured artistic images of ice crystals on her windowpanes as a hobby, but never lost her fascination with natural foods.
“I’m self-taught,” she said. “I’ve never hesitated to ask for help from reliable sources when I’ve needed it. What to call me? Call me a concerned consumer.”
Petrichor
According to my understanding of Buddhist tradition, the human mind is incapable of understanding the Great Originating Mystery, so Buddhists don’t spend time contemplating it. It may be that the human mind cannot fathom human existence on this singularly beautiful planet, as well. So, the reason as to why we are here may escape us until we reach a higher level of consciousness, which may be possible only by caring for our planet and one another. Hence we live in a quandary: we are to care for our planet and one another, yet lack the mental capacity to know why.
The three major pyramids in Giza, Egypt. From left to right, the Pyramid of Menkaure, the Pyramid of Khafre, and the Pyramid of Khufu (also known as The Great Pyramid). Photo by Mark Fischer / Flickr under Creative Commons.
Conscious human evolution, that is, evolution by choice rather than chance, is the tool we have to unlock the secrets of life and release ourselves from this quandary.
Among the benefits of modern technology, which is, in itself, a mixed blessing, is that technology can afford us the space and time to make personal transformation. Yet, a technology that separates us from what gives us life, rather than enhances our relationships with what gives us life, likely does not serve conscious evolution.
Let’s take a quick look at some indigenous technology. When I ask students for examples of that, they usually come up with things such as bows, arrows, spears, atlatls and stone knives. When I ask students to think big or beautiful, they can’t. So I’ll draw a pyramid on the board and say, “This is an example of indigenous technology.” I may show a photo of jewelry from a tomb and say, “This is an example of indigenous technology.”
The later examples used processes we still do not understand. In 1978, Nippon Corporation failed when trying to build a scale model of the Great Pyramid of Giza without its complex interior. The goal was to use only primitive tools and techniques. Choosing a site near the Great Pyramid where they could quarry limestone, they went to work.
They could not cut the limestone blocks from the quarry without jack hammers, could not transport them across the Nile and sand without steamboats and trucks. Cranes and a helicopter were used to position the blocks. Nor could engineers bring the corners into alignment, even by using lasers for leveling. Yet the builders of the Great Pyramid evidently had the answers. Some suggest they used complex mathematics that relied on the sun for accurately leveling the site.
Like the Egyptians, the Inca were also known for their stonework, creating huge ceremonial and civic structures with virtually no space between the joints of rock. As for metalworking, some processes used in antiquity to create jewelry, especially gold jewelry, still cannot be duplicated today.
Among my favorite examples of indigenous technology are stone knives. Photos from electron microscopes show obsidian (and maybe flint) knapped blades to be sharper and perform better than surgical scalpels, although the FDA does not approve stone blades for surgery. Several times, when I Sun Danced and was cut with scalpels, I wondered how much less painful it would be with a flint-knapped blade, but it was not to be.
Technology should enhance our connection with the planet, rather than separate us from it. Connection is what indigenous technology accomplished, accomplishments and technologies moderns have not completely deciphered. I’m no proponent of capital punishment, but I am amazed that hemlock’s most famous victim, Socrates, seemingly tossed back a cup of it and was quickly released into Hades. Today, despite a palette of pharmaceutical death drugs, the job is frequently botched. Are we so dead-set against the efficacy of plants and to the indigenous knowledge of their uses that to acknowledge them as a legitimate choice to pharmaceuticals somehow undermines reality?
The point is that indigenous technology intimately connected the user to the world, or in Socrates’ case, the Underworld. The pointlessness of much modern technology is that it is designed to separate us from what gives us life, as well as from one another. It makes us oblivious to the obvious; oblivious to the miraculous.
This was really brought home the other day. It was a perfect spring afternoon in Montana: temperature in the low 70s, azure, cloudless skies, no wind, beautiful plants, and sweet-smelling air. This was right after a rain. Petrichor is the pleasant smell that frequently accompanies rain after a long period of warm, dry weather. According to LiveScience it has two causes:
“Some plants secrete oils during dry periods, and when it rains, these oils are released into the air. The second reaction that creates petrichor occurs when chemicals produced by soil-dwelling bacteria known as actinomycetes are released. These aromatic compounds combine to create the pleasant scent when rain hits the ground.”
Like the fragrant scent from a flower, petrichor is a way the earth thanks the sky for rain.
