Archetype of the Spirit

Excerpts

ARCHETYPE OF THE SPIRIT
Visioning Human Wholeness

ARCHETYPE appendix includes five poems to Earth, Sky, Sun, Moon and Tree, components of the Archetype.  Here is Earth.

EARTH
To kneel upon the soft soil,
to work loam until it receives the seed;
we can feel the goodness.
We can smell it in the moist ground.
We can know the goodness
as the seed splits, sends up its yellow blade,
turns in the light for green transformations,
restores goodness to the nourishing root.

Earth is the mother of life.
She responds to the presence of light,
the collaboration of human hands.
Her powers are great
in the ceaseless cycles of moisture and soil,
of fires at the center of shifting continents,
of her seasons of creation and regeneration.
She replenishes, she sustains, she nurtures.

A living cycle of the seasons keeps time
as surely as heart beat follows upon heart beat.
Summer grows green, replenishes the generations
    of flora and fauna abundant.
Autumn gives harvest of plenty
    as seed sinks into the receiving soil.
Winter brings in a fallow time
    forcing closure to one cycle, preparing for the next.
Spring unleashes blossoms and bees,
    pushes trillions of green leaves into the light.

But we have found fossils of fern in Greenland,
where glaciers of ice now reign,
And remains of glaciers in New England
where green trees and sweet berries now grow.
Volcanoes have prevented summers
and carbon emissions have prevented winters.
Deserts expand where jungles once grew
and rolling fields of wheat where dust once blew.

Civilization has grown upon the earth
transforming landscapes for human habitation.
Rivers are diverted to water fields,
mountains are carried to fill valleys.
The air is brown over cities.
Frogs are born deformed in our lakes.
The blood in our bodies turns toxic.
Can we imagine all compensations
as mother earth responds to our deprivations?

Caverns of earth open, giving birth to rivers.
Pores of earth open to sponsor seeds of life.
From steaming pools prokaryote and eukaryote cells emerged.
The sea brought forth kelp, crawlers and swimmers.
Ferns, flowers, amphibians, reptiles diverged upon her continents.
Birds took wing from her nests, and warm blooded mammals.
Primates, then humans came to live, one with another.
Every living being, for better or worse, interacts in relationship
with all other living beings in communal interdependence.

Now earth can play games and wage wars
    of slaughter and extinction.
Now earth can speak of meanings
    and the purpose of life.
Now earth can chronicle its own emergence
    beaming messages to kindred planets.
Now earth can sing celebrations of itself
    and pulse with electric grids.
Earth has become the artifact of life
    or it may return to night for a new dawn of consciousness.
Mother earth which nurtures all
    is the womb and doom of every living offspring.
Every child is her child;
    every elder is received into her cycles of everlasting care.

Earth Mother

Earth Mother,
"Venus" of Willendorf

 

Archetype of the Spirit

Archetype of the Spirit