A version of this article was first published on Positive News here.

Is our underlying nature abundant or austere? Most politicians tell us the solution to our economic woes and other challenges is to cut public services while making people and nature work harder in the global economy. But if we look at how ecosystems function we find generalities that suggest abundance is the Earth’s natural state and the key to civilisation’s success is working with it, not cutting it off.

Life on Earth is tenacious and exuberant. Everything is powered by a seemingly endless gift from a vast, mysterious orb. The sun’s prerogative is to throw out photons with such consistent generosity that a process as slow as life can depend on it, for billions of years. As life has become more complex it has captured more of the energy sailing through space and drawn it down into the seething layer of life on our planet.

At the beginning, the biosphere (the global sum of all ecosystems) was simple, but it has grown steadily more complex as evolution has generated new forms of life. Eventually, single-celled creatures clumped together to make tubes. Sucking in energy at one end and excreting from the other is a fundamental that hasn’t changed as vertebrates emerged which, after 4 billion years, grew nipples, hair, big brains and invented fear, money, time and scarcity. 

Life creates the conditions that allow life to thrive. The biosphere has created soil, a chemically active atmosphere, fossil fuels and everything our civilisation depends upon. But human consciousness throws up a systemic anomaly in the progress of life on the planet. Unlike other organisms, which innately support the ongoing evolution of life, we have choice. We can cut down the Amazon to mine oil, dump coal in the Great Barrier Reef and extract all the fish from the sea, or we can choose to be compassionate, ecological and live in a way that supports life.

The problem is that the global economy itself is not conscious. In a very real sense it is insane – we trade the living land for dead money and sit clutching our coins waiting for the reaper. If we work in this economy unquestioningly are we insane too? If we choose another way, what options are available to us?

Transition Towns, New Earth Communities and other conscious communities worldwide are demonstrating new ways to live and organise ourselves. They advocate for us to move away from notions of fear and scarcity and the hoarding that come with them, and build new economies that are more abundant, equitable and ecological.

The New Economics Foundation details how such economies could work. For example, they just published a book cataloguing diverse research that shows how a shorter working week would help tackle urgent problems that beset our daily lives – from overwork, unemployment and low wellbeing, to needless high-carbon consumption and the lack of time to live sustainably. Less work for purely economic gains would allow us more time to care for our families and communities, grow more food ourselves and, slowing the economy, give Gaia a break.

In a less competitive economy where people are happier, we might also vote for a Universal Citizen’s Income that would redistribute to the poorest and stimulate creativity across society. Freed from the bondage of the endless growth economy, what else might we do?

Other indicators of a conscious shift towards abundance abound, not least with Lily Cole’s Impossible – a social network based on a culture of giving and receiving freely, and the renewable energy investment platform Abundance, which enables people to get a better return from their investments, moving them to co-owned energy assets.

The energy and food crises that threaten to topple our teetering, skyscraper civilisation are human constructs. Our way out is re-imagining how we live, not doing more of what we were doing to cause the problems. A much greater proportion of the population being involved in the production of the food and energy they consume addresses multiple challenges. We can create life-sustaining employment and disempower the corporate behemoths chewing up nature.

We evolved out of a world that was just ready for us. Our success depends on us enabling planetary conditions to be sustained as they were when our species was born. This depends on humility or as anthropologist Gregory Bateson said: “I surrender to the belief that my knowing is a small part of a wider integrated knowing that knits together the entire biosphere or creation.” We must leave large swathes of our planet wild so that it can sustain itself. This can only happen if the global economy is reined in, tamed, guided, made more conscious.

Environmentalism is giving way to something bigger and bolder. We are not just asking people not to drive anymore. Being ecological is about positive actions that nurture abundance, such as growing copious vegetables and giving them to the old lady who lives alone down the street. That builds community and reduces our need to rely on corporate food. And in being abundant ourselves, might we not fall in step with our mysterious universe – so perfectly poised for life – and contribute to the evolutionary destiny of our planet?

A more fulfilling world is imminently available to us and with a networked, collaborative effort we can rapidly get there. And why shouldn’t we have lofty ambitions? We are stardust waking up. Right here, right now.

“What is wild cannot be bought or sold, borrowed or copied. It is. Unmistakeable, unforgettable, unshamable, elemental as earth and ice, water, fire and air, a quintessence, pure spirit, resolving into no constituents.
Don’t waste your wildness: it is precious and necessary.” – Jay Griffiths

An erotic encounter was not something I expected as I climbed into the beckoning branches of an old avocado tree, 5 years or so ago, whilst woofing in New Zealand.