There is something truly mesmerizing of the diversity embodied in the blues and greens of spring. I’m convinced those colors look better this time of year than any other. When I stepped outside yesterday and took it all in, I resolved to match my mental-emotional state with the natural. I would feel only good and have only good thoughts, acknowledging that the sun shone equally on all.
Sun through post-rain trees; photo via YouTube.
Nothing in me would disrupt the sweet-smelling, vital energy out there. I would not adulterate perfection. It would all be as it should be during my entire nine block walk to the co-op downtown and back home.
It was, until I walked a few feet. Then, car exhaust knocked me off center. However, it was the look on the driver’s face that gave me pause. Seemingly he was not having a perfect day, although he seemed to have a perfect car. He flipped me off.
“He’s probably upset he’s not walking,” I thought.
I had to re-center myself a few more times before I got to the store, but practice and a perfect day made it easier each time. Once was at the Federal Building, where a man was spraying chemical lawn treatment with no hazmat protection. That would likely be bad for business. The acrid smell of liquid chemical fertilizer burned my nose; the drone of the pump on the back of his truck blotted out the bird songs. I said a little prayer for sprayer man and went on.
I had a delightful discourse with the co-op cashier, then took the long way home, all of an extra block. Bozeman is a small town by American standards, but it can have big-city traffic behavior, especially during “evening rush hour.” So I waited at the crosswalk on a two-lane one-way street for traffic until a pick-up truck finally stopped so I could go. In Bozeman, that does not mean it’s safe because the traffic in the other lane almost never responds to a vehicle stopped near a crosswalk.
Isn’t that interesting? A truck is stopped in the intersection, blocking the crosswalk from the view of traffic on its right — in this case — yet that traffic never, ever seems to consider that the truck is stopped because someone might be crossing the street. So a second vehicle would have run me down, but I stopped in the middle of the crosswalk. The driver pretended not to notice me as she zipped by a few feet from my feet. I am pretty sure if we don’t look at one another, it’s easy to convince ourselves there’s no one there. I smiled at her anyway, flashed the peace sign to the truck driver and enjoyed the rest of the walk.
Montana is still fortunate enough to have grizzly bears and I spend a fair amount of time in the mountains. While grizzlies are nothing to mess with, and maulings happen, most bears don’t cause problems. Yet in a twenty-minute walk I was flipped off, poisoned and almost run over, all by my own kind on a perfect day. It makes being in grizzly country all the more relaxing.
It seems to take a 24/7 onslaught of negative stimuli and distraction to keep us divided. On the other hand, it would take little positive input to get us to realize our connections with one another and the planet if we weren’t inundated by divisive messaging. I think this impending realization is the great fear of whatever wizard is behind the curtain of fear mongering. Realizing our connection is the crux of conscious evolution. Keeping us separate is the anti-thesis. By taking care of our planet and one another, mystery and wisdom are revealed. Even if I’m wrong, it’s a nice thought.
Another thought is that modern technology keeps us from doing much of what we can do for ourselves. Now, that is quite a statement. Yet from my experiences and studies I’ve come to that conclusion. From telephone and internet communication, to travel, healing, navigating in the dark and finding lost people, many of us have successfully practiced these techno-abilities simply using our human abilities; indigenous shamans and shamanesses are even more proficient.
So the question is, “Why do we invest in and embrace technologies that can do no more than we can do?” For an excellent, well-researched exploration of this question, I suggest the book Spirit Talkers, by William S. Lyon, PhD. I am not saying there are no benefits to modern technologies. I am saying they should not be foisted upon us by undermining our talents and common humanity, or at the unsustainable expense of the planet. That’s all.
This brings us back to life on Planet Earth and the tumult of our times. The chaos is so encompassing that it simply has to be contrived. Nothing can be this whacko without Undivine Intervention. So what’s going on?
I don’t know, but I sense we neither understand the importance of our planet nor our being here. Obviously our singularly beautiful planet is special. So, if we are here, we must be special, too. We aren’t special because we are special, though. We are special because we are equal.
For some reason, we have chosen to make ourselves unbelievably miserable while desecrating this rare space jewel, rather than consecrating her with our activities and creativities. While we may not pose an existential threat to our own consciousness or to the planet — one way or the other both will survive — we do pose one to our happiness and evolution. Peruvian shaman don Oscar Miro-Quesada is fond of saying, “More than saving the planet needs loving.” I think the same goes for us.
