Tikkun Daily Blog Archive (https://www.tikkun.org/tikkundaily/author/nancyvs/page/4/)
Today an email arrived that bowled me over. It’s from Shailja Patel. I love the synchronicity of its arrival. Balmurli Natrajan has been blogging about Hindu fascism from a secular perspective. Shailja Patel enlarges that point of view by adding a Goddess perspective.
As I told you in my first post in this “Sister Talk” series, my sister Amy Vedder — with her husband Bill Weber — first realized the importance of the human connection in conservation efforts while working in Rwanda in the 1970s. Since then they’ve always tried to create win-win situations for the animals and the people affected by their projects. After many years this strategy resulted in a conservation program called “Living Landscapes.” The projects under the umbrella of this program have all involved large-scale conservation efforts that extend beyond the borders of parks and reserves. Their breadth has been necessary in order to meet the needs of both the wildlife species as well as the people in nearby areas.
I recently talked with Amy Vedder, one of our nation’s foremost experts on wildlife and wilderness conservation. She’s the vice president of the Wilderness Society, and made her name in environmental circles by starting — with her husband Bill Weber — perhaps the first ecotourism project in the world: the Mountain Gorilla Project. She and Bill recently published In the Kingdom of Gorillas, describing their groundbreaking work in Rwanda with this Fragile Species in a Dangerous Land, as the subtitle spells it out. Despite her prominence, I was able to get her alone for an hour, talking about things that are important to me. You see, she’s my sister.
I don’t normally read Thomas Friedman’s op. ed. pieces. But this one — “Connecting Nature’s Dots” — drew my attention, probably because of the word “Nature” in the headline. Practicing Wicca attunes me to nature, since to me it’s sacred.
I perform weddings as a lay minister at First Unitarian Society in Madison. Frank Lloyd Wright built our original church, so many non-members want to get married there — too many for our professional ministers to handle. As a result, I often have the opportunity to perform interfaith weddings where I put my Unitarian Universalist (UU) principles to work. UU’s believe in the “inherent worth and dignity of all people,” “acceptance of one another,” and “a free and responsible search for truth and meaning.” Instead of a creed or dogma, what holds us together is a set of seven principles, three of which I just listed for you.
Some of you might have been surprised to learn that I wrote about tree divinations in the latest Matrifocus. Actually I’ve been writing an entire book — The World is Your Oracle — in which I compile and create oracular techniques, a volume I trust will prove useful to practitioners of many faiths. Why? Because I believe that divination allows us to get in touch with our own inner wisdom. And because we have reached a point in our history where change is occurring so rapidly that we need to rely on our own know-how and skills, not just those of the “experts.”
Before I started blogging for Tikkun Daily, my web publishing consisted of my own website, www.mamasminstrel.net, and articles in Matrifocus, the web magazine by and for Goddess women published four times a year. What I love about Tikkun Daily — the lively interaction that’s beginning to occur — is something I found in embryo in Matrifocus. Matrifocus always has a wide variety of articles that inform me, entice me, lead me to think a little differently, and most importantly, feed my soul. Often it includes essays by some of he most interesting thinkers in feminist spirituality: Patricia Monaghan, Vicki Noble, Susun Weed, Max Dashu, Johanna Stuckey, and even occasionally Starhawk. It always includes poetry and beautiful art, as well reader-submitted reviews of Goddess books, DVDs, theater, and films.
This quarter the articles range from my description of “Tree Divinations” to two articles on permaculture by Mary Swander and Madelon Wise plus a lovely introduction to fairies and devas by Susun Weed.
Before the Hadron Collider went online a few months ago, some scientists expressed concern that it might cause the implosion of the entire solar system, destroying Earth — the only planet we know that harbors life. Scientists at a recent conference on Monterey Bay in California debated whether there should be limits on robotics and computer systems before humans lose control of them. And in the last few years, several biology professors have objected to the release of exotic species as biocontrols for native pests, noting how a number have proliferated and are now killing the plants they were meant to protect. You could make a case that all of these problems reflect a “fatal flaw” in humanity’s ability to anticipate the future consequences of its actions. That’s exactly what Van Rensselaer Potter, a retired University of Wisconsin biochemist, suggested in an article he wrote in the early 1990s.
Ritual is not a word that we Unitarian Universalists tend to use. We think of it as formal, rigid, hollow of any meaning, coming out of traditions that have prescribed rules and customs that we no longer perceive as valid. Ritual, as I said, is not a word that we UUs tend to use. Unless we’re pagan UUs. Then the word has very different connotations and meanings.
As I said yesterday, Wicca (my religion) may take an integrated view of death as a part of life, but I was raised here in the old U.S. of A. And that means that death can be just as hard for me to face as the next American. If we look at contemporary American culture, it’s clear that we’re a death-denying society. Death is one of our final taboos. For secularists in the US, death no longer has metaphysical implications. It is the end of life and as such has a physical finality that even in the near past would have been hard to imagine.