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Be grateful for loved ones, our biosphere

If you’re looking for something to be thankful for as the holidays draw near, consider your own lucky existence.

Unless you believe that you were put on this Earth by a conscious entity for purposes known only to that entity, you probably share the contemporary view that you are the result of a series of propitious accidents.

First, there was the Big Bang, which gave birth to a septillion stars organized into 170 billion galaxies. The Milky Way, our smallish galaxy, encompasses around 400 billion of those stars.

Among these celestial lights, we have identified but a handful of planets we believe could support life. One of those planets is our dear terra firma which, more than 4½ billion years ago, was formed from ice and dust particles at just the right distance from the sun to enable life to emerge.

About 1 billion years later, the first proto-bacterial life forms arose from the interaction of organic chemicals found in pools across the planet. Life hung on – although it was almost extinguished twice. After 3½ billion years of chancy evolution – which easily could have failed to produce any species with linguistic skills and higher consciousness – your parents were born and eventually met – by chance.

We’re all amazingly lucky to be here, and unless we are absolutely miserable, we have the experience of living to be thankful for. That experience includes loving and being loved by our family and friends and at least appreciating, if not loving, strangers, all of life and the planet that nurtures us.

Which brings us to the idea of thanksgiving for our good fortune. Thanks can be given verbally and through benevolent actions. Both require an attainment of personal grace, which has the same root as gratitude, and the mature recognition that love is a two-way street: You can’t get it, or at least take it in, without also giving it. If you seek contentment and a full life, give back as much as is given to you.

But how do we return the gift of life to our sanctuary in space, the planet that shelters and nurtures us? How can we show gratitude toward Mother Earth?

The obvious answer is that we can live more lightly upon her. By making Thanksgiving less about stuffing ourselves, and especially by making Christmas less about stuffing our stockings and more about nurturing the Earth and each other.

We know which practices are called for: Buy less and buy locally, grow your own, reduce, reuse, recycle. But before those practices can become sufficiently widespread to make a difference, we must cultivate the sensibility that gives such actions moral authority and makes them as rewarding as participating in our consumer culture.

I call this new attitude “biosphere consciousness,” or “biospirituality.” The holidays will make the perfect background for exploring it in upcoming columns at our ecological house.

Philip S. Wenz, who grew up in Durango and Boulder, now lives in Corvallis, Ore., where he teaches and writes about environmental issues. www.your-ecological-house.com.



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