Lineage of Living rEvolution
My efforts with Living rEvolution are my attempt to grapple with the moment we are in of impending biospheric collapse and share a story that helps to weave the threads of our broken relationship with the community of life back together in our consciousness and in our actions. I write it publicly with the hope that it is of service to others. Beyond the messages in this book, Living rEvolution has come to be my life’s work, my soul gift – reintegrating the fragmented relationship of the human species to be in more respectful and regenerative relationship with the wider living community.
I believe that one of my purposes for being alive is to share the message in this book. Wow! What a sacred purpose. I take it very seriously. My purpose on Earth is living rEvolution. What an honor to be able to share my passion and purpose with you and invite you to work together.
It feels important to start with sharing some of the lineage of how I arrived at this work, this service, this purpose, and mention at least some of the many voices contributing along the way. I know many authors put acknowledgments at the beginning, or likely the end of a book, but there is no way I can segregate the contributions of so many from the main body of this book. Indeed, as you read, you will encounter influences from many, many people and communities. While my role in this book is as the principal storyteller, and weaver of threads, it is not my work alone – so many are involved as life lives through me.
The lineage of this book is the whole river of my life that has led me to the moment of being able to type these words and have them appear on the page as you now see them before you. I wish to share this lineage with you, so that you may have some sense of the constellation out of which this message arose.
To my knowledge, it began something like this. 14.7 billion years ago there was a great flaring forth of the universe, a great billowing out of matter and energy at a rate so infinitely precise that the universe didn’t blow out into nothingness, nor collapse in on itself in a giant black whole. Trying to wrap my mind around the elegance of that takes my breath away.
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A long time and long distances later, the death of a star/supernova gave birth to the matter that formed into my home planet – in the language I was taught – Earth. My body is made of stardust. Your body is made of stardust. Every single atom in my body and in yours was forged in the stars. In that way, we all have stars in our lineage, and there are stars in the lineage of this book.
I was born on planet Earth, in the time keeping system in which I was educated, on September 4, 1983 to the parents John Moran and Satyena Ananda. My body tears up with gratitude to my parents whose lives and choices made my particular life possible. All of the lineages – the unbroken chains of ancestors that survived before them over a human journey of 200,000 thousand years, so that I might breathe my first breath and walk upon this good, green Earth. The immensity of the gift seems more than my finite body can hold, so I must share this infinite joy. Rejoice. If you are reading this now, you also are alive and partaking in this great gift that is life.
I was born into an interracial marriage – my father of European ancestry and my mother of mixed ancestry including African and European descent who grew up under “one drop.” For those unfamiliar with the concept of one drop, for a period of United States’ history, a person with even one drop of African ancestor blood was considered black. This is what I mean when I say my mother grew up under one drop. Even though there was a lot of mixing in her family – including with many people of European ancestry – and my mom’s skin is quite light, she was considered black and she went to a school where all of the students were black. This is notable for me, because even paler than my mother, I read as white to most people, and one drop has not been my experience. Having very light skin myself, my experience with skin privilege is vastly different than that of my darker skin sisters.
Being mixed has been a lot of my experience. Mixed in terms of race. Mixed in terms of wealth - it seemed to often be a struggle for my parents to make ends meet financially, but I never once lacked for love. I typically only had new clothes for school due to the generosity of my godmothers, yet I grew up with infinite abundance of access to the living world, spending many days in my tree house or exploring the beaver ponds of the rural mountainous region of western Massachusetts.
Identifying as a cis-gendered woman for much of my life, my gender identity has also been a little more complex than black or white, male or female. When my mother was pregnant with me, she, my father and my sisters were certain that I was going to be a boy. I believe it is because I kicked a lot, which I think is rather ridiculous to draw the conclusion of male sex from that. At any rate, they had picked out the name Raphael for me, and when I was born with female genitalia, they didn’t know what to do. In fact, I didn’t have a name for the first month after I was born. My father, a life-long spiritual seeker was listening to a Sanskrit chant and heard Aravinda – and said “that’s it.” And so after a month, I had a first name. I chuckle a little because it turns out Aravinda is a male name in India. I got my male name after all.
So, this plurality in my identity strengthened me, shaped me, as I was growing up.
