The symbol of the Mother Goddess or ‘Gaia’ speaks of the whole of life, animal, plant and human and the earth and the waters that sustain it. As James Lovelock of the ‘Gaia Hypothesis’ [Gaia and the Theory of the Living Planet by James E. Lovelock] explained all this life and energy makes one interdependent system. A system of exchanges, influences and sharing. Life is sharing, when a female feeds her baby, protects and warms it the child returns love and warmth to her. We sense that the loving energy flows back to Gaia, its ultimate source. When I hold a lover in my arms he or she shares their warmth, gives me a sense of security and physical pleasure and vice-versa. When a creature drops its dung on the earth the earth returns rich growth to the biosphere that sustains animal life. All life operates through sharing, each creature taking what it needs and returning something along the way or, at its death, enriching the soil so that life is ever circular.
But some human cultures have developed a system of accumulation where certain individuals and families acquire much more than they need of material things and then spend their time building walls around their property rather than sharing the surplus like, for example, the potlach ceremony of North American Indigenous peoples such as the Haida.
Understanding the Gaia principle means sharing what we have with others: our goods, our skills, our bodies, our selves. We walk away from the habits of accumulation and over-consumption. Life is exchange, giving and sharing. Sharing is caring. Just as the Great Mother, the nurturing abundant Mother feeds and cherishes us so we should return the love to her, abstaining from all the ways our ‘advanced’ culture has found for torturing, tearing up and terrifiying her living body.
https://populationmatters.org/news/2023/03/the-real-cost-of-an-iphone/
Sharing space and love, food and joy, knowledge and understanding is the Way of the Goddess. Everyone knows little kids have trouble sharing — ‘it’s mine!’ — is the toddler cry. We are in our infancy as people, as a ‘civilisation’ when we emphasise mine-ness and meaness. But that is exactly the heartbeat and rhythm of a consumer-acquisitive society.
As much as possible, walk away from the competitive ownership of things. Focus on inner satisfaction, the calmness to appreciate the blessings of breath and life.
The Goddess is a great symbol of shared existence, she embraces all living things, humans and animals and plants and recognising her we can think of allowing all living things their space and reduce our personal destructive impact on the biosphere: as much as you can reduce using toxic and anti-environmental materials like plastic and fossil fuels.
Consider your space, your home, your garden, your local area: take measures to share the space, make it friendly and accessible to other people, not just your family and friends, not just human creatures.
The Mother invites us to live in the Great World, not just a tiny private cage of ‘I own this, I own that, my side of the fence and everyone else is outside…’
