Everything comes from the Earth – even tar, ammonia, and radioactive uranium. Covid has been complex, a perceived enemy of human life but it is also a voice of the Earth. Do we have to be told there are too many people using too many resources? Like a mother, the Earth is putting us on restriction. No more fun! No more distractions. So we have to deal with ourselves.  Relationships, economy, overpopulation, environmental problems – it’s all coming to a head and the Earth is trying to help us do what we need to do to survive – REFLECT, CHANGE, AND DOWNSIZE!

Of course it hurts – that’s why when we noticed the first warnings of environmental stress we didn’t do anything. I mean, extinction of animals and insects didn’t do it, wildfires and floods didn’t do it, melting of the million-year-old tundra didn’t stopping us. You’d think we would have put a lockdown for any of these issues - but noooo. We are just silly children of the Earth – playful, fun loving, and egocentric, but Mommy Earth is saying enough!

So, we can do this in two ways-

1.- Keep being childish and getting harsher and harsher repercussions because we are not getting the message.

-OR-

2. – Grow up and be proactive. Change how we are and what we value. Radical work needs to be done on our food systems and transportation. Reducing our world population should be a priority of social policy rather than through war, famine, ecological collapse, and oh yah - disease.

I can think of several good ways to change some of our problems. Moratorium on new buildings or paving; we have enough. Recycling should be our growth model. Radical waste management. Standardize food containers for easy recycling. Ban all household items that do not degrade (mattresses, pillows, rugs, ect…). Make garbage dumps a resource with materials being mined and sorted for redistribution. Trolly-cars in every city. Drain every chlorinated pool and don’t allow farming in the desserts.

Hey- if I can think of solutions where are all the brainiacs at the top figuring this out? You know why – because we haven’t had a hippie president. Yeah, Clinton played the sax, and Bernie was cool, but we have yet to see someone who has seen the light on a mushroom trip and who refuses to wear a suit.

At this point any solutions are good and sometimes the best ones come from the ground up. It takes more time, but it’s usually a wholistic solution. Many solutions can be personal solutions. What are you doing to help the Earth?  I’m praying to David Attenbourgh as my guru.

The thing that is in the way is our value system - our love of money and convenience. These are hard ones to get over. Some hippies have figured this out and jumped ship, but still, hippies play this game because convenience, power, and money are a slippery slopes. But what if we got these and used them for the benefit of the Earth? We would see some progress.

Here is the challenge – what practices that we have developed during covid can we keep in place once covid is no longer restraining us? We have a disconnected view of ourselves as something above or beyond the Earth’s body, but we are the Earth, we are Earthlings.

So as extensions of the Earth’s consciousness we should bow to covid as the divine word from the Earth-mother and heed the message, because our actions do matter.