When I was three, my family moved from inner city Roxbury, MA (I remember nothing from the first three years of my life) to Savoy – a town in rural Western, MA. My parents had a vision of founding a healing center and intentional community. It is called Starseed Healing Sanctuary, and over 30 years later the land, sanctuary and my mother remain faithfully in service to personal and planetary transformation. Growing up in an interfaith, intentional community environment, I was introduced to many perspectives, approaches and personalities. I think it shaped an appreciation for diversity in me, as well as an appreciation for weeding out what feels like phony spirituality and what feels authentic to me.
Growing up, I spent lots of time outdoors, developing a healthy love for the living world. I also spent many an hour curled up with a book, a voracious reader with an insatiable appetite for learning. I excelled in school, choosing to go away to boarding school as a sophomore in high school looking for more stimulation and challenge. I found it at Miss Porter’s School, throwing myself fully not only into my academic studies, but also with all manner of extra-curricular activities – cross-country running so I could continue my access to the wider living world, pottery to get my hands in the good cool earth of clay, layout editor for the school newspaper fed my interest in the world, and so on.
It wasn’t until I was a freshman at Yale – having just arrived days before the World Trade Center and Pentagon attacks of September 11th, 2001 happened – that I was launched into my passion for activism. I became an anti-war activist, making many a trip down to D.C. for protest, as well as protesting more locally in my college town of New Haven. At Yale I pursued an undergraduate degree in environmental studies and enrolled in the five-year program with the Yale graduate School of Forestry and Environmental Studies, completing both my B.A. and M.E.M (Masters of Environmental Management) in five years. I chuckle at the name of the masters degree – environmental management – as if humans are needed to “manage” the environment. What I most believe we need to manage is our own behavior, and that was some of the focus of my graduate work: the social ecology of conservation and development – how we can change human relationships with the living world so as to be more sustainable. I appreciate the interdisciplinary nature of both my undergraduate and graduate studies, receiving a strong foundation in both the hard sciences and the humanities, and as you read on, you will likely see how this interdisciplinary, or intersectional approach has influenced my work with Living rEvolution.
I also studied international environmental governance during my later years at Yale, interning for a year a the United Nations as a part of the Dominica mission, and if I had gotten a job immediately upon graduating in my field of study, it likely would have been in South or Central America. As fate would have it, my sweetheart, and now partner of 16 years lived in Boston and that was just too far from South America. Upon graduation, I was also thoroughly exhausted. I should have taken a year off before starting college, but I didn’t. And then combining the undergraduate and graduate degrees had its own intensity. When I graduated with my master’s degree, I felt so intellectually spent that I didn’t pick up a book for about a year – unusual for me, who as a child would get in trouble for reading when I was supposed to be doing chores or sleeping (I can remember many a night with a flashlight under the covers, reading well into the wee hours of dawn).
I didn’t pick up a book for about a year. My partner owned a small pipe organ restoration business, so I worked for him a year, mostly working in the office, and sometimes helping with hands on restoration work – mainly cleaning components or painting. After a year of that, my mind felt rested and once again hungry to learn about what I was most passionate about and so I started reading again. I was reading a bunch of Frances Moore Lappe’s books on topics such as Living Democracy when I decided I was ready to find a job in my chosen field. A good family friend Joshua Mailman had co-founded an organization of socially and environmentally-minded business owners – the Social Venture Network – and so he invited me to attend the annual spring conference in hopes of finding a job. I got one good job lead (that didn’t end up working out), but mostly at the conference I discovered that I didn’t want a job, I wanted to do the work I wanted to do in the world. After hearing Van Jones speak and meeting Laury Hammel and Judy Wicks – cofounders of BALLE – the Business Alliance for Local Living Economies, and in conjunction with my reading about Living Democracy, it all just clicked for me: in order to building living economies, to make progress in shifting dominant economic systems to be life-affirming and sustaining, it was necessary for there to be major shifts in the governance process – to actually have a true democracy, a living democracy. Suddenly this vision of a movement of movements came into focus for me and I was off – on my path of researching and writing about a Living rEvolution.
I’ve spent the better part of the last 12 years, researching, writing, and increasingly living the rEvolution. It has been a long journey, and also a privileged journey. For me to have the time, space and support to follow my passion, rather than being locked into a job for income is a privilege beyond words. I feel so grateful to my life partner Joseph for being such a huge support in so many ways for me during this time. It has been a joy and an honor to share pathways for 16 years. In our marriage vows we pledged to support each other in our work for the healing of the world. The support I have received from him has been immense. Thank you deeply Joseph for supporting me in my path in so many ways.
