Unitarian Universalist Church of Palo Alto

Always Learning

December 30, 2005
Rev. Darcey Laine

Sabbatical Episode 6: Gaia and Gratitude

My final class at University of Creation Spirituality was taught by Joanna Macy, renowned Buddhist teacher, Nuclear Activist and Deep Ecologist. She also taught at Starr King while I was in seminary, but her classes were so popular, I never got a chance to study with her.

This class, called “Our Life as Gaia” was another 4 day intensive. Unlike previous intensives, however, there was no “art as meditation” in the afternoons since Joanna’s teaching style intertwines seminar, storytelling, meditation and group work. To prepare we read Richard Heinberg’s Powerdown: Options and Actions for a Post-Carbon World and Joanna’s book Coming Back to Life: Practices to Reconnect Our Lives, Our World. The focus of the intensive was to provide information and experiences that would help us reconnect with one another, our selves and with the earth so that we could act from that place in the world.

Joanna started with the premise that our culture is having a crisis of meaning as the stories we told ourselves are unraveling. What is required is a re-awakening to our living body, the earth. One session was spent in seminar learning some of the basics of System’s Theory, the modern scientific paradigm which brings the relationship among particles or “things” to the foreground. We experienced the “Truth Mandala,” a form created to hold the strong emotions of a group she was working with as the wall fell in Berlin, but which is flexible enough to help other groups deal with the strong emotions of our disconnection from our world. Another day focused on expanding our sense of time. Joanna postulates that “the time medium in which we live is actually accelerating” and that our connection with the past and future is broken. We must remember to ask “what would future generations want us to do?” in answering questions like “what will we do with the poisons we have created?” which Joanna suggests is the most important choice of our generation.

This intensive was not only my final class at UCS, but was to be the last class taught at this incarnation of the school. The master’s program had been offered in connection with Naropa Univeristy, but Naropa and UCS (now Wisdom University) had decided to go their separate ways. Throughout the weekend staff and faculty were packing boxes, and everyone was saying their goodbyes. At the end of the last class Joanna led a ritual that held, not only the end of the class, but the end of the school as well. It was sad, and it was hard, but I learned again how healing it can be to take the time to say good bye, and how comforting to hold such an experience with others in community.

As I prepared to transition back into my post-sabbatical life at UUCPA, I was often overwhelmed with a sense of gratitude. I know well how lucky I am to have a semester to study just for the sake of study; to learn those things I needed to answer the questions of my own soul, to answer the questions my work with you has raised. So many of you took up extra pieces of the work I usually do so that I could have the space and time to think deeply and gain some perspective. And so in gratitude I offer those precious gifts I gathered on my journeys, my sense of reconnection to the earth, my expanded sense of time, a more cohesive cosmology, and a sense of the value of aesthetics in creating sacred space. I offer a stronger sense of what I believe is important for myself, for our community, for humanity and for our biosphere at this time. I hope I will be able to inspire and challenge you as I have been inspired and challenged. I offer this with a deep sense of gratitude.