Environmental Partnership with the Sustaining Spirit Archetype


There have been a lot of discussions about the state of the environment and what national reforms should be made to address the issues that affect our health and wellness on this planet. In addition to national reforms, there is also the need of individuals to become sustainable partners with our earth and our environment. Can we humans render our planet sustainable? The partnering questions are: Can the earth, in all of its expressions and manifestations, sustain itself, including we humans? Will we let it? Will we get out of the way to let the earth do some of its own self-healing? And will we enter into partnership with it?

The response to all of these questions is the sustaining spirits call to partnering with the earth. The sustaining spirit carries its powerful call and invitation into the external world, not only to people, but to the very earth itself, to its spirit, from the minutest microorganism to the huge mountain ranges and oceans of grandeur and omnipresence. They all enter into dialogue with us humans because spirit, theirs and ours, acts in a multidimensional reality far beyond the solely cognitive, far beyond the realities we have chosen to construct.

Most of us are part sustainers, of one kind or another, in one situation or another in order just to keep things going and to maintain the minimum level of our beingness through thick or thin. We call that survival, which does not perhaps differentiate us from other species. It is an ecological principle.

But is sustaining the same as maintaining? The sustaining spirit calls us to a land far beyond maintenance and the status quo. It is a new land of creativity and even transformation, wherein we have so changed our ways of living that a visitor from another star system would see a different set of people, culture, economy, and ways of living, being and doing. This is more than a gradual shift to the environmental perspective. A remarkably reflective spirit, the management genius and futurist, Peter Drucker, has for years called this a discontinuity, a systems-break, where the birth of a new system is generated by and from a space inside us for which the usual statistical, logical, or behavioral accounts no longer suffice.

In the early 1980s, I did an envisioning workshop with members of various environmental groups and associations in New England. Hundreds were involved for a couple of days of hard work. Their compelling images of the future looked mostly to the external size of policy, program, and institutional reform. A much smaller number of environmentalists understood that changing our social habits of waste, and the trashing of our nest, habits lodged in our social biography, would require some substantial inner work that might be best invited rather than forced.

In enspiriting, the inner and the outer biographies are inextricably interwoven. It is a whole new kettle of fish that requires us to revisit many of our most hallowed traditional and cultural beliefs:

• That all truth is objective


• That evidence is the only aspect of human experience to which we should give credence


• That there is a kingdom of God and there is a worldly kingdom, and they dont have much or anything to do with each other


• That scientific psychology and psychiatric intervention are the therapeutic antidote to spirits absence in our lives


• That the sacred is a very small portion of humans experience of their world rather than pervading everything we are and do.

What this means is that the self-nurturing and the nurturing of others go together. Discerning this interlock is a powerful clue to the sustaining spirits presence in you. We all need the self-nurturing. One way or another, your spirit is ready to partner with you. But are you ready to partner in the world beyond your inner biography? Such is the call of the sustaining spirit.

I believe we are called to listen to our spirit tell us a new story about ourselves. I believe some members of our species have been doing that since time immemorial. I think its time now to raise the level of consciousness about our spirit so that it becomes manifest in each of us, and in the world. Not everyone is ready to do this, but more and more are ready. Are you one?

Nowhere, to my mind, is this new spirituality, as people like to call it, more clearly in tune with our predicaments, challenges, and threats than in the case of the archetype I call the sustaining spirit.

Notes from When Your Spirit Calls: In Search of Your Spiritual Archetype

posted by Warren Ziegler @ 9:22 PM