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Author Aaron William Perry reads the final chapter of “Y on Earth” (ch. 33: “Culture”) while out hiking in the sunshine of a wilderness area in the Rocky Mountains. This concluding chapter wraps the entire book into a hope-filled and joyful call to action: we have the power and the responsibility to create the culture we really want, a culture grounded in the humble soils of stewardship, regeneration, sustainability, care, health and the cultivation of well-being.
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Transcript
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Hi friends, welcome to today’s edition of the YonEarth Communities stewardship
and sustainability podcast series.
I’m coming at you today up in the woods, up in the mountains in one of my most favorite
spots, one that I come to often to unplug to connect with nature and to drop into the
incredible, expansive, awesome beauty that is the reality of this planet.
And I want to invite you to get out in the woods soon, give yourselves permission to
take a walk, go be among the trees and get away from the technology and the buildings
a little while if you are able.
Well today, unlike some of our other podcast episodes, we’re not interviewing a friend,
instead I thought it would be a fun change to share with you one of the chapters from
YonEarth.
And I thought I’d actually cut right to the very last chapter, the 33rd chapter, which
is called culture.
And as many of you know, the book covers so many interconnected topics, topics that are
related to our personal health and well-being, our levels of thriving in our own lives
and our families, our homes, our communities, and getting ourselves deeply aligned with
global strategies for regeneration, stewardship and sustainability.
Of course, love and care and joy and gratitude are essential to making all that happen and
get to have a lot of fun doing it.
Which you may not realize given what the camera is showing you and what the microphone is
picking up is that I’m actually standing on a bit of a ledge over here and it turned
out to be one of the better spots with a little bit of wind shelter for the microphone and
some sun shining overhead, beautiful, beautiful sunshine today.
So this is chapter 33 culture.
Here creating it, you and I, right here, right now, Mahatma Gandhi told us that a nation’s
culture resides in the hearts and in the soul of its people.
The Dalai Lama tells us that this generation has a responsibility to reshape the world.
Start the task even if it will not be fulfilled in your lifetime.
Even if it seems hopeless now, never give up.
Offer a positive vision with enthusiasm and joy and an optimistic outlook.
In Pope Francis in La Dato Si tells us that we are the guardians of creation.
So this is chapter 33 culture.
We have a choice, a choice between hope and despair, a choice between stewardship and
destruction, a choice between love and cynicism, a choice to heal.
As we heal, we will encounter and draw from an ever-deepening well of hope.
We will come to see more clearly the underlying wise of our lives.
To see through the veil, we will come to see clearly which of the various rungs of Maslow’s
hierarchy of needs is ruling our reality.
Are we being ruled by the forces of disembodied prophets and superficial image?
Where are we cultivating true identities grounded in love, humility and authenticity?
As we come to see ourselves and our individual motivations more clearly, we will also see
the broader fabric of our society with increasing depth and clarity.
We will come to understand a powerful truth.
We are our culture.
We are both products of it and are creating it.
Our identities, our motivations, our choices, are all converging in a great tapestry that
makes human culture on planet earth.
We will see that our culture is not some monolithic predestined autonomous thing out there known.
It is the ever-evolving fabric made up of all of our day by day choices.
It informs how we run as a society and why and we inform it.
To see through the veil of the consumer culture veneer that has emerged and taken hold over
the past century, we must open our eyes, open our hearts and open our minds.
Our culture is like software.
It shapes how we experience and interpret our world and how our world experiences and
is impacted by us.
If we are to fill our lives with love and humility, we must learn to see things as they really
are, not as we’ve been lulled to assume them to be.
We must reconnect.
Reconnect to the soil.
Reconnect to our bodies and our minds.
Reconnect to our communities.
Reconnect to our impacts on the living world around us and on all of our brothers and
sisters in our one great human family.
To reconnect we must connect the dots, dots that form a cohesive tapestry of truth and
meaning, but dots that have become fragmented and disintegrated in our modern techno-consumer
culture.
We have connected many dots throughout YonEarth and there are so many more to connect.
What dots will you seek out and connect in your life?
Our quest to reconnect, to cultivate and ethos of sacred stewardship and mindfulness is
essential to our health and well-being.
It is a matter of our liberty.
The sacred God-given freedom that defines and inspires our human quest.
Listening, thinking and speaking, telling story and celebrating the great story of our
species journey are essential to our freedom and to cultivating the world we really want
to be.
They are essential to our ability to get smarter and feel better as we cross the bridge
from our modern industrial adolescence into a mature and caring, eco-zoic era that
Thomas Barry and Brian Swim have envisioned and shared with us.
