Unfolding Our Cosmic Intentions for Earth, People, and the Commons
From St. Petersburg, we look west to water and east toward land. In both directions, the heat is rising. To the east, opportunistic diseases decimate the great citrus orchards that once made Florida famous. To the west, the Gulf stores the energy generated by greenhouse gases, ready to unleash destructive storms and waves annually. How shall we respond to the ecological processes now challenging our carbon footprint? Humankind has lived on this peninsula for thousands of years, adapting to the rising sea over millennia by retreating inland. That solution is not so easily made in our generation. Yet in this age of individualism, the greatest promise for the future is with our collective creative imagination. Together, we can open our hearts, minds, and wills to possibilities that emerge from our collective conversations, possibilities that no one person could divine alone. We can imagine together. The Sixth Assembly of the Florida Interfaith Climate Actions Network provides space for our shared imagination.
By unfolding we point to the way the future emerges through our attention and engagement. As problem solvers, we have a habit of identifying why something is going wrong and then deciding how we can fix it. But the heat sink that land and sea have become is beyond the “fix-it” stage. We need our dreams, wisdom, and experience to dance together so that awe and wonder guide culture into new patterns of behavior.
Recognizing our cosmic relationship can guides us in a beneficial unfolding of the future. Throughout the modern era, humanity has tended to stand separate from and even isolated from the cosmos. We have often ignored or rejected our relatedness to everything on Earth and throughout the universe. We can no longer afford to pretend that our species can act with impunity towards the rest of creation and reality. Even our individual bodies are a hive for a multitude of organisms, most of which we’re just beginning to understand. Life is a system far more complex than what our waking attention acknowledges. We are of the cosmos and never independent from it.
Recognizing that the future can unfold according to how well we integrate ourselves into the cosmos, our common intention now matters exponentially. Numerous investigations suggest that when a fraction of a population focuses their attention on a common intention, great shifts in the culture occur. Moreover, studies on empathy and compassion point towards them as the greatest human power. From within us are the resources that fund imagining our common intention to dwell in a life-sustaining cosmos.
That means our cosmic intention must incorporate (a) the Earth and all that encompasses it as a living system balanced by a long history of adaptation, (b) people who function on Earth as a species that is self-aware of the impact of its actions on each other, and (c) the Commons as the shared aspects of Earth’s life system that sustains us all. Our modern world has turned on the loss of a sense of the Commons, to great chagrin. Even now social forces seek to privatize as much land and sea to extract minerals and fossil fuels without restriction. When the whole Earth is mined, what will distinguish it from a moon rock? We need a collective intention in which People understand that we will dwell on the Earth sustainably only as we enlarge our imagination for the Commons that supports sharing in the system of life.
Our Assembly will help us name our common intention for becoming more conscious of our collective presence and help each of us discern where we will focus our attention for the well-being of this living system we call Earth.
