Listen to the wisdom of our living sages. Germain Greer writes in her essay, Whitefella Jump Up, "Get out of your car. Get off your trail bike, get out of your four-wheel-drive, which you smash down the foreshore with, get out of the vehicle, get off the Jet-ski, stop racing around. Sit down. Sit on the ground. And think. Think about it. Think about the country."
Greer is suggesting that we 'sit on the ground' a bit and think about it. What she is suggesting is a cure for most of the ailments around the world today. While she is focused on the conflict among Australian Aborigines and whites in her home country, Australia, it is wise advice for all of us.
If we could all stop and sit on the ground for a moment, we would likely see how connected we are to the earth, how the earth is like a shared parent -- like a mother who nourishes and nurtures. Feel your feet touching the earth, take your shoes off, see the solidness in the soil. Walk solidly on the ground feeling each step as you take it. Let yourself be swept away by the enormousness of the earth and your speck of space upon it. Then think of all the feet touching the earth around it. We are all connected through our shared relationship with the earth.
We attend so little to something so big. We spend so much of our time worrying about our little space of land, our little space in time, our need to be in control of as much of the earth as possible. But, remembering the earth as that which has been and will continue to be regardless of who is sitting upon her, think that it is might be more important to discover how to live harmoniously with others on the planet than to value ourselves.
Jonas Salk wrote in Anatomy of Reality, "The most meaningful activity in which a human being can be engaged is one that is directly related to human evolution. This is true because human beings now play an active and critical role not only in the process of their own evolution but in the survival and evolution of all living things. Awareness of this places upon human beings a responsibility for their participation in and contribution to the process of evolution. If humankind would accept and acknowledge this responsibility and become creatively engaged in the process of metabiological evolution consciously as well as unconsciously, a new reality would emerge, and a new age would be born" (p.112).
Touching the earth is one way to begin to see the necessity of using conscious effort in shaping our own evolution. To touch the earth is to awaken a wisdom of our