As Barry writes, our only security lies in an integral human relation with the life systems
of the planet.
Every human activity, every professional role, every religious tradition must now be judged
by the extent to which it inhabits, ignores or fosters this mutually enhancing human-earth
relationship.
We need an eco-zoic economics and eco-zoic medical practice and eco-zoic jurisprudence
and an eco-zoic education.
So to our religious and spiritual development lies in the transition from our present
senizoic, religious and spiritual life to life in an eco-zoic context.
We live in a time when we have the power and opportunity to choose a pathway of thoughtful
caring synthesis, a pathway in which we plumb the depths of our cultural history, harvest
gems of wisdom and understanding and bear those gifts with us into the future.
Not in atavistic naivete, but in determined and intentional awareness, choosing to create
our culture as Alistair Macintosh shares in soil and soul, I do not argue for going
back to the past, but I will be suggesting that the past should be carried forward to
inform the future.
In this way, fresh light can be shed on the story of modern times and wisdom harnessed
to knowledge.
Creating wisdom and coupling it to the burgeoning knowledge of the modern era is paramount
to creating the culture and future we really want.
For until now, our mainstream techno-consumer culture has been a wash and knowledge and
bereft of wisdom.
We need both.
Without both knowledge and wisdom, we are flying blind.
We cannot see the bigger picture.
We cannot see the broader context nor properly perceive our own situation.
Without the combination of wisdom and knowledge, we will miss the fact that we humans are at
a tremendous crossroads.
We’re at an inflection point, the quality, magnitude and scale of which we’ve never
before seen as a species.
We’re connected technologically like never before, able to communicate instantaneously
through one great digital internet that spans the globe.
As if that fantastic noosphere-positive just a century ago by Teohard Deshardin is now
showing up in our early space-age technologies.
We’re connected to and changing the very biological fabric of our home planet, the atmosphere
and the ocean for there is truly just one of each.
Our reflecting back to us in their rapidly changing chemistry, the fact that we are living
out of balance, out of cycle with mother nature, our mother earth.
But at this crossroads, we have the power to choose our course and direction.
We can choose to reconnect with the living soil, the humus.
We can choose to cultivate our humility and to share and tell story and celebration
and with humor.
We can rediscover that our very humanity is intimately linked with the living soil that
is our earth’s biological skin forming a great blanket of life across the land.
As we awaken to the epic story that unites us, the story of one humanity on one planet
earth, we will see our eukos, our place in a whole new way.
And we will understand that we are all living in one eukos.
One ecology, one economy, the place that is our only home.
We have the choice to cultivate our lives in the direction of sage poet Farmer Wendelberry
when he tells us it is possible as I have learned again and again to be in one’s place.
In such company wild or domestic and with such pleasure that one cannot think of another
place that one would prefer to be or of another place at all.
One does not miss or regret the past or fear or long for the future.
Being there is simply all and is enough.
Such times give one the chief standard and the chief reason for one’s work.
As our understanding of our place in the universe becomes clearer and illuminated, we will
come to understand that yes, we need the economic market of commerce, but the market needs
us too.
It is not an infallible God, quite the contrary.
The market is incapable of generating love without our stewardship guidance, without
our careful and thoughtful demand and our deliberate and balanced work.
The market is a rudderless ship, a drift, in a nasty chaos of short-sighted selfishness.
The market needs us to guide it, to shepherd it, to steward it well.
To compel its relentless signals of demand, innovation and supply into the flowing channels
of restoration, compassion, stewardship and gratitude, otherwise it will destroy us.
If we do not choose well at the crossroads upon which we now stand, our global economy
will undermine the fabric of life as we know it.
We will churn and chew and devour what is beautiful, what is sane, what is precious,
and what is sacred.
We must understand that this destruction is already underway right now.
This is not some conjuring, some hypothetical, some narrow, special interest conspiracy.
This is the reality of what is happening in our lifetime to our world.
To understand and care about this truth is not a special interest, it is especially in
all of our interests.
It is a unifying truth, the likes of which our species has never before encountered
on such an epic scale.
To become skillful, shepherding captains of this great vessel of economy, we must internalize
and embody the wisdom of Henry David Throw when he tells us, it is not enough to be busy.
So are the ants.
The question is, what are we busy about and why?
Our human proclivity to industriousness must now be guided and channeled into the sacred
flowing rivers of ingenuity, stewardship, and creativity if we are to get where we really
want to go.
We must ask ourselves, am I healing the earth?
Am I healing myself and cultivating the skills of stewardship?