Yet, the time and energies suggest we have the opportunity to make a quantum leap of evolutionary understanding if we make use of the time and galactic energies available now. So, there may be no existential threat, but there is a choice.
We can be happy, fulfilled and conscious now, and live in harmony with one another, our planet and the eight and a half million species we share her with, and undertake a mutual journey of conscious evolution to new dimensions; or we can choose to be even more unhappy and miserable than we are now, strangely apathetic at the prospect of sludging through 25,000 years or so before we have a comparable galactic alignment and energetic boost as is available today.
I think it’s time for some immediate gratification.
A note from Steve on The Petrichor Practice:
The next time you go outside after a cleansing rain — and I know there are some intense storms going on in parts of the world so some may have to wait — simply connect and embody petrichor’s natural purity. If you can do this under clear skies, day or night, so much the better. Take it in. Consciously and completely fill your mind, body, spirit, emotions and soul with it. Keep at it until you feel a very real and strong sensation and transformation. Then simply intend to energetically share this, without holding back, to everything in your life for a few minutes, an hour or all day. Reboot as often as necessary.
Steve Guettermann is a freelance writer and “teaches” critical thinking at Montana State University. He is currently studying Peruvian shamanism under don Oscar Miro-Quesada, and published an article in last year’s Planet Waves annual edition, Vision Quest. Steve’s email is migratoryanimal@gmail.com; you can also visit his website.
You may pre-order all 12 signs of INVOLUTION here. What we’re living through today is not written about in any book. We’re its pioneers in consciousness. For us, in our time, the revolution must be within. INVOLUTION will be your guide.
Publishing Schedule Change
Hello — Len Wallick’s usual Tuesday column will not be appearing today, as he completes some other writing for Planet Waves. He’ll be back on Friday with his usual column. — Amanda
Send More Chuck Berry!
By Len Wallick
Seminal rock-and-roll musician Chuck Berry died on Saturday (March 18, 2017) in his Missouri home at age 90. Appropriately, his passing took place just as the era-defining Uranus-Eris conjunction in Aries was still exact to the degree, and closely opposed to his natal Libra Sun.
The great Chuck Berry strutting his stuff at Virgin Fest in 2008. Photo by Joe Cereghino.
Born in St Louis on Oct. 18, 1926, Charles Edward Anderson Berry can fairly be said to have defined an unprecedented era. To paraphrase John Lennon, another name for rock-and-roll might well have been “Chuck Berry.” Few are those who would argue with Lennon’s wry observation.
It could also be said that Chuck Berry’s life was reflective of both Uranus and Eris. Further to just a few interpretations of Uranus, he was a revolutionary presence who who reached (and galvanized) billions of people through the medium of radio broadcast.
Consistent with the personality of mythical Eris (the putative “goddess of discord”), both his lifestyle and music provided ample discomfort for those who feared that rock-and-roll constituted a threat to the racially segregated and plutocratic social order he was born into. Thankfully, the alarmed critics perceived Chuck Berry quite accurately.
Chuck Berry was born a black male in an area (and era) rife with institutionalized racial oppression. His parents were not wealthy. His formal education was interrupted (and perhaps defined) by incarceration. For a long time, and in an interesting parallel to another revolutionary and influential historical figure, he made his living as a carpenter. All told, it was not an auspicious beginning for somebody who would eventually be known and honored worldwide.
Only after his first Saturn return was Chuck Berry finally able to combine his cultural legacy with his personal experience and express it far and wide through the universal medium of music. After that, the rest was (and continues to be) history.
Indeed, Chuck Berry’s legacy has for some time been assured beyond any earthly eventuality. Riding aboard both of the Voyager spacecraft launched in 1977 is a gold-plated and playable copper phonographic record. Included on that disc is one of Berry’s best songs: “Johnny B. Goode.” If you are not already familiar with the lyrics, you could plausibly offer a fitting tribute by becoming acquainted with them — they say a lot about both America and one of its most distinguished sons.
If comedian Steve Martin proves prescient, the greatest tribute may be yet to come. In a 1978 televised skit, Martin played a silly psychic who predicted that we would soon receive our first message from extraterrestrial beings who had intercepted one of the Voyagers. The anticipated content of that still-awaited missive was (of course): “Send more Chuck Berry!”
