Yes, the major rock opera now opening everywhere is the Sixth Extinction. Burning cities, snowdrifts in NOLA, and floods in the Blue Ridge…. and 30 months of record global heat. Its here. The Sixth Extinction is here. But we gotta love it just like we love springtime flowers and the return of the beautiful bobolinks and bluebirds and wood ducks…
When we are confused, we need to go outside. We find in a healthy ecosystem the best teacher. Right now we are challenged by our political situation to co-exist with people we don’t like. But we have to include in our values a way of living that is uncomfortable. Call it “extreme inclusion”. Well that’s what the Earth has with a happening forest. Hawks are co-existing with beavers, with sunflowers and fungi and roses and salamanders… impossibly different from each other, they are sharing that forest.
“Love Earth” and “Love Extinction”. These two sides of our nature seem incompatible. Loving Earth seems deep, soft, emotional. Mass extinction on the other hand, happens every hundred million years and kills lots of life. But the Sixth Extinction, triggered by man’s carelessness, might be the only way for the Earth to stay healthy right now, to keep love going.
Our job is to find room for the everyday love and also for the things that happen over millennia. We will operate with strength in our response to the perpetrators of this extinction – if we use the strongest emotion the Earth has given us, Love. I know it’s hard to imagine loving Trump, Musk, Vance…. But if we hate them back, they ignore us. If we find a way to love them back, then we are rewiring their hate, using the strong hand the Earth has dealt us. Our love must be inventive and relentless.
We will stop the emission of carbon and methane and the greenhouse gasses by loving the Earth and loving the life that the Earth gives us. Now is the time for our Earth-love to feel very new, to share our earth-love with neighbors that we never talk to. Love of Earth will spread everywhere. We will be hugging each other because we are truly sharing the same eco-system. We are all with the Earth, made of the Earth. We will be looking into each others’ eyes knowing that this is the Earth looking into the eyes of the Earth – the lover’s gaze. Revolutions are made of this kind of love.
We will make eco-systems of human life, contrasting with each other as much as agreeing – like the contrasting flyers and crawlers and hoppers and diggers in my forest of opposites, but all of us sharing the same fierce love of the Earth. And our love will find a way to stop the toxins. Did you notice? The Earth is bringing us another Spring, encouraging us to go forward in our life-loving intensity…
As the flowers and songbirds ecstatically flow around the warming sky, we will rise with our stormy love, a demanding fierce love for life. When we are all the Earth, completely Earth, the politicians will try to make people afraid of us, but it could be that this mass movement would just have too many of us full of too much love, love that demands life.
The Earth gave us this amazing thing called Love – for this Revolution!
Amen? Earthalujah!
Reverend Billy