Walking in the Land of Many Gods: Remembering Sacred Reason in Contemporary Environmental Literature

PREFACE

ix Preface The founding premise of Walking in the Land of Many Gods is that a creative force animates the universe—a force that became manifest in the Big Bang nearly 14 billion years ago and that led to the formation of Earth 4.5 billion years ago, which in turn fostered a life-sustaining system, call it Gaia or what you will—and that humans, like all animate and less-than-animate beings, have the potential to participate in this creative force. Our participation as a species might perhaps differ from that of other species in that ours includes a self-consciousness that allows us the opportunity to reflect on our connection to and participation with, or, alternatively, our separation from and reaction against, this creative energy. Central to the human ability to participate in or separate from this flow and exchange of creative energy is the role of language, which originally derived its force from our sensuous participation with the world around us but which now acts as an endless game of tag. The poststructuralists seem to have it right. Language is now too often an endless play of signification, cut off from the reality of what it purports to signify. We have become, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, trapped in our own mental machinations seemingly without a way out. This entrapment is the logical conclusion of a separation from the natural world that began ten thousand years ago on the floodplains of Egypt and Sumer, heightened with the advance of a historical mind-set and the scientific revolution, and fully closed around us with the rise and domination of the techno-industrial-urban world. But, I would contend, there is another way. Walking in the Land of Many Gods is my attempt to point in this direction. What I hope to show is that we can remember an ancient wisdom of Earth and elders that reconnects x preface us, bodily, sensuously, spiritually to the world that sustains us and nurtures us and that is the very foundation—in an evolutionary and biological sense but also in an emotional, psychological, and spiritual sense—of our being. The central question becomes, then, about our place in this world. I want to ask, can we re/place ourselves bodily, emotionally, intuitively in the natural world in such a way that we reopen the channels through which the creative energy of the universe flows, so that we become once again participants in the ongoing dialogue between all species, indeed participants in the omnipresent conversation that occurs within the totality of the natural world including the plants and the animals, the mountains and the valleys, the rivers and the streams, the sky, the thunder, and the sun? Can we reanimate our own words, both spoken and written, so that they participate in this creative energy and become, rather than the means of our disconnection from the world, a way of reengaging the flow of energy that invisibly surrounds us? Finally, can we remember an ancient way of thinking and being in the world that heals our bodies and our spirits and that assists us in returning to our rightful place in our communities, human and nonhuman, allowing us to heal the rift between ourselves and nature? The problem of the twenty-first century is the problem of the human relation to the natural world, a problem too great for any one individual to answer comprehensively or definitively. We light candles along the way, hoping to illuminate our path and see our next step. Walking in the Land of Many Gods, I hope, is one candle among many, offering some glimpse of the journey before us. ...