This morning I'm challenging myself to write a different sort of article than usual.

It's easy to write articles about plants and homestead life, but sometimes it's nice to streeeetch and press the bounds of other parts of my brain.
Over the past two days I've read 2 books by Louise Erdrich, "The Round House" & "Future Home of the Living God".

Erdrich writes superbly about complex life themes with Native American roots.

"The Round House" kept me wrapt with beating attention the entire time. It also made me think about living in a woman's body and the lack of safety (the book started off with a violent rape of an indigenous woman and continues as the mystery unfolds of who did it and why). "Future Home of the Living God" also set my mind thinking as it takes place in a dystopian present where all of our worst fears come true, food becomes unavailable and women are turned into "breeders" as the world increasingly becomes unsafe for human life.

When I was reading it my thoughts turned toward the reasons we have chosen to homestead here. While a padded bank account & investment portfolio make some feel safe, access to clean water, a home in a relatively unpopulated area, and fruit & nut trees in the ground bring more feelings of safety to me.

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But I don't really want to write about that today. Today I want to pin down some thoughts around being human, turning the soil of my soul to see what's there.

I want to write about a trend I see.

When I was growing up in Christianity, I was told from an early age that my earth life was only part of my life. After I died, I was told, the part of me that was indestructible would either go to Heaven or to Hell. The gist of this was that there was an eternity spent somewhere, elsewhere and that this life was basically only a preamble setting the stage for a literal, ongoing, never-ending forever spent somewhere else.

Of course we sang about the gilded and golden streets, but deeply within my heart I always wondered, What does come after? What do we do up there? (Because heaven is in the sky)... What entertains us for eternity? Why is earth life just a preamble? Can I just get this part over with and go to the eternity part, where I am with God?

A few years ago, one of our friends did just that.

He wrote Ini before he killed himself saying that he was tired of not being understood, that he wasn't depressed, but couldn't we see?, he just wanted to go to the beyond, back to or forward into whatever comes next.

I couldn't really blame him and I don't. Other cultures have spiritual traditions that include a noble self-kill option. It's very taboo in our culture, but my personal belief is that people should have the autonomy to kill themselves if they want to. Especially old people, but I digress.

Part of the crux I'm getting at is that as humans many of us have part of our energy tied up in a mysterious beyond.

Large segments of the population live in that beyond, praying and thinking about it, making actions to "earn points" for it, reading about it (although I'm sure that very little is actually revealed about it), following rules so they can have a better experience later, etc.

That energy that is tied up in this storyline, I think, diminishes from our stake in life on earth.

I realized this divide early on as I started to really care about what was happening here and it sunk in that the language we use around our experience creates our thoughts which shape our reality. Our beliefs, our religions shape our realities.

As I studied other religions and spiritualities, I came across Animism, which basically states that the spirit of life is within all things and literally breathes from and inhabits everything. Even stones. That the spiritual world isn't separate from the day to day, but within it. It isn't beyond, but here. In the trees, in the sun, the antelope, termite, fungi and even us.

Offshoots

One thing that happens as a result of waiting for that glorious hereafter is that this life doesn't really matter. The material plane is thought of as lesser than the spiritual.

You can even see this in New Age thought as well when people talk about ascension (which to me mirrors the Christian thought, but in a New Age way).

Ascension, talked about in this way, means going beyond the 3-d into further and higher vibrations, being lifted out of our "base human lives" and into greater seeing, knowing, experiencing. It is even said that entire populations have ascended in this way and disappeared.

Again, this rings so similar to me as the beyond kind of thinking of the major religions. I can't subscribe to it, because again we are trying to "get away" from what is, from the body and valuing the spiritual over the physical.

I like animism because the spiritual inhabits the physical. They are one in the same. They breathe into one another and are one another.

I see the Ascension idea as just another way to "get away" from this dirty and base earth, which is another form of the escapist spirituality.

I vote for & invest in another way.

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Inhabit

That is my religion.

Inhabiting our bodies, our habitat, the earth.

Breathing into our lives and letting the soul be in the soil that we tend and plant seeds that produce vegetables and fruits which feed out bodies. That is holy, is whole.

Taking care of what we have here and treating it like our great Church.

Tending what we have here, putting our energy into it, not into the future, not into an unforeseeable eternity, not into a 5-d reality that we will vibrate on "only if we can be higher" ...

All of this reaching forsakes the very soil beneath our feet which I have seen do amazing, even miraculous, spiritual things.

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What would our actions look like if we put all our energy into our earth-life? If we let it all hit us what is really happening here on earth? If we let in all of the class wars, racial divides, destruction and devastation of our biosphere?

If we let the daily miracles, the angels within our midst, the wonders of the mundane vibrate into our consciousness and finally said, this is good enough.

We are here, this is good enough. This is it.