Growing Roots Into Earth

One of the opportunities and challenges of our time is that of rooting ourselves into Earth and Cosmos, of re-membering the source and nurturance of our being. This re-connecting of self to our wholeness is also the grounding of a vision of thrivability worthy of pulling us into a future worth dreaming into being.
Following are a series of quotes for this Earth Day that have to do with the rooting of ourselves back into Earth, with remembering our innate belonging.
“Life has always seemed to me like a plant that lives on its rhizome. Its true life is invisible, hidden in the rhizome. The part that appears above ground lasts only a single summer. Then it withers away—an ephemeral apparition. When we think of the unending growth and decay of life and civilizations, we cannot escape the impression of absolute nullity. Yet, I have never lost a sense of something that lives and endures underneath the eternal flux. What we see is the blossom, which passes. The rhizome remains.

In the end the only events in my life worth telling are those when the imperishable world irrupted into this transitory one. That is why I speak chiefly of inner experiences, amongst which I include my dreams and visions.” — Carl Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections, pg. 4
“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! This is what is the matter with us, we are bleeding at the roots, because we are cut off from the earth and sun and stars, and love is a grinning mockery, because poor blossom, we picked it from its stem on the tree of life, and expected it to keep on blooming in our civilized base on the table.” — D. H. Lawrence
“My roots are connected deep into the ground, engaged in a continuous interplay with the soil, bacteria, microorganisms, fungi, insects, and water, gathering nourishment to help me thrive.  My leaves and branches dance with the wind, the sun, with animals, birds, insects, microorganisms, bacteria, all in continual flow. My body returns to the soil and is soon transformed into new life. And so the cycle continues.

A thrivable entity is one that is richly and dynamically interconnected into its ecosystem, engaged in a process of continuous co-creation. The upward spiral…” — Jean Russell, from her blog Nurture: Making Our World Thrive at nuture.biz
This co-creative stance in life that Jean writes of, this upward spiraling of an integrative complexity and wholeness, is grounded in the reality of Life’s reciprocity and its consequent preference for strategies of mutualism. Mutualism is an evolutionary symbiotic strategy of wellness, hardiness and wholeness that can incorporate both competitive and cooperative hinging between species and individuals, resulting in ‘mutual benefit.’
Evolutionary biologist Elisabet Sahtouris writes of such relationships in EarthDance, identifying the principle of “mutual consistency” as essential to cooperative bonds of vulnerability and trust. I like to think of this as “mutual coherency.”
Mutual consistency or coherency arises when we are willing to treat ourselves and the ‘other’ not as transactional objects, but with the respect inherent in transformational relationships: i.e. we are willing to be changed by the interaction, to come out of it different in identity in some way than when we entered into it.
It is through such mutualistic relationships with a myriad of bacteria and fungi and insects… that this Juniper was able to crack open the boulder in the photo, from along the Chama River, NM, USA. And it through our re-membering our of our place in the network of Life that we too will again grow roots into the earth, and thrive, along with all our relations.