The Book
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Sacred Earth Rising Within
The Making of a Spiritual Ecologist in a Creative Cosmos
K. Lauren de Boer
Foreword by Matthew Fox
Part memoir, part lyrical essays and poetry, Sacred Earth Rising Within carries a powerful message of hope for the human prospect. It begins with the author’s early experiences as a minister’s son, and the life-changing impact of the kidnapping and attempted murder of his sister when she was eight and he was seven years old. This early trauma thrust the author into a state of spiritual rupture and a subsequent journey back toward wholeness.
The author draws striking parallels between this personal trauma and the larger collective trauma of our culture’s severance from the natural world. He extends this as well to the traumatic aspects of our lack of grounding in a larger unifying story.
In his reckoning with the past, the author asks deeper questions about what it means to be human. How does connection with nature help overcome early trauma in individuals and societies? Is the universe a friendly place? What is the healing power of a life-giving cosmology, one that brings us back to meaning and a sense of belonging to the universe?
Interweaving what the author calls “landscape interludes” with narrative non-fiction and poetry, he presents a new hybrid genre that speaks to the heart, mind, and spirit of the human within the context of a creative cosmos. The result offers a profoundly healing narrative for our time, one that is both personal and universal. Sacred Earth Rising Within has been identified as a work that falls within the emerging genre of autocosmology.
Read excerpts…
“When I use the phrase ‘spiritual ecology,’ I often think of the word spiritual as describing the animating dynamic we feel in the web of relationships that is ecology. It has to do with our capacity to feel the sensuousness of nature as joy, wonder, terror, exhilaration. The body is the locus of this dynamic.” (p. 6)
“In describing my own personal trauma and my family’s, as well as our attempts at healing, including the missteps, I am telling the story as well of our larger cultural rupture and the need for healing. The Earth speaks to all of us in healing language if we can only listen.” (p. 9)
“This book is a chronicle of my lifelong attempt to rekindle and sustain a religious mind. Not religion in the sense of dogma, creed, and God, but in the sense of a religious devotion to life, the cultivation of wonder and reverence, a renewed sense of the sacred, and an embrace of mystery and magnificence in the universe.” (p. 11)
“My fascination for the natural world grew like fungi from the leaf litter of trauma in my past. The fearsome pincers and imposing size of the stag beetle and the soothing wind across a prairie landscape were ways of reimagining loss and creativity, nature as fearsome risk and safe haven. My love of writing and of nature came together in a new way that began to give me a sense of healing a rupture.” (p. 99)
“We have all known more avatars of wind than we can describe and we could use more terms to name them, using names that evoke their experience in our bodies. There is the fresh wind, for instance, that relieves us of staleness: “Cool Maiden Makes New Again.” There’s a wind that ruins good fishing: “Puts Fishes to Sleep in Afternoon.” Or the fearsome wind that caught me and my brother off-guard once, imperiling us in the middle of a lake in a boat during a lightning storm: “Turns Quickly in Dark Light.” There’s “Cicada Counterpoint at Twilight,” the wind that stirs magic on summer nights in the Midwest, alternating its voice with the song of the pulsing insects.” (p. 150)
“There is an inner dimension of spiritual ecology that corresponds to sensitivity to the universe. It involves attention to one’s ecosystem of emotion as much as the outer landscape. There is an honoring of intuition and the value of feeling. Fear, anger, awe, outrage, love, joy, all generate energy that can be tapped through attention. As a practice, it can help us to face the tensions of our time in creative ways.” (p. 229)
“We need the healing of a beautiful world. Living in awe of life’s creative powers and the unfolding of the cosmic story moves us away from a deep-seated alienation that has permeated the western psyche, one that has created the illusion that Earth is nothing more than a storehouse of resources for human use. What is awakening in human consciousness today is the growing realization that we live in a self-organizing, self-healing, self-generative community and that this creativity courses through the human as surely as the galaxies and the panoply of life on Earth. The world lives in us; we do not live in the world. Earth’s great spheres — the air, land, waters, community of life — are not just a storehouse of resources but are our identity.” (pp. 218-219)
“A big part of my culture’s story has been a collusion in a great secret, a period of silence about the true condition of our existence. That best-kept secret has been our belonging to the community of life, that we are not just inextricably embedded in the universe, but that the universe lives within us, that we are the universe weaving a great story. And that we are held in that web of connection and cannot fall out. As with all secrets, it begins to fester under the weight of silence. But there is a turn back toward the sacred in the culture, even in the midst of more and more challenging crises. The universe wants to know itself within us in every moment. Gaia wants to be known again as the sacredness in the world, and she is a formidable force who will not be silenced.” (p. 371)