How generous Nature is!

This week we celebrate beginning of summer (Wednesday). Let us remember how generous the universe is. For example, the sun. The entire energy of the earth runs on one billionth (!) of the energy the sun emits every day.

Sufi mystic Hafiz in the fourteenth century caught the deep meaning of this when he wrote:

Even after all this time

The sun never says to the earth,

          ‘You owe me.’

Look what happens

With a love like that,

It lights up the whole sky.

Currently, climate change, so much a result of human narcissim and self-absorption, appears rendering the sun into an enemy.

Portrait of Khwāje Shams-od-Dīn Moḥammad Ḥāfeẓ-e Shirazi (1325-1390), by Abolhassan Sadighi. Wikimedia Commons.

But heat emergencies should wake us up to our own complicity as a species in our own demise amidst ever worsening draughts, floods, hurricanes, tornadoes.

Latvian traditional dance in Riga, June 23, 2016. Video by chapo773. YouTube

And get us moving to, as Thomas Berry said, “reinvent the human.” Which means reinventing the way we do work and energy, education and religion, politics, media and economics on this earth. And ready us for the “inner jihad” that can move us

beyond wars against one another and provide the group response to the common calamity we face from climate change.

The bottom line is found in Hafiz’ poem. The sun is generous. Are we generous back? Are we generous forward–to future generations of children of all peoples and all the species inhabiting our amazing earth?

Hafiz reminds us that we all have a spiritual warrior inside of us and generosity is a sign of authentic warriorhood.

The warrior

Wisely sits in a circle

With other men and women

Gathering the strength to unmask oneself.

Then sits, giving,

Like a great illumined planet on the Earth.*

Suscol Intertribal Council, 2015 Pow-wow. Photo by Sarah Stierch. Wikimedia Commons.

We must recover the warrior within if we are to have the gumption to respond to the Earth crisis and climate crisis of our time.

Inner strength is required.

Circle consciousness is required.

Moral outrage is required.

A sense of community is required. (To hell with the exaggerated individualism of capitalism, consumerism and modern consciousness—“I think, therefore I am.”)

Wisdom is required. (To hell with so-called education and academia that teaches knowledge and ignores wisdom!)

The divine feminine (Earth and Wisdom are both goddesses) is required.

The intuitive brain is required (where Einstein says values are found).

A renewed healthy masculine, the sacred masculine, is required.

Humans imitating the generosity of nature and the cosmos is required.

Vist Matthew Fox’s Website Here

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*Daniel Ladinsky, The Gift: Poems by Hafiz the Great Sufi Master, Renderings by Daniel Ladinsky (NY: Arkana, 1999), pp. 34, 135.

Adapted from Matthew Fox, One River, Many Wells: Wisdom Springing from Global Faiths, pp. 416f.

And Fox, The Hidden Spirituality of Men: Ten Metaphors to Awaken the Sacred Masculine.

Banner image: Sun, Sky, and Clouds, photo by Bodomi. Wikimedia Commons.