Am I practicing humility and gratitude for this utterly miraculous life on earth?
If we are to secure and accomplish the mission of bringing our economy into harmony with
our ecology, we must harmonize our compassion and care with our work and demand.
As Paul Hawking describes it, we need to imagine a prosperous commercial culture that
is so intelligently designed and constructed that it mimics nature at every step, a symbiosis
of company and customer and ecology.
To enter into a realm of harmonized oikos, a realm of frugal superabundance, we will no
longer see the rules of the economic system as zero of some, with some winners and many
losers, nay, we will evolve our consciousness from which the very constructs of economic
laws are generated and arrive at the win-win-win design paradigms, parameters and mandates as the
new true laws of our oikos.
This is what we mean by getting smarter.
This is cultivating a new ethos.
We will cultivate service-oriented conspiracies while realizing that consumerism, how we now
know it is just a passing fad.
Our children and our grandchildren will know as true that the consumerism that marked
the past century is a mere fad, passing away into the annals of history.
We will have the clarity to choose between two distinct paths.
A choice articulated by Pope Francis.
The world tells us to seek success, power and money, he says, but God tells us to seek
humility, service and love.
Our choice is not easy, but it is necessary.
To choose the path of service and love requires grounded boldness.
A steadfast commitment to stewardship and a humble courage forged in the fires of
our souls to alter our economy.
An economy that if left to the status quo is rapidly destroying our home and our humanity.
Which path we choose is up to us.
Our guidance of economy is paramount.
But our culture is also about so much more than our economy.
In the essential triad of care, care of ourselves, care of each other and our living planet,
so much lies awaiting our attention outside the realm of buying and selling.
We must see and cherish our sacred connection to divine creation all of it, a sacred connection
that is our birthright.
We will then experience the magic of this super abundant earth creation as Derek Jensen
means magic.
He says the time after is a time of magic.
Not the magic of parlor tricks, not the magic of smoke and mirrors, distractions that point
one’s attention away from the real action, no, this magic is the real action.
This magic is the embodied intelligence of the world and its members.
This magic is the rough skin of sharks without which they would not swim so fast, so powerfully.
This magic is the long tongues of butterflies and the flowers that welcome them.
This magic is the brilliance of fruits and berries that groan to be eaten by those that
then distribute their seeds along with the nutrients necessary for new growth.
This magic is the work of fungi that join trees and mammals in bacteria to create a forest.
This magic is the billions of beings in a handful of soil.
This magic is the billions of beings that live inside you, that make it possible for
you to live.
This infinite miraculousness of our living earth and otherwise self-sustaining bio-regenerative
life force of creation needs our help.
She needs our healing efforts and our healing touch, and so many of us are energized and
grateful to be called to serve God’s creation in this critical time.
We have right in front of us the possibility of coming together in a great confluence
of love, creativity, and stewardship, and this process is already underway.
Annie Leonard observes, everywhere I go, she says, I meet people ready for change, people
who are fed up with the exhaustion that comes from devoting one’s life to the workwatch
spend treadmill.
People who know in their hearts that it’s wrong to treat the planet and whole groups
of people as disposable.
People who are challenging the bogus stories we’ve been fed for years and are writing their
own about hope and love and working together to build a better future for everyone.
In order to choose this path, we must become expert stewards of ourselves, of our own bodies,
minds, and spirits.
We must deliberately unplug from our technologies, connect organically with each other and with
the living world around us.
We must develop a discipline of delighting in the wonders of creation.
This is not peripheral, this is not optional.
For if we fail to cherish and celebrate the incredible beauty and sophistication and
patterned complexity that is the fabric of our living world, we will fail to understand
proper technique for stewardship.
We will have committed a grave sacrilege against our creator.
We will have a shoot and desecrated creator’s divine work.
That would be a display of bad manners at best, rude to say the least, deadly in this
case, deadly to our psychosomatic spiritual well-being.
Not delighting in God’s creation is the recipe for crushing and dispoiling our own souls.
And this is something we each have the freedom and power to avoid.
As we unplug routinely disengage the digital technology and the market’s constant hub
of commerce, we open a space for our hearts and minds to connect with the wilder reaches.
Where the songs of birds, the sights of swaying trees, the aromas of sun-warmed soils are
all around and occupy and fill our attention to an overflowing peace and abundance.
We will heal and reverse the great disintegration that has been underway as Thomas Barry observes
as we lose our experience of the songbirds, our experience of the butterflies, the flowers
in the fields, the trees and woodlands, the streams that pour over the land and the fish
that swim in their waters.