Planet Waves AM/FM March 18, 2018
We Must Remember History
By MADALYN ASLAN | Originally published November 2016
We are a Cancer nation, born on the 4th of July. The sign Cancer, more than anything, consists of memory. This is how Cancer, a crab, survives. The crab is our oldest living creature on earth – five hundred million years old. A survivor, above all. Memory is crucial. We must remember history.
Fifty-million-year-old crab fossil.
And that we have choice.
We survive through evolving. Expanding the gene pool. The inbred and purebred do not live long. Diversity in humans as well as animals is healthier. That’s the good news! Now, here we go –
I see an eagle attempting to find its footing on a rolling boulder. The eagle, symbol for America, is over a boulder that is presently rolling. The American eagle WILL find its footing, after another turn of the boulder / revolution of the land.
Americans, most courageously now original Americans gathered in North Dakota, are fighting to defend their earth. Black Americans are fighting to stay on earth, as in fighting to stay alive, and it will be this way for quite a few Americans, as long as violence continues to be sanctioned by the President-Elect. And then there is the earth we all live on, every single human being, and that, too, is under attack. We are in great danger of making ourselves extinct.
We need to see clearly. At present all is whitewashed in dreams, mirages, misrepresentation. Distortions in mainstream media have blinded an entire population. Most of TV news is lying. Truth doesn’t count for very much anymore. We are happily blinded. As T.S. Eliot said, humankind cannot bear very much reality.
What’s right in front of us, through this blindness, is the offer to take a risk. We must have courage. We can’t give in to shapeless, amorphous, fears. I don’t see immediate disaster. The system won’t break. Just terrible, terrible fear. A kind of North Korea terror with accompanying brainwashing, including Stockholm Syndrome. We must calm ourselves.
Many of you are asking me what to do. Stop watching Trump’s current reality show. Stop reading the tweets, go two days without watching TV, put down your phone, walk away from the internet entirely, spend an hour in nature, fill yourself with beauty and fresh air, BREATHE. If you’re in a city, go to a park. Watch a hilarious movie. Love your loved ones. Recharge. And then come back. Calmly, practically, set aside, and spend half an hour a day to call your representatives, sign petitions, protest, be a good citizen. All Americans. Your voice counts.
Jeanette Winterson wrote: The world is surely wide enough to walk without fear.
The consciousness of service arrives. Time to shoulder duties. This hits Friday, December 9, before Sun and Saturn clash in fiery Sagittarius December 10 – whoosh! After this is when the country really gets it. Hold on to your seats. Or rise up from them. The country is being fought over, as it was at its very beginning. There will be a spectacular unveiling of tricksters – following an explosion – followed by a spirited defense of home. We want to believe facts will count, and sadly they don’t to those who only want power. But the country’s not going down without a fight.
But remember, protective Jupiter is in Cancer’s fourth house until October 10, 2017. In other words, watching over and protecting our original home! The fourth house rules home and roots, family of origin and the very foundations. The founding fathers founded a secular nation. A Christian, anti-earth nation is the opposite of our original foundations. The pilgrims were escaping religious persecution and wanted nothing to do with religion in their government. The native Americans were living on the land and from it, not destroying it. The “reigning” forces at present, all of Trump’s “picks”, are attacking our original foundations.
And yet, Trump offers the dream of a fantastical past and offers to make it all better. Two strong Cancer themes, but without the reality necessary for survival. The United States is a superpower precisely because it is united. It is the largest united country in the world, and that means a ton of resources, a ton of money. I see a movement on the west coast to secede, but they will need the resources of the U.S. (which they won’t have if they secede.) Practical Cancer, not coincidentally, also rules coins and money. Cancer Jupiter Benjamin Franklin (born January 17, 1706) said: A penny saved is a penny earned. Another concept that disappeared after the Depression generation. We learn to do the right thing for survival, and then we forget it. Forgetting is not lucky for us.
As the boulder rolls, (turning and turning in the widening gyre), will there need to be a complete turn – all our rights rolled back – for the pendulum to swing back? I hope not, but history, often, miserably, repeats itself. Also, full disclosure, I initially saw many being killed.
I also saw that we won’t realize how good we had it until we’ve lost it. As every person who grows old experiences. We are a young country. And we teach history less than any other country. We worship youth – which does not last long.