Another large influence for me in my path with Living rEvolution has been encountering the work of Joanna Macy and the Work That Reconnects. In the spring of 2008, I was speaking with a friend – Emily Hardt – about my work with Living rEvolution, and little did I know how much this would change the trajectory of my life, but she asked me if I was familiar with Joanna Macy’s writing and the Work That Reconnects. Joanna was to be visiting my home state of Massachusetts that fall to offer a workshop, and so I checked out the workshop description and was immediately intrigued. Not only did I register for the full 7 days, but I also registered my mother and my partner Joseph for the shorter weekend portion. I also dove into reading Joanna’s books. Upon experiencing the interactive work for the first time in person that fall, I immediately fell in love with it. It spoke so deeply to me, reconnecting me, re-weaving me back into intimacy with the living earth and with fellow workshop participants.
Arising in the late 1970s out of anti-nuclear activism, the Work That Reconnects was originally called Despair and Empowerment Work. That name offers a good description as the Work invites people to be present with their deepest feelings of despair, grief, fear, outrage, sorrow, you name it, about what is happening to the living body of Earth. This deep emotional work, referred to in the Work That Reconnects as “honoring our pain for the world” is in this body of work explored together, in community. Time and again, hundreds of thousands of people around the world have found that being in mourning, rage, and despair together, simply being present with their emotions can be healing and freeing. Rather than getting stuck in these emotions, attention and presence allows the possibility of their energy being composted, opening up fresh energy and empowerment for the work ahead of mending our broken relationships with the web of life.
I feel deeply grateful to Joanna Macy and all of the people who have contributed to developing and carrying on this body of work. It has become a spiritual home for me – the opportunity to come together; to be real with one another; to find common cause in our grief for what is happening to this world, and our love for it; to renew ourselves for the work of healing of the world. The Work has been indeed reconnecting for me – reconnecting me with the intelligence of life itself, with love for life, and with companionship from other humans. I felt similarly to how I have heard John Seed – another person influential in the development of this work – has felt – that if the only way he could continue experiencing it on a regular basis was to facilitate it, then he would facilitate it.
After a few years of getting to know this open source body of work, I began to facilitate it myself. I have served with my partner Joseph on the Interhelp Council, the governing body of the local regional Work That Reconnects network for the past seven years. I have also had the incredible honor to be on the initiating and co-facilitating team of an immersion program in the Work That Reconnects for young people age 18-30 called the Earth Leadership Cohort. As much as first experiencing the Work That Reconnects changed my life view and path, a similar credit is due to the Earth Leadership Cohorts. These young people – some in my own age range at the time – were my teachers, setting me off on a path of deep inquiry as to how that body of Work had not yet deeply incorporated an oppression analysis or approach. My path over the past three years have delved into that – how we are together is just as important as any what of why we have assembled. In fact, in more of my work, the how has become the what: how do we build life-sustaining culture together as the way we do things together.
The very first Earth Leadership Cohort (ELC) initiated me into an inquiry into how power, privilege, oppression and trauma were manifesting on a personal level in my life; interpersonally whenever I was with other humans; and on an institutional, systemic and structural level. I am so grateful for all of my companions on this learning journey including but not limited to all of the ELC participants; ELC co-facilitators Markie Babbott, Kirstin Edelglass, and my beloved Joseph; Interhelp Council members – most especially Carol Harley and Paula Hendrick; and facilitators and friends of the Work That Reconnects who have talked by Zoom video conferencing many Thursday mornings for the better part of the past two years.
I am deeply grateful for all of the support and meaningful connections that have come to me through people I have met through the Work That Reconnects. I am so deeply grateful for this community of people committed to life on Earth! This community has been so deeply nourishing to me and I will be forever grateful.
In addition to the Work That Reconnects, a few other trainings and workshops I have attended that were highly influential for me and that I would like to credit include:
- BALLE - The Business Alliance for Local Living Economies national conferences 2008 - 2012
- The Systems Thinking in Action Conferences in Boston and Seattle (years?)
- The Art of Hosting Conversations that Matter (year?)
- The Bioneers by the Bay conferences year – years?