I had been working in various organic farms, my delicate city princess feet toughened by weeks of walking barefoot, hands stained dark with soil from the daily picking of tomatoes, green beans, strawberries, corn and a variety of other sumptuous delights the world around me generously proffered.

With no audible noise from traffic, no stimulation from a computer, stereo or TV, my mind had considerably quietened, and I began to notice subtle but distinct changes in the sensitivity of my perception. I was sensing things I had never sensed before – specifically, an ability to feel plant energies or auras – enjoying how each plant ‘felt’, almost as though I could tap into their qualities or personalities, which would all evoke different responses within me.

I could tell a tree was diseased without looking at it, just by being in its presence. And I noticed that whilst walking through enchanting groves of avocado trees (so many avocadoes! Oh what I would give now to have a garden full of avocado trees!), I would silently greet trees and swore I could feel them ‘greeting’ me back.

But climbing into the branches of this particular tree, I experienced an unmistakable giant whoosh of energy, deliciously tingling in my pelvis and dancing it’s way up my spine, as though – and dear reader, I know this sounds odd – but as though the tree and I were engaged energetically in something of an erotic frolic. Surrendering to the waves of bliss, feeling energetically penetrated by pushing and probing roots & tendrils, I had my first orgasm, perched in a tree.

This was the first of many experiences since then, which have prompted me to reconsider the entire framework within which I viewed both sexuality and more widely, the nature of life.

Jay Griffith writes “wilderness and wild nature are sexual…the grinding of shoots thrusting up into the light, the hungry torsion as snake squeezes snake, birds flightily dipping as they twang an orgasm between a wing beats, the delicate incipience of young sexuality in bud and blossom…”

How differently would we teach our children about sex, if we understood that there is no difference between the life force that permeates all living things, and the erotic desire to create? That life is erotic: each moment, a continual creative impulse to come into existence.

Photo credit – Arno: http://www.arno-image.com/

How differently would we think about our relationship to our partners and the world around us, if we stopped thinking of sex as something that only happens behind closed doors between people, involving genitals? As D. H. Lawrence famously lamented, “Oh what a catastrophe, what a maiming of love when it was made a personal, merely personal feeling, taken away from the rising and the setting of the sun, and cut off from the magic connection of the solstice and equinox!”

But my erotic tree escapade and subsequent experiences were more than sensual revelling in the world around me. My felt experience was very much that of the tree as a sentient being, both responsive to me and capable of initiating contact. This of course, going against everything I had ever been taught by mainstream culture, which tells me as a human I am superior in intelligence to everything else, and the lowly world of flora, incapable of perception or consciousness.

What a wonderful thought to remember that for over 90% of our time as human beings on our planet (estimated at 200,000 years), before the birth of agriculture and modern culture, we were intimately connected and in deep relationship to earth. What’s so fascinating about this, is that it’s not just that we had more information about the earth (how animals behave so we can hunt them better, which fruits are edible), or even that our perception was more finely attuned and sensitive, but that our reality, based on our direct, felt experience of our connection to earth, was radically different. We lived in a totally different paradigm.

If we can infer how we used to exist for the majority of our time on our planet, by observing indigenous hunter-gatherer societies that have managed (against all odds) to prevail today, we see that we experienced life all around us – whether rock or lake, flower or beast – as sentient, with equal rights and status.

Humans didn’t just ‘believe’ in the interconnectedness and sacredness of all, this was our tangible, sensory experience, our reality. So of course, we would ask for permission from the spirit of the animal we were hunting before killing, why no part of an animal would ever be wasted, why a rock would not be moved without reason, and land could not be ‘owned’. This is why an Apache Indian cannot tell a story without including where on the land it happened – for being alive is so intimately connected to the earth – that everything that takes place, is in relationship to it. A relationship that is so paramount in our experience of being alive, that words and concepts such as ‘past’ and ‘future’ did not exist as they do now.

How would life on our planet be different if we quietened our busy minds for a moment, listened and felt how the pulsing of life through our veins is the same that pulses through the unfurling of a fern, uniting us all in the web of life? If we could feel our actions being witnessed, even judged, by sentient trees?

We can all see the destruction and suffering that our current paradigm of separation and superiority over life, has created. The most powerful change that can take place will not be top down from governments and institutions, but must come from a collective movement into a new shared experience of life.

It’s up to you and me to rekindle those hidden memories that lie buried deep in our bones, of what it is to live in reverence and with respect for life. So stop. Listen. Climb a tree. You never know just what might happen…

Ruby Luna May

www.alchemy-eros.com

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Ruby May is an edge-dwelling, truth-seeking creative visionary, whose passion lies in combining the fields of sexuality, transpersonal psychology and spiritual ecology and creating playful, transformative & magical spaces where we can learn to live ‘beyond our imagination’.