Earth Spirit Dreaming: Shamanic Ecotherapy Practices - Elizabeth E. Meacham 2020

Conclusion: Re-Visioning the World One Dream at a Time
Dream-Connecting Practices

Knowing our remorse, pain, anger and grief in the face of the devastation of our Earth home and family is an important step to waking up our senses. We cannot move into alignment with Earth and our true selves without feeling vast wellsprings of pain. We can feel so small in the face of time, in the face of history, in the face of the intractable forces of a civilization that perpetuates the seemingly bottomless degradation of life on this planet.

Yet from this pain, we begin to know that we love the Earth. We begin to feel our way back home; listening to the song that arises in our hearts as we reconnect with Earth, we find our way back into the folds of life. Often, the song begins as a lament, and that is always there in our times. Yet we can find in our hearts, and through love, stories of joy and wonder, community, care for life and amazing human ingenuity to create healing and change. As we wake up, we find there are others already awake and working toward a new way of living in Western culture seemingly everywhere we turn. From my own studies and teaching of sustainability, I now feel true awe at the numbers of people and communities that are creating new stories in their own lives and for their bioregions, all over the world. There is a vast web of new stories, and dreamers weaving their stories into a healing dream for the Earth.

As children, we touch the Earth with wonder and love. We draw lines in the dirt, our primal creativity feeling the skin of our planet with reverence. The magic of childhood is lost in what Gregory Bateson calls the “yoga of occidental education.”⁹⁴ Over time, we unconsciously “realize” that our primal love for life is childish and “unreasonable.” We grow out of this love and forget our belonging. Now is the time to grow back into our love for our planetary home.

In the face of hopelessness and helplessness, we fall back on love: an undervalued resource in our resource-obsessed culture. Love opens our hearts; love finds a way; love leads us back to where we began. Being entranced and filled with the magic of dirt, the light of the sun, the slippery feeling of water falling through our hands, the wind dancing in the trees, sings us into a next step. Remembering who we really are in relation to the rest of life, we forget how to take so much from the Earth. Through our love of the Earth we change so much more than we can imagine is possible.

Loving the Earth, we feel when we step across a line into a new way of being. Though we may not be able or choose to change in that moment, we begin to know where the lines are. We begin to grow into an ethic of care. In circles with others, speaking of nature with reverence, honoring the Earth, we come to grow Earth-honoring communities with new beliefs, new ways of being and knowing each other and new stories.