- Nonviolent Communication (Boston area teachers Paul Merrill and Gail Carroll)
- Biodiversity for a Livable Planet conferences
- Sandra Kim’s Healing from Toxic Whiteness training
- White Awake and other anti-racist curriculums
- Gender Reconciliation International
- Daniel Foor’s Ancestral Lineage Healing
- Relational Culture three-part training series with Cedar Landman and Lucien Demaris
- Kingian Nonviolent Conflict Reconciliation Training
And I absolutely must give a shout out of deep gratitude to the Healing Justice Podcast. Launched in November 2017, this podcast has been so healing and integrating for me. Among other things, making explicit that healing can and should be incorporated into how movement work gets done.
There are a great many authors whose books have been trusty companions on my Living rEvolution learning journey. I will not list all of them here, but a few I absolutely must credit include:
· World As Lover, World as Self by Joanna Macy
· Hi My Name is Chellis and I am in Recovery From Western Civilization by Chellis Glendinning
· Democracy’s Edge, Getting A Grip and other books by Francis Moore Lappe
· The Great Turning: From Earth Empire to Earth Community by David Korten
· The Dream of the Earth and The Great Work by Thomas Berry; and The Universe Story by Thomas Berry and Brian Swimme
· The Tao of Liberation: Exploring the Ecology of Transformation by Leonardo Boff and Mark Hathaway
· The Spell of the Sensuous and Becoming Animal: Towards an Earthly Cosmology by David Abram
· Blessed Unrest by Paul Hawken
· Thinking in Systems by Donella Meadows
· Walk Out Walk On by Margaret Wheatley and Deborah Frieze
· This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. The Climate by Naomi Klein
· Spiritual Ecology by Llewellyn Vaughn-Lee
· The Lost Language of Plants by Stephen Harrod Buhner
· Wild Law By Cormac Cullinan
· The Ascent of Humanity; Sacred Economics; and The More Beautiful World Our Hearts Know is Possible by Charles Eisenstein
· Original Instructions edited by Melissa K. Nelson
· Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants by Robin Wall Kimmerer
· The Chalice and the Blade by Riane Eisler
· An Indigenous People’s History of the United States by Roxanne Dunbar Ortiz
· Radical Dharma by angel kyodo williams, Rod Owens and Jasmine Syedullah
· Emergent Strategy by adrienne maree brown
· Your Resonant Self: Guided Meditations and Exercises to Engage Your Brain’s Capacity for Healing by Sarah Peyton
· My Grandmother’s Hands: Racialized Trauma and the Pathway to Mending Our Hearts and Bodies by Resmaa Menakem
I listed the books in relative order in which I read them, spanning over the course of 12 years, and it is interesting for me to note the overwhelming prevalence of white authors earlier in my journey, and the turn to indigenous and authors of color only much later in my learning journey. That speaks some to my journey… That began primarily in environmental and peace movements, and has only in more recent years deepened into social justice and intersectionality.
In addition to these authors being my teachers and companions on my learning journey, I wish to also thank Marilyn Daniels for the year of coaching I did with her and the following people for conversations that have deeply enriched my journey: Louise Dunlap (author of Undoing the Silence: Six Tools for Social Change Writing and a forthcoming book exploring her white ancestors’ role in the colonization of California), Sarah Pirtle (social justice educator, award-winning musician, and life-sustaining culture elder), Naava Smolash (author the book Turn This World Inside Out: The Emergence of Nurturance Culture) and Patricia St. Onge (editor of Embracing Cultural Competency: A Roadmap for Nonprofit Capacity Builders with whom I had the honor of being one of the coeditors of a special issue of the Deep Times journal on the impact of race and culture on the Work That Reconnects).
Considering that acknowledgments typically go at the end of a book, or the beginning, and I am wondering if this long list has been boring for the reader – or a treasure trove of resources to explore. Thank you for listening as I name some, but certainly not all of the actors in the lineage of this work.
And my dear blood family: my mother – Satyena Ananda and my grandmothers – Regina Anderson and Elizabeth Brennan – all three of whom have shown me great love and provided embodied examples of strong women. My sisters Ishael and Tiphareth who have always shown me great love. My father – John Moran - whose love and support during my childhood greatly shaped the person I am today. I wish to acknowledge all of my ancestors – known and mostly unknown – who have struggled and thrived through the ages that I might have life today. Thank you ancestors – both blood ancestors and otherwise whose lives have come before mine and made my life possible.