Protective Jupiter watches over our origins, however, and expands them. Many of us will literally be pulled out of the woodwork to defend its original beams. In its purest form this should mean a win for native Americans. That’s being optimistic. (I am part Iroquois but know little about it, nor about that side of my family.) But hope springs eternal.
There is hope but there’s no instant fix. The collective grieving and loss, as in the shock of a death, is weighing against us. Hillary is in mourning. Obama is waiting to act. Trump right now is dominating the environment and trying to control everything. Typical of a Gemini, he is flip-flopping, dramatically, and typical of his Libra Jupiter, he is blindly worshiped and getting away with his performance. He’s running his own reality show. Except it’s our country. We are now in Libra Jupiter (September 9, 2016 – October 10, 2017) which was my initial prediction, that Trump would win the election. And that he’d get away with his frantic antics until the end of Libra Jupiter, which is October 10, 2017.
But I can’t accept this. I look deeper and I see Trump is a young boy. Young soul. Scared. Counting his toy soldiers (his money.) He won’t rule. I don’t see him living in The White House for long. He can’t own it, he can’t profit from it, it’s of no use to him. He will be used, and will not last long. He, being used, will also use, that’s the deal. Do his business, in, out, take the money. The worst part is he’s not the worst part. The worst part is those behind him pushing their agendas. Trump is a front man, a salesman to sell the dreams to buy the land, and then to sell it off. He is forever a private property developer, but now with our entire country, and its laws, and people, as a building to be bought and sold. Always a slumlord, he terrorizes tenants until they move out, and then sells the country. I see that this was the plan all along.
Most frightening is how duped we all are. We are completely distracted by Trump’s outbursts while our country is being dismantled before our very eyes – and it’s happening fast. November 9, I declared this was a coup. We are fiddling while our Rome burns.
Confucius counsels: We should feel sorrow, but not sink under its oppression.
In the end, I see a couple, male and female lovers, in The White House. That is not Trump and Melania. They will not live together in The White House, as every President and First Lady have done since The White House was built. In the ultimate finish – and it’s no sweet immediate – I see the male lover handing his cup to the female. The male is handing his cup, literally, his presidency, to the female. In the end, the mantle of history goes to the female.
November 24, 2016
You can read more of Madalyn Aslan’s writing at her website: madalynaslan.com. She is the longtime astrologer for the New York Daily News.
Our ‘Coming of Age’ Age
“Late in the night, I seemed to commune with entities of pure thought, beaming a message at me. Their words hovered in my mind, then scattered away. I retrieved my notebook and scrawled them down before they vanished from my memory. ‘You go deeper into the Physical to get to the Infinite.’”
— Daniel Pinchbeck; 2012: The Return of Quetzalcoatl
Our time has many names, including New Age, Aquarian Age, Information Age and Computer Age. Those all sound positive. However, in other circles our time is known as Kali Yuga: the Age of Quarrel and Conflict, or the Iron Age. Whatever we call it, our time seems to be a Coming of Age age.
Brown bear (Ursus arctos) having fun; photo by Beverly & Pack via flickr, under a Creative Commons license.
Change is rapid and constant. We seem to be moving toward something positive, but that is paradoxically opposed by the Holocene Age of Extinction, otherwise known as the sixth great extinction, which many anthropologists and other scientists say is the current age.
The Holocene is also known as the Age of Man. In other words, the Age of Extinction is the Age of Man.
But it does not have to be that way. We can tip the scales in our favor and move away from the Age of Man toward the Age of Universal Man, or Homo universalis, as Barbara Marx Hubbard says. This is an age of conscious evolution rather than conscious extinction. We can start this move by realizing that not only do we lose a species in extinction, we lose its voice, its language, its way to communicate and its connection with the universe. That language is not only a gift from the Creator/Creatrix to that species, it is also a gift to us, as we learn how each species perceives and interacts with the world. To learn, we have to listen.
Some human language originated from sounds heard in nature, onomatopoeic sources: an ongoing orchestration of natural sound and vibration, especially from animals. Language will not evolve in the way it can when we no longer hear such sounds. I heard this in a catbird’s song one morning as I walked along Winter Ouzel Creek near my home. When birds and whales and frogs and crickets sing with all they’ve got, despite all that goes on around them, I sense how much they are doing to maintain the purity and evolution of the planet simply with their song.
As biologist E.O. Wilson asks, “Do we really want to live on a planet where one species cannot leave half of it for the other 8.9 million species?”