As we lose our experience of these things, our imagination suffers in proportion as do
our feelings and even our intelligence.
We can, if we will, reverse this trend.
This is the gift, the choice that our Creator has put before us.
If we cultivate connection with place, with living soil, with nourishing food, if we steward
instead of conquer, if we create balance in our lives, if we demand care and compassion,
if we envision a future that we really want and then pursue it through deep love and
the hard but essential work of healing, we will get there.
We will create the culture we really want.
This means deliberately practicing the simple core activities of day-to-day life that we
have explored together.
This means getting out to nearby organic farms on a regular basis.
This means cultivating our garden plots, whether in an inner city or rural place.
This means immersing in wilderness.
If we have opportunities to travel to other places, it means seeking out the eco-tourism,
agro-tourism and service-tourism experiences that await our discovery.
Seeking farmers and mothers, teachers and leaders.
Seeking the company of trees and comfort of forests.
And seeking soil and planting seeds literally and figuratively wherever we go.
Like eco-zoic, Johnny Apples seeds and Jenny soil makers, we need to become true heroes
of humility.
Heroes who understand the wisdom and import of Melissa Will, also known as the Empress
of Dirt when she exclaims, I am a gardener.
What’s your superpower?
This is about embodying the timeless wisdom of our ancestors and elders.
With my grandpa, Bear, whose garden became a training ground for me and many others.
An eco-hero in his own right who survived prison camp and demonstrated right there in his
humble backyard plot the value of the ongoing garden, the ongoing nourishment that makes
for a true legacy.
A life poured out and toward the next generations.
Stop a bear who demonstrated that his garden is essential, is victorious in meaning, love
and connection.
Our opportunity to create this eco-zoic culture together is predicated on our great awakening.
On the emergence of a hyper-intelligence that is rooted in the natural intelligence of
the living world.
Together we have the opportunity to create what Alistair Macintosh calls a meta-culture,
a connection at a level of the soul that goes deeper than superficial cultural differences,
a connection simply by virtue of our underlying humanity.
By getting smarter, feeling better, converging knowledge and wisdom, healing our planet.
As we open our hearts and minds to the knowledge and wisdom of the ages, we will become you
and I, the modern-day wisdom keepers.
We will continue planting the seeds in each other’s hearts, to make meals with friends
and family and love and celebration.
To spend more time outdoors and in our gardens than we do in front of mind-numbing screens.
To deliberately cultivate the stories of our lives, like great poets writing love sonnets
for the Creator, who understand our thread connection to the future.
We will wake up one day, our children, our grandchildren will wake up one day and will
say, as Alex Stefan has envisioned for the year 2115 in a speech titled, A Talk Given
at a Conservation Meeting a hundred years from now.
We live today on a healing planet.
Yes, much has been lost, but much was saved or restored or reinvented.
And what was saved and healed and made anew has become a powerful legacy.
Those gifts became the seed beds from which sprouted our new world.
Those seeds of hope were saved and planted and tended to by the people who made the decision
that they would live as if the future mattered, as if nature mattered, as if we mattered.
These were visionary people, responsible people, courageous people.
All around the world our best ancestors took up the challenge of leaving a different
bolder legacy, one not of error and loss, but of leadership, stewardship and innovation.
On every continent and in every sea, some of our most important wild places were made
safe.
Ecological restoration was begun.
These were saved in the face of planetary catastrophe the tide was turned.
If today in the 22nd century we live in an era of optimism and hope, it is because some
of our ancestors in the dawn of the 21st lived in a time of clarity and commitment.
When they understood the planetary crisis they faced, their answer was not cynicism or
surrender, but to seek out others and together meet the crisis with action.
When they rose in the morning they put their hands to not only the common tasks of providing
for their families and communities, but the exceptional work of honoring their kinship
with those who would live in generations to come, and laboring on our behalf to leave
a bright green world.
When they sat to eat together, they not only nourished their bodies, they nourished their
connection to earth itself and reminded themselves that humanity lives within this planet, not
apart from it.
When they too counseled together, they felt the hopes of their children’s children’s
children keeping them company.
They made ambitious plans.
When they rose to speak, they spoke not for themselves, but for human possibility and
the renewed bounty of life on earth, where these ancestors gathered, heroes gathered,
and when they departed, they had given us back our future.
This is the possibility, the call of our legacy together, you and I.
Let us envision and create a healing world, where our food nourishes our bodies and minds,
where we restore living soil, where we eliminate the cancerous chemicals from our water and
air and land, where people no longer become sick and diseased because we are poisoning
our homes.