All of these people and sources are part of the lineage of this book. This book is a co-arising of many sources of intelligence that it is my honor to be weaving together through my mind, heart and hands. There is so much support that goes into the writing of a book. All of my ancestors who came before me and survived so that I may be alive at this time and write this book. All of my family, all of my relations, all of the food plants and dairy cows and chickens that have fed me good nourishing food, the water that has strengthened and renewed my body. So much wide web of community has supported this book into being. I offer thanks.
Some of my research process has been linear, but not always. I remember sitting at my dad’s kitchen table with Margaret Wheatley soon after I started my work on Living rEvolution in the form of a book and expressing how I wished the book to be written through me. Certainly not a passive act, but certainly not something I was doing on my own. This section aims to not only introduce you, the reader to how my personal journey has informed this book, but also the lineage – the many voices that have contributed to and shaped the voice you are now hearing through my hand.
Having received such abundant love, support and generosity over the course of my life, how could my response be anything other than wanting to give back as much as I can? Well, there are ways it could have been otherwise. I know people who have a ton and don’t give back. But I think it is because of their soul wound. I didn’t have that soul wound because of how I have been loved.
Because of the volume of support I have received from my life partner, Joseph Rotella, it feels fitting to continue an ode of appreciation to this person who has been so deeply supportive of this process of Living rEvolution being born through me. Not only has he loved me deeply, and been a partner in thought and action (we frequently co-facilitate together and many of our life-ways changes are taken together – growing food, backyard chickens, brewing kombucha for the gift economy, etc.), but he has also worked exceptionally hard at a full time job offering me both financial security and flexibility with my time such that I can give so much time and energy to this message of Living rEvolution being birthed through me. It has been a long labor process, one which I would not have been able to complete if I had had to work full time in the money economy just to take care of my physical needs, or if I had made the choice to start a family with my own (or someone else’s) biological offspring.
My decision thus far not to have children is multifaceted and includes prominently that the most humane way I can think of to reduce the human population to a sustainable carrying capacity is voluntarily. If I want others to make that decision, I need to be willing to make it myself. There are many other reasons for this decision thus far to not to have human offspring, but the one that is most relevant here is that I would take being a mother very seriously and would give it a lot of time and love. I didn’t want the majority of my life energy to go to the fostering of the life of one human because of how it would take away from my life energy to give to Living rEvolution. Maybe this is a false choice – I could have a baby and still do my work, but without a village and with the social isolation I experience in today’s society, a lot of the responsibility for child-rearing would fall on me. I have chosen instead to give my time to this work of Living rEvolution, that I might be a good ancestor for whoever follows me whether they are direct descendants of my particular ancestral line or not.
I thank my friend Belinda Griswold who currently lives on Whidbey Island – occupied Snohomish territory for telling me about the role an alder tree plays in that ecosystem. Once populated by giant Douglas Fir trees, the island’s forests during European colonization faced widespread deforestation. In the wake of that ecological massacre, alders sprung up. They only live for 30-40 years, and the ecological role they play is to prepare the soil for those who are to come after them. I see my work with Living rEvolution in the same light – how can my work with Living rEvolution prepare the soil for those who are to come after me – regardless of whether they are my own human offspring or not. The alder does not prepare the soil for their species’ own gain. In light of cascading ecological collapses, I choose to give myself to the quality of the great dance of the community of Life on Earth. Life will continue on Earth – the only question remaining is, and in great part due to human choices – what quality will the conditions be for the community of Life after me. How conducive to life will they be?
As a final acknowledgement (that very easily should have come first if I were keeping with de-anthropocentrism) I offer gratitude to life force itself that lives through me. I offer thanks to the good green Earth that sustains me daily with air, food, and all sustenance. I offer thanks to the local ecosystem, community of the living where I reside in the settler colonial town of Watertown, homelands lands of the Pequosette people. I offer apologies for the genocides your peoples have faced, for my responsibility in that as a settler in these lands and commit to striving to find ways to be a good neighbor in this living community. Thank you to the trees that live on the hill behind the Watertown Department of Public works, and all of the neighborhood streets that have been my walking routes over the years of this book coming into being. Thank you to the beings of the gardens both in front and in back of my house – you have had such guidance, wisdom and medicine for me. You also are present in these pages, I acknowledge you, and I thank you.