If we can leave half the planet intact, we may yet shape-shift into what don Oscar Miro-Quesada recommends: “…rather than being a dominating species we become an altruistic, interdependent presence within the great web of life.” This type of human presence can reverse the Holocene Age of Extinction and create the Age of Universal Man. This is to what the term “world reversal” refers. This is our choice.
Animal sounds became shamanic songs to call in animal allies — from this world and beyond — but these relationships are being lost through extinction. And it’s not just sounds; plants, animals, fungi and human cultures are leaving, along with their language, gifts, perceptions and wisdom. So we are left with less understanding of the natural world and a lessened opportunity to understand it because the orchestra is not complete. We originated within a symphony, but are forced to live in a cacophony.
As the natural world becomes less diverse, so does the human world. Both are less communicative, knowledgeable, wise and beautiful, as strands of the web of life are cut and dangle without connection. Rather than orchestrate repair by reflecting natural processes in how we support ourselves and evolve, we engage in biological book-burning and censorship, heralding not just a Silent Spring, but a Silent Millennium. Is this really the legacy we want to leave as the Age of Man?
Right now, much of the natural world hides from us, afraid we will find it. Beauty. Species. Sound. Going…going…almost gone. The thing is, Gaia’s magnificent creatures and creations do not want to leave the planet. They don’t want to exist just in the ethers. They want to live here, with us.
Fortunately, the planet still loves us as one of her own; but the reciprocity and decisions of the natural world are becoming like ours, based on fear rather than love. You see, there is a difference between Mother Earth/Gaia and the world. Gaia contains the world, but her consciousness is distinct from, although connected to, everything that lives here. This is why it is imperative we connect with both the Planet and the natural world, and listen to each while living our lives. Otherwise, while Mother Earth will try to support us, nothing else that lives here will. If this happens, our odds of surviving are going…going…too.
Some human behaviorists suggest we are attracted to beauty because we equate beauty with health. Beauty is a transformational and inspirational vibration. As the beauty and the diversity of life on our planet diminish, we don’t have beauty available to us to transcend and transform our consciousness. Without a foundation of natural beauty, it’s harder for us to recover once we get knocked down, so we stay stuck and we stay down. For sustenance, we prey on each other instead of praying with each other. Relatively speaking, things not in balance require more to subsist than those in balance.
The natural world of creative growth and evolution is orchestrated through the mantras of our animal allies and compadres. That is what a consistent nature song is, a mantra. They are beautiful and sacred sounds used as an object of concentration, and they embody some aspect of spiritual power. There is not just a predator-prey relationship; we seem to have reduced the natural world to that, being the reductionists we are. Natural world relationships are a shape-shifting cosmology of energy and consciousness through an evolutionary flow through consciousness. To experience this may be why we’re here.
We walk into the unknown every step of the way. This means the unknown is something with which we should be intimately familiar. Through planetary preservation we enter into sacred and appreciative relationship with the seen and unseen worlds that maintain life and foster conscious evolution. From awareness to connection, from connection to expansion and from expansion to a higher vibration — right relationship may lead to a quantum jump to greater and clearer manifestation from the love and joy of being and becoming. I suspect that right relationship will be appreciated and reciprocated in higher vibrational experiences, so it makes sense to learn it and practice it here.
There is no doubt that physical reality is a demanding, but beautiful, place. Earth is our mystery school. Here we experience cause and effect, and learn how to manifest desire in sacred relationship within sacred space. Were we to be placed in a space where manifestation of desire happens effortlessly without first learning to be responsible with this power, god/goddess only knows what we would do.
So maybe the Creator/Creatrix knows what he/she is doing after all, by testing us here. By choosing conscious evolution, an Age of Universal Man can become the time and space to remember our source, history and creative and loving power and how to use them. If we can effectively and compassionately manifest on the earth plane — by all accounts the most difficult plane of all — the joy and freedom awaiting us in more etheric realms must truly be remarkable. But first we have to know the joy and freedom that is here now. A Holocene Age won’t serve any of us.
Steve Guettermann is a freelance writer and “teaches” critical thinking at Montana State University. He is currently studying Peruvian shamanism under don Oscar Miro-Quesada, and published an article in last year’s Planet Waves annual edition, Vision Quest. Steve’s email is migratoryanimal@gmail.com; you can also visit his website.
