Becoming accountable to our relationship with the earth: Racial Justice Network’s and Climate Justice 13th framework re-Grounding. 

Our greetings to all who are present. We call in all those who are not fully present and we all acknowledge the life within us and around us which supports us and which we too can be in support of.

Here is a moment for us to all be in acknowledgement of the life that connects us through our breath and beingness.

As much as we may often claim, in our works, a commitment to the Earth, how do we really demonstrate that commitment?

Have we really, truly and deeply recognised and felt within our hearts, the capacities that we have for being at one with this Earth who bears everything that we bring to it.

There is nothing that we have taken in that does not first arise in the Earth, in the spirit of selfless giving.

There is nowhere that we move that is not in some way supported by the complete altruism of Earth connection and generosity.

All that we lose from ourselves that is waste, in any form, at any level of human organisation, is absorbed and reprocessed by this planet.

So do we come even close to being in a place of humble acknowledgement of what Earth is to us and in relation to that, the fact of our belonging to the Earth makes it necessary also to be in full acknowledgement of each other, not only across the face of the Earth, but also over the deep time of this planet’s existence.

We owe it to ourselves. We, literally, owe it to ourselves.

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Even though some humans have been foolhardy enough to take upon themselves the authority and misguided perception that the Earth belongs to them and so have decided to exploit the Earth’s body, breath and substance, as if there is no tomorrow, literally as if there is no tomorrow… we really ought to know better.

Who has created life? I am not speaking here of artificial life forms, those that are based upon firstly studying and then trying to replicate life forms, I speak of the kind of creativity that life alone possesses and can reproduce. I am speaking of being able to generate the capacity to give, receive and be in the space of the breath that connects us, impartially, without agenda and with something that surpasses this human word ‘Love’.

The moment that we can answer that question with the honesty it deserves, is the moment that we cease to crave and demand possession of more than that which we can reasonably be accountable for.

It is a space and time of acknowledgement.

When we aspire towards that space it is as if the scales can fall off our eyes and we truly see all of life in its beautiful nakedness and at the same time fullness.

In that space and in that time there is neither unity nor binary, there just is and in that space and time we can afford to be completely generous with ourselves because we understand our completeness and the completeness of all beings, none greater or lesser than the other. None with any greater or lesser capacity to contribute than the other and so we cease to clamour for growth because we recognise that any growth that is beyond our sufficiency must be cancerous. Cancer comes with the gift of great responsibility and accountability and who is the one who has the capacity to rise to the place in which the cancer has no role in the continuity of life.

Colonialism or coloniality is such a cancer.

We have not yet arrived at a place in which we know how to look it in the eye and send it back to the place of brokenness from whence it came. For it is such a place and time that it arises. That place is anyplace and that time is everytime. The moment we seek to claim life over and beyond that which we can be fully accountable and responsible for, we are colonising. We seek to make these claims because we feel we are broken and lacking, we feel incomplete and so we steal from others in a variety of ways and inevitably we are in no position, because of this brokenness and feeling of lack of capacity, to remedy the destruction we cause by this extractive behaviour.

Unfortunately colonialism is addictive behaviour, manifesting in many forms, arising in many places. It bears hallmarks of both blindness and illusion, for other are emboldened to imitate this behaviour believing that they become adorned by possession.

Have we no idea how disfiguring it is of our humanity to carry the weight of hundreds of deaths and deformations on our bodies, in our places of habitation and work, in the food we eat, and water we use, simply because we have been unable to face the internal cracks and breakages: the wounds, ancestral wounds within ourselves?

Colonialism produces waste. We can never have enough. The waste tends to accumulate around those who have taken most. Imagine if in the places where there is most extravagance the Earth was to first implode, but no, in the scheming, greedy ways of the most broken, that waste is exported and so the environmental damage accumulates around those who cause the least damage.

Climate change? Climate Crisis? Climate emergency? What is this thing called climate that we study as if it is not the same Earth being impacted by the brokenness of humanity? Why do we not call it what it is: Climate Change is Human degradation: the devolution of the human outside of balance. Climate Crisis is the crisis of Human sensibility: the way in which it is beginning to realise that it is trapped in a kind of paralysis of madness. Climate Emergency is the emergency being faced by humans in their inability to control their own greed, namely the trauma which has emerged and is causing so many to be stuck in a vortex of lust and inertia.

Let us not look outside of ourselves, rather let us look at each other and within. Let us not seek to assign fault to the blameless earth: it practices everything we can aspire to. No, let us find within what we call nature and environment the ways in which we can heal our brokenness, beginning first with our breath and moving the breath into beingness with our complete selves.

Let us remember who we are and to do this we must Sankofa into the root of our beingness as belonging to the completeness of being Earth and the knowledge that that is enough, it good and is whole.

If we wish to practice generosity and humility then let us offer to lend our full support and solidarity to those who have been studying Life for long. We know who they are. This is the work that heals and these are the ones who do not raise their voices stridently, but who simply go about the work of Life and who are often punished for it by those who are broken and who are ashamed.

Let us close on a remembering. Remember your breath.

Acknowledge the Breath of the Earth in all its manifestations

Aspire to be whole in all the ways you can be.

Ase.

Written by Mama D