I could go on, the influences, inspirations and sources of support are so numerous. But because it could be an entire book, and there are other things I wish to share, I will conclude this exploration of lineage with a few questions that have been a compass in my work. A few years ago, I wrote a mantra to guide my writing for this book. It involved three questions:
1. Is this medicine?
2. Is this healing story?
3. Is this integrated intelligence?
On December 14, 2017 I added a fourth question:
4. Is this love?
Allow me to share a little bit more about these four questions that have been such a guiding compass in my process.
Medicine
At its heart, at my heart, my desire for the messages of this book is to be medicine for bringing humans back into healthier relationship with the community of life on this planet.
My primary inclination is that so much of the human and wider ecological devastation we are experiencing or witnessing now is because of flawed worldviews and deeply ingrained dissociation on many levels. The medicine for dissociation is integration. What is the medicine for flawed worldviews? Positive disintegration. Positive disintegration is a term coined by Kazimirez Dabrowski and speaks to the spiritual imperative that we must die before death - die to ways, identities, and worldviews that are a disservice to life. We must integrate the fragmented parts of our psyche and body back into unified health, which will not be the same as before the rupture, so it is not restoration to a prior state, only building to a new state of health and wellbeing.
Healing stories
Some of my favorite examples of healing stories are some of the stories Robin Wall Kimmerer shares in Braiding Sweetgrass. Rather than retell her stories (I highly recommend you read the book), throughout this book I have shared some of my own stories, experiences that have been healing for me.
What makes a story a healing story? For me, it is one that mends the fractured, fragmented pieces of our psyches and weaves our intelligence back in with the intelligence of the wider web of life.
Deena Metzger writes that “Stories heal us because we become whole through them… We restore those parts of ourselves that have been scattered, hidden, suppressed, denied, distorted, forbidden.” (quoted in Chellis p. 146)
Chellis Glendinning writes that “Drawing together the cognitive and emotional fragments dissociated by trauma into a coherent story establishes a pattern of integration into the psyche.” (p. 174-175) Stories can help mend fragmentation in our psyches.
Story has this power to work with the deep subconscious, to access archetypal levels where wholeness is possible, reintegrating the fragmented aspects of our consciousness.
Has a story ever felt healing for you? If yes, what are the aspects of it?
I remember my friend Sarah Pirtle telling me about a conference she had attended with people from all around the world exploring different cultural approaches to conflict resolution. She wrote a song to describe one of her experiences with story – when telling a story for the first time about harm one has experienced, and the storyteller is really listened to and heard, it is possible for the teller to be liberated in the way of no longer being alone in their pain. The listeners are then there with you, sharing in the burden. Some of this came out of the South African Truth and Reconciliation work, where it was very important for the truth telling to be heard and acknowledged. That in itself provides an element of healing. Not that healing ends there, but it is a critical beginning.
For an example of what has been a healing story for me, check out Medicine Messages from Spider and Mama Moose.
Integrated intelligence
The educational system and dominant culture I grew up in taught me not only over-reliance on my rational mind, but also distrust of my body and emotions. Worldviews obscured that it was even possible for the body to have intelligence. To the contrary, intelligence happens throughout the body, not just in the brain as if it is a computer/central control center. The desire with writing this book is part of my pathway of deconditioning that overreliance on the rational brain, and that I increasingly integrate the fractured and fragmented manifestations of intelligence in the form of Aravinda. This is happening on a number of levels: there is integration of intelligence within my body, and also between my body and the larger wholes – social and ecological – that it is a part of. I was so fascinated in a recent online course to discover that one of the body intelligences is social intelligence – an intelligence that is only possible in relationship with other social beings. As you will read later in this book, a main aim of Living rEvolution is to restore health in the connections between human consciousness and the intelligence of the wider living world. Head, heart, hands, hearth (earth, with an h added, lol).
Love
At its core, Living rEvolution is about being love. Love for this miracle of existence that is life on Earth. And acting on that. Being that bridge of love that can help bring back together the fragmented parts of our wounded humanity.
The next chapter turns to grounding in love, grounding in gratitude, grounding in awe for the basic miracle that is a living planet – Earth.