Let us become the heroes we have been called to be.
Our clean organic fresh nutrient dense foods are the norm, and the several decades-long
fat of wanton consumerism is left in the dust.
By heroes pursuing not the mere appearance of joy and fulfillment, but its authentic experience.
Let us create the culture we really want, a culture of care.
In this culture of care, we will integrate home and work.
Our spiritual lives end our lives as economic actors.
We will cultivate integrity in our lives, in our communities, and in our society.
I will take a moment to pause and show you the image of a culture of carrots, a diagram,
little thought map.
Oh, I am having so much fun out here sharing this with you, the wind is blowing.
It is perfect temperature, just enough to feel invigorated, and I just want to take the
opportunity to remind you that this is an episode of the YonEarth Communities Stewardship
and Sustainability Podcast series.
My name is Aaron William Perry, and today I am reading to you from the 33rd chapter,
the final chapter of my book, YonEarth, and the chapter is called Culture.
I just want to mention as well that if you would like, you can go to YonEarth.org, that
is a letter Y-O-N-E-A-R-T-H.org, and you can get your own printed copy of the book,
or if you would like, you can use the code podcast to get a discount on the audiobook
or the e-book version of this, as well as our other digital products that are several.
So it is such a joy to be with you friends, and I hope you are enjoying this episode.
It is just a little bit more to go in the chapter that concludes the book, so let’s get
back to it.
So let us celebrate with humility.
Let us celebrate with humor.
Let us celebrate the living humus upon which we stand, and upon which our living humanity
depends.
We are alive in a watershed moment in the long story of our species, a tremendous inflection
point of human evolution.
We have been chosen by virtue of the simple fact that we are alive right now.
We are each chosen.
We live in a wonderful time of immense power, a power of knowledge, and energy unimaginable
a few generations ago.
And the accumulation of our choices are daily dances and core activities are determining
the direction of our lives.
We have the choice to create ourselves, our identities, our being songs.
We have the immense opportunity and responsibility of being the authors of our lives.
What story will we write?
How far beyond the veil will we venture?
How deeply will we look inside and come to know ourselves?
Heal ourselves, steward ourselves.
How clearly will we ask again and again what is motivating us?
What is our why?
Where on the rungs of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs are we sitting and being guided by
the complex mechanisms our minds and bodies and communities?
With eyes open we will ask ourselves again and again.
Why?
What cultural atmosphere will we create?
What ethos?
What essential character of our times?
We are smart.
We have the ability to change and grow.
We have powerful wills.
If we choose optimism, humor, joy and gratitude, we will have the capacity to realize a century
of regeneration and sustainability, of health and well-being.
It all begins right here, right now, with our place and our food, with simple core activities,
with daily disciplines of delight, with our connection to soil in our own homes and
neighborhoods.
In the end, this is a choice between cynicism and faith.
Faith that we can and will rise to our greatest challenge and will indeed create the future
that we really want.
We will create a culture of authentic experience, not mere appearance.
This is our future.
This is the culture we are creating together.
To get there, we must ask ourselves, what is our why?
YonEarth?
A couple concluding quotes here a few in fact.
So E.O. Wilson tells us, you are capable of more than you know.
Choose a goal that seems right for you and strive to be the best.
However hard the path, aim high, behave honorably, prepare to be alone at times and endure failure.
Persist the world needs all you can give.
Free Jof Capra tells us, we do not need to invent sustainable human communities.
We can learn from societies that have lived sustainably for centuries.
We can also model communities after nature’s ecosystems, which are sustainable communities
of plants, animals, and microorganisms.
Since the outstanding characteristic of the biosphere is its inherent ability to sustain
life, a sustainable human community must be designed in such a manner that its technologies
and social institutions honor, support, and cooperate with nature’s inherent ability
to sustain life.
And Shardan tells us, there is almost a sensual longing for communion with others who
have a large vision.
The immense fulfillment of the friendship between those engaged in furthering the evolution
of consciousness has a quality impossible to describe.
Now, that’s the concluding chapter.
I hope you’ll experience the whole book and I said that we just read Culture, which is
the 33rd and final chapter of the book, however, there is a little epilogue called Our
Story.
It’s just on one page and I want to share it with you.
This is the one we’re writing together and this is not a dress rehearsal.
I look forward to what you will make happen.
Thank you for tuning in today and just give you a quick view for those of you on the video
with me of this incredible place.
You can see here I’m kind of perched on a bit of a ledge.
I’ve got some amazing views over here.
Thank you for tuning in.
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