One Mind, One Earth

Last updated on: April 22, 2014 at 10:00 am by Kenn Gordon

One Mind, One Earth 2014-04-22T10:00:09-06:00 Kenn Gordon

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There is an old Spike Milligan poem which tells the tale of a little girl who upon learning that the world is round and is spinning, calls out to her dad: “it makes me feel quite giddy.”

I like that poem because it reminds me that we are all very small, and that as generation after generation of human beings have layered up the world with all material and wonderful things, there is a bigger thing happening at any given time.

The world – the earth – is spinning.

This Earth Day the aim is to focus on making our cities sustainable. But it’s equally true that we ourselves need to make our lives sustainable. We do that by living consciously. And we live consciously by paying attention to where our energy flows at any one time so that we don’t run the risk of waking up one morning in a more precarious (giddy) position than we were before.

When we live consciously, we naturally slow down. We focus our attention on what we are doing, what we are saying. And we listen more carefully to each other so that we can catch the nuances that sometimes trip us up.

Years ago before Earth Day even started, the mantra was the 3Rs – reduce, reuse and recycle.

These 3Rs could equally be applied to our thoughts. We can reduce our mental activity by focusing our mind with meditation practices. We can reuse affirmations to keep our focus on what we wish to have in our lives, and we can recycle that which we know to be of use – whether that means returning to a practice we may have discarded for a while – like journal writing, or doing our daily spiritual mind treatment work.

I know for me that it’s as easy for me to forget my personal purpose as it is for me to forget that I’m actually just one small “thought” as it were, spinning around on a relatively small planet that is nurturing and sustaining billions of people.

When we take the time to take care of ourselves, we are taking care of the planet as well. We are asking the big – yet small – questions like: do I need to purchase more packaging? Do I need to eat preserved foods? What changes can I make to avoid using non-reusable resources? And what can I do to make my community, my city, more livable?

Every day we are building communities, and we are either doing it with conscious or unconscious thought.

Frank Lloyd Wright – that wonderful architect who married form with its surroundings – once said: “I believe in God, only I spell it Nature.”

It is in our human nature to impose the external – an egoistic imprint if you will – on the eternal. Our job is to reveal the eternal in all that we do so that our true nature – as individuals and as a collective – illuminates the earth for all of us.

Happy Earth Day!

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