Life as a continuous, all-encompassing stream
Ever think of Life that way? Then check out this short excerpt and follow the link to read:
Burning Through the Roots
| By Dawn Adrian |
“I spent much of my childhood here, in the Valley of the Sun. The name of this place—Phoenix—reflects the fact that the city’s founders knew they were building a new city upon the ruins of an ancient one. A people called the Hohokam left behind a network of canals here that the early white settlers cleaned out and put to use in their own agricultural fields. I am sure you know the story of the Phoenix, also called the Firebird, that those city founders had in mind. It is a mythic being that died in flames in order to give new life to the young Phoenix that rose from the ashes of its consumed parent.
Americans have been preventing wildfires in forests for the better part of sixty-five years. That’s equivalent to bustling about the Firebird’s nest with water hoses and extinguishers, dousing any sparks or hints of flame, deciding on our own that the Firebird’s nest really shouldn’t be permitted to burn. Fire is dangerous, after all, and it kills the Firebird! But the forests have finally managed to start burning anyway these last few years, and they’re not likely to stop any time soon. So now when the nest is burned to ashes and the Firebird with it, we let salvage loggers and tidiers and planters and terracers come in and sweep up the mess because it’s so unsightly—but can be sold, not incidentally, for a last profit. In the process, we lose any chance we ever had to have a Firebird—or a forest—ever grow there again……”
Dawn Adrian is founder of the Tapestry Institute on science and native wisdom. This article is from her opening plenary address at the 2009 Metanexus conference, “Cosmos, Nature, Culture,” held in Phoenix, AZ.
