Grief is a natural and healthy reaction to the human desecration of the earth and its biosphere. Avoidance of grief reinforces the pattern of psychological repression and conspicuous consumption that is the status quo. So one thing you can do to honor the Earth this Earth Day is to let yourself grieve. Read more
One thing you can do to honor the Earth this Earth Day is to question the myths which underlie the status quo. Magic is the art of changing consciousness. Create art, music, chants, poetry, and fiction to help us imagine a new kind of society which has only barely begun to be dreamed of. Read more
Our capitalist economic system is fundamentally incompatible with a healthy planetary ecosystem. We live on a planet with finite resources, but our economic system is premised on infinite growth. And since we can’t change the laws of nature, we must change our economic system. This means challenging some of our most cherished myths. Capitalism infects all of our relationships: with other people, with other-than-human beings, and with the Earth. We learned these ways of thinking, and we can unlearn them. Read more
If we really want to practice a nature religion or an earth-centered spirituality, then we should learn where we are on the earth and "learn the songs of that place, the song of water and the song of wind." Science can help us do that. Even if you live in a city, there are still plants and animals all around. "Saving the earth" can seem remote if you have no experience of the land around you. Read more
Resilient communities are those can better withstand the shock of environmental change and economic collapse. One part of building resilience is re-skilling. We have lost many of the skills that our grandparents took for granted half a century ago -- but we can relearn them. Read more
The contemporary Polytheist movement is in its adolescence, and like every adolescence, it's awkward and accompanied by a lot of exclamatory rhetoric ... but it will be outgrown. Of course, just as there are adolescents who are wise beyond their years and more mature than their parents, there are also parts of the Polytheist movement which are like this. I suspect they are made up of people who are more concerned with cultivating a rich cultural center than with building walls at the boundaries. Read more
We don't own our myths ... or our gods ... or their images. And we shouldn't act like we do. There will always be other people will understand them differently. The way they understand them may not be sacred to us, but we still have got to respect that they are sacred to them. Read more
One thing you can do to honor the Earth this Earth Day is to help reground our Pagan rituals. Let's begin by asking the hard questions: Do our rituals help us experience the natural world or do they actually cut us off from it? Do our circles connect us to others or cut us off from the rest of the world? Is our Paganism too inwardly-focused? Is our connection to the “elements” just in our heads? Is our magic just another attempt to achieve mastery over the natural world? How “earth-centered” is our Paganism really? Read more
UUs, as individuals, certainly find transformation through many different processes–we serve (and are saved by) many different gods. But is there a distinctively UU god, a particular transformative process that we partake in collectively, our special patron in the naturalistic pantheon? Read more
Despite the overwhelming weight of the scientific consensus about anthropogenic (human made) climate change, it can be daunting for a lay person to talk about it publicly. One thing you can do to honor the Earth on Earth Day is to learn how to talk about climate change. Read more
The Allergic Pagan
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