Category Archives: New cosmology

The power of radiance

Jun

2018

by Betsey | 12 Comments

We humans have brought ourselves to a fascinating and challenging point. By our numbers and our choices, particularly in the last 200 years, we’ve grown into an equivalent of the geological forces that have shaped our planet over its 4.5 billion year life. Our effect on the thin layer of atmosphere blanketing the earth means that we are potentially altering the ability of every living thing to prosper, or even exist. Our use of resources — forests, water, air, minerals, soil — is far outstripping the earth’s ability to replenish them. Millions of people worldwide are grappling with these challenges, which represent not just things to do but require new ways to think.

Checkerbloom (Sidalcea malvifolia) Point Reyes National Seashore, California

Now that we have become this force, where do we look for inspiration on how to act in our new role? To the universe itself, suggests cosmologist Brian Swimme amplifying the thinking of Thomas Berry, with whom he collaborated for many years. In 2005 Brian recorded a series of talks on the powers of the universe, the modes the cosmos itself operates by. These are the processes that gave birth to everything, including us. He chose ten of them: seamlessness, centration, allurement, emergence, homeostasis, cataclysm, synergy, transmutation, transformation, interrelatedness, and radiance.

In 2007 I attended the earth literacy intensive at Genesis Farm, a Berry-inspired ecological and spiritual center. One of our projects was to choose a power and, after pondering it for a couple of weeks, create a presentation for our final evening together. I made a beeline for the CD that held the talk on radiance.

Just before going to Genesis Farm, I had been at an art workshop where a fellow participant shared her mandala journal with us. So inspired by this magical way of responding to our world, I sat down to do my first mandala as soon as she closed her book. I brought this happy zeal with me to Genesis Farm and combined listening to Brian talk about radiance with this new way of meditating. From a butterfly to the stars, all was held in its shimmering essence. So, even though radiance is the tenth listed power, I’m going with the time-honored and delicious principle of eating dessert first.

Radiance may be the sweetest of the powers, but that doesn’t lessen its immense importance and complexity. We wouldn’t be here at all if it weren’t for the most radiant of all local beings: the sun. She, blazing wildly from the depths of her fiery furnace, sets our standard. She also has a lot of company. Since the primeval flaring forth, everything in the universe has been giving off light, in the visible spectrum and out, in the form of electromagnetic and quantum energy. ‘Radiance is the primary language of the universe, the way the universe communicates with itself.’ The way that it speaks to us. The sun and the earth, with all its emerging forms and beings, are part of the cosmos’s ongoing conversation.

Monkshood (Aconitum delphinifolium) Wynn Nature Center, Homer, Alaska

Our task, Brian says, ‘is to become the human form of radiance.’ We didn’t evolve to become consumers, or cogs in an industrial machine, or to allow the sublime beauty of this world to be destroyed for trinkets. We evolved to manifest 14 billion years of radiance.

For this, we can turn first to our most luminous organ: our heart. Our most crucial organ, nourishing every single cell, every moment of our lives. But it’s not only an exquisitely designed pump. It receives, and radiates. Look at a mother watching her baby, he suggests. ‘You don’t need to talk her into the idea that she’s holding a magnificent beauty.’ And we, looking on, recognize the glowing love flowing from her, and our heart opens in turn. ‘What comes forth, what reverberates out, feels like it’s completing the beauty that’s there.’

Staghorn cholla (Cylindropuntia versicolor) Saguaro National Park West, Tucson, Arizona

Our heart’s radiance is both effects and science, body and spirit. It’s a sublime biological system and an electromagnetic field 100 times stronger than the brain’s. Its rhythms convey information to all systems, functioning as the information hub of the body. It synchronizes the brain, giving us deeper access to our frontal lobes, helping us process the world and make sense of our emotional experiences.

The heart’s effects — warmth, aliveness, love, compassion, joy, forgiveness — both reach into and receive the world. These capacities are the essential qualities of all spiritual traditions, which recognize them as the way into our kinship with all other beings. They are the traits that have always made life worth living, and are why turning to our hearts now is crucial to our complex path forward.

Fairy slipper orchid (Calypso bulbosa) on Mount Tamalpais, Mill Valley, California

I might also say turning on our hearts. Since everything is connected, it makes perfect sense that our heart’s energy field would interact with the universe’s many interwoven fields. For the past ten years the Global Coherence Institute, part of the Institute for Heart Math, has been studying just this. A recent study “showed that human heart rhythms of participants synchronized with other participants, even in some cases…hundreds of miles apart. This indicated that the participants were all synchronized to an external signal in Earth’s magnetic field environment.”

This is utterly fascinating, and Heart Math’s research, devoted to the science behind our most radiant organ, is full of such gems. But we don’t need studies to know we are in the presence of a big heart, or a tender heart, or a joyful spirit. Or that the heart leaps with joy at the sight a velvety sky full of stars, or a loved one’s face. Brian calls radiance a mode of perception as well as a power. The heart gifts us with the intuition to read other hearts, to read the earth itself. Our response is a reciprocation. When we see with compassion, or hope, or joy, when we recognize and react to beauty, we don’t spend those capacities, we enlarge them.

Tall purple fleabane (Erigeron peregrinus) Waterton Lakes National Park, Alberta, Canada

We’ve been operating under distorted perceptions — that the earth is merely a resource, that some humans are less worthy than others, that economics is more important than love. All of these come from the basic distortion that everything is separate. When we allow the radiance of the universe to speak through our hearts, we can both perceive and radiate our deep interconnection with every manifestation of the unfolding cosmos.

Of the heart’s qualities, scriptures the world over tell us, the greatest is love. We have thousands upon thousands of poems, songs, paintings, stories of love. I think most of us would say it is the most important element in our own lives. We are passionate about, even obsessed with love. And yet the culture we have created devalues it, just as it is capable of trashing so many other manifestations of radiance.

Autumn peach leaves, Genesis Farm, Blairstown, New Jersey

The recent outpouring of love-fueled outrage in response to the border crisis reassures us that love is powerful. But the decades of policy leading to this crisis in all the countries involved were, and continue to be, fueled by greed and domination. The disconnect between the depth of feeling in our hearts and the crushing power of corporations and governments makes love seem like a weak force.

And yet we feel — in our hearts — that it’s not. It’s there that we know, as Brian says, ‘that something glorious is streaming into us.’ Knowing that the radiance of the universe is beating through our hearts can give us the strength to move through the frantic constructs of our time toward the vivid future we yearn for. This is not a ‘love, sweet love’ invocation; it’s not limited to that dimension. The sun doesn’t set us an example of placid radiance. Hers is wildly fierce, life-giving, life-altering. It makes everything possible.

Sand lily (Mentzelia nuda) Smoky Valley Ranch, Oakley, Kansas

But the universe also tells us that sweet radiance is powerful. Plants turn the sun’s ferocious energy into sugars, nourishment to feed themselves and to sustain the millions of years of evolution that radiated out after the appearance of photosynthesis. Out of this sweetness, plants create luminous petals, delicious fruits, aromatic essences to nurture other beings, including us, whose brains and senses have slowly evolved to hold consciousness of the beauty of life, and lives.

Loving this incandescent bounty anchors us to the earth we rose from. We seek to create it, live it, share it, save it. We derive courage, strength, dedication. We respond with loving radiance. We are emboldened to take action. ‘We discover who we are in the midst of the deep voices of the universe.’

Wild geranium (Geranium erianthum) Wynn Nature Center, Homer, Alaska

I’d love to have you on the journey! If you add your email address, I’ll send you notices of new adventures.

Pacific coast iris (Iris douglasiana) on Ring Mountain, Tiburon, California by Betsey Crawford

Transcendence on
the headlands

Mountain top in the clouds in Golden, British Columbia by Betsey Crawford

Rights of Nature

Yellow butterfly at Kaplan's Pond, Croton-on-Hudson, New York by Betsey Crawford

A girl in the Garden of Eden

Hummingbird sage (Salvia spathacea) in Solstice Canyon in the Santa Monica Mountains, California by Betsey Crawford

The Work that Reconnects:
a weekend with Joanna Macy

Eostre and the Universe Story

Mar

2018

by Betsey | 6 Comments

Humans are story-making animals. We have a story for everything, and many, many stories for the same things, depending on where and with whom we found ourselves when we arrived in this life. Our tales explain where we came from, how we got here, why we’re here at all, how to behave now that we are here. As science expands our knowledge of how the universe, and our tiny piece of it, came into being, how our DNA links us, how we migrated out of Africa, we create new stories, layering evidence on metaphor, while still cherishing the old and familiar ones.

Easter connects me to many stories, especially those of my childhood tradition of Catholicism, where the ancient lore of fertility goddesses, ushering in light and renewed growth, became entwined with the story of Jesus of Nazareth, whose last days were embedded in the story of the Passover, which was in turn embedded in the story of how a tribe became a nation, one of thousands of stories about how tribes cohered, and how that made them special in the eyes of their gods.

Western hounds tongue (Cynoglossum grande) taken on King Mountain, Larkspur, California by Betsey Crawford

Western houndstongue (Cynoglossum grande) King Mountain, Larkspur, California. The individual flowers would barely cover your thumbnail.

The Easter stories of death and resurrection, and their ties to the seasonal changes from birth to fruition to death to rebirth, go back to our earliest records: those on the cuneiform tablets of ancient Sumer. Inanna, Queen of the World in the Sumerian pantheon, traveled to the underworld, was stripped of her clothing, tortured, and crucified, while the world above shriveled in response. Though she was rescued in three days, her ordeal was just the beginning of a journey to explore the mysteries of death and rebirth.

The embodiment of the planet Venus, Inanna became the Babylonian Ishtar, and in turn the Canaanite Astarte. Her spirit eventually metamorphosed into the Greek Aphrodite, the Roman Venus, perhaps the Germanic Eostre, who may or may not have presided over the celebration that bears her name. The lineages are not pure and direct; many stories and energies are merged and scattered among them, and traits are bestowed and then changed. Ishtar was also the goddess of war. By Aphrodite’s time that title belonged to Ares, and Hera had become the queen of the Greek pantheon.

Milk maids (Cardamon californica) taken on King Mountain, Larkspur, California by Betsey Crawford

Milk maids (Cardamon californica) King Mountain, Larkspur, California, another tiny, dainty flower

The hints we have of Eostre don’t suggest the mighty energies of Inanna. She is most likely representative of any number of fertility goddesses, bringing with them light and fecundity, heralding the spring avalanche of green growth, renewing the promise of survival. She may be related to Eos, the Greek goddess of the dawn. The etymology of the word Easter is traced through the Proto-Germanic word for dawn, ‘austron-,’ but is only used in German and English. Most other European languages derive their word for Easter from paschas, or passover.

I love all of this: the layers of meaning, the tellings and retellings of the same basic human tales, the bequeathing of characters from one civilization or culture to another. These interweavings speak of the depths of our connection to other human beings, even those living many thousands of years ago. To me, it doesn’t challenge the Christian beliefs in the teachings of a holy man named Jesus to know that his story was couched in literary structures inherited from venerated traditions. The idea that our great narratives are echoes of more ancient ones isn’t a limitation to me. It’s a sign of the universality of our fears, our longings, our loves.

California hedge nettle (Stachys bullata) taken in Golden Gate National Recreation Area, California by Betsey Crawford

California hedge nettle (Stachys bullata) Golden Gate National Recreation Area, California. The individual flowers are about an inch long.

Our stories provide us with energy and motivation. They place our feet on the ground of our culture. They entertain and explain and nourish. But our love of story also has a long history of darkness. There has been a lot of carnage over whose story is the ‘real’ one, and many stories to justify the mayhem: that one group is chosen and another not, that we can never have enough, that the earth is ours to use up, that my story justifies killing people with a different one. A narrative can burn a forest, enslave a people, destroy a planet. So often it’s only after protracted battles that we wearily sit down and listen to the shared longing under the destruction: I want to be safe. I want to be loved. I’m afraid of my vulnerability. I want the comfort of abundance. I’m afraid of death. I want my life to be meaningful. I want my children to be happy. I want the light to return after a stretch of darkness.

Chocolate lily (Fritillaria affinis) taken on King Mountain, Larkspur, California by Betsey Crawford

Chocolate lily (Fritillaria affinis) King Mountain, Larkspur, California

One of the reasons I am so drawn to Thomas Berry’s work is his call for a new story. His is a way to see the world around us, and including us, not as an accidental cascade of carbon atoms, but as a constantly evolving expression of enormous creative power. We are not the end result, beings perched on a planet put here for our disposal. We are one of many, many manifestations of this continual, billions-year-old generativity, beings emerged from the earth itself. Related by the very elements of our cells to all the other forms that have developed with us. Connected in the most profound way to the living landscapes we walk among.

Blue dicks (Dichelostemma capitatum) taken in Cascade Canyon, Fairfax, California by Betsey Crawford

Blue dicks (Dichelostemma capitatum) Cascade Canyon, Fairfax, California

Though Berry’s universe story is grounded in the advancing science of the history of the cosmos, he saw its connection to many indigenous creation stories, where beings — animal, plant, rock — rise from the soil of their sacred places. Not long ago, we were all indigenous to a place we held sacred, and when I was tiny I lived for a while in a place that rooted me to the earth. But later, hunting Easter eggs in suburban New York in the 1950’s, that deep connection was more elusive. I sensed it in my love of the wind, of the violets growing in the cracks of a rough patch of sidewalk, the smell of our neighbor’s lilacs. I felt it in the tunnel my father cut through a massive tangle of honeysuckle, allowing us a home among the branches and roots. I once sat in awe at a mysterious jack-in-the-pulpit that showed up in the tiny woodland separating our house from our neighbor. These wisps were among the many threads of love and longing that Berry’s message wove together for me, connecting me to a story that places my feet and my heart securely on the planet that created me.

Foothills shooting star (Dodecatheon hendersonii) taken in Golden Gate National Recreation Area, California by Betsey Crawford

Foothills shooting star (Dodecatheon hendersonii) Golden Gate National Recreation Area, California

I’d love to have you on the journey! If you add your email address, I’ll send you notices of new adventures.

A girl in the Garden of Eden

Transcendence on
the headlands

The call of wild beauty

Cows in Osceola, Missouri by Betsey Crawford

Walking in beauty

The solace of deep time

Feb

2017

by Betsey | 16 Comments

In his 1981 book, Basin and Range, John McPhee gave us a good analogy for the scale of deep time. Stretch out your arm sideways, and imagine that the 4.55 billion-year timeline of earth’s history runs from the tip of your nose to the tip of your middle fingernail. A quick swipe of a nail file would wipe out human history. So, a lot happened before we showed up. Vast seas came and went. Continents formed, coalesced, split apart, regrouped. Mountain ranges were pushed up and eroded away. More peaks were shoved up out of the remains. Volcanoes spewed untold amounts of lava and ash. Great ice sheets advanced and retreated for eons. Plates moving over the surface of the earth met and groaned as one was forced under the coming edge, or crushed against it. Running water slowly eroded everything it passed over, forming great rivers that cut deep-walled canyons over millions of years. Life startled into existence and began its long evolution.

It was wild. And I’m sorry I missed it, though the 300 million-year stretch of meteor bombardment would have been harrowing. The wonderful news is that we can still see into earthly deep time; all we have to do is look at rocks at any road cut, on any mountain or desert trail, along any coast. One of my favorite places for reading earth history is southern Utah, where you can literally drive through deep time. It’s not only an open book but it’s in vivid color. It’s almost in pages: layers of sandstone, limestone red with hematite, white limestone without, volcanic ash, volcanic tuff, tidal-flat mud, dinosaur footprints, ancient conifer and fish fossils.

The photos above and below were taken on the same drive, a couple of hours apart. Above is the lunar landscape left by the erosion of the Cretaceous era Mancos Formation. Some 95 million years ago mud quietly sifted out onto tidal flats, between the toes of dinosaurs, on the edge of an inland sea. The white rock in the picture below is Navajo Sandstone, laid down by wind in a vast desert of sand in the early Jurassic Era, which began 201 million years ago. It sits on top of the Kayenta Formation, whose layers were deposited in rivers, also in the early Jurassic. There was plenty of time for both. The early Jurassic lasted for 27 million years.

In the eleventh century, two widely separated but equally brilliant polymaths, Shen Quo in China and Ibn Sina in Persia, theorized about the geologic upheavals that might have formed the mountains surrounding them, and the seas that had apparently left behind the fossil-laden strata at their feet. They also conjectured about the vast length of time these processes must have taken. Shen Quo postulated that climate changed over time when he saw fossil bamboo in an area where bamboo no longer grew. But in Europe — where, despite many dissenters, the biblical account of creation held sway — it wasn’t until the end of the eighteenth century, with the writing of Scottish geologist James Hutton, that a more modern view of the formation of the earth began to take shape.

Hutton lived near the Siccar Unconformity. Looking at stratified rocks at a 45-degree angle lying over older strata, tilted to the vertical, he saw something we now take for granted: the inconceivably long history of an earth where layer upon layer of silt sifted to the bottom of whatever sea was current at that time. In the ebbing and flowing of these ancient waters, layers were added onto lower layers, weighing them down until they hardened into stone, sometimes separated by breaks called unconformities. Hutton guessed that geological forces, which we know as the meeting of tectonic plates moving on the surface of the earth, pushed these strata off their horizontal axis.

John McPhee is credited with the modern use of the expression ‘deep time,’ but I’d never heard it until the work of Thomas Berry entered my life. Both meant the same thing in scientific terms, though Berry was concerned with even deeper time — the 13.7 billion years since the universe came into existence. Berry’s thought was also infused with his spirituality and his deep appreciation of indigenous wisdom. The beauty of his philosophy is that he didn’t look at our eyelash-sized sliver of human history as an accident or addendum to the vast forces that had existed for so long before our arrival. Nor did he see us as a culmination of such forces. Rather, we are another manifestation of these great energies. Our unusual consciousness was not meant to set us apart from — and certainly not over — the rest of creation. We hold a way for the universe to see, feel, and ponder itself.

I wish I could say that this billions-of-years perspective means I’m not buffeted by day-to-day affairs, either personal or political. But I am, whether from private concerns about my loved ones, or public fears for people I will never meet, but nevertheless cherish. Too much suffering is at stake. The damage to the earth, with more to come, is heart crushing. I mourn my former confidence in the strength of our institutions. For the first time since childhood I’m worried about nuclear war.

And yet, under the wash of day-to-day anxiety, Berry’s vision of deep time offers me a sense of strength and an underlying peace. When I stand on layers of stone in Utah, or indeed anywhere on the planet, I’m grounded into those molecules and the forces of those unfathomable years by the simple fact that I am part of them, made of the same stuff, here for the same reasons. I bring to them the gift of being able to reflect their beauty and mystery. They bring the literal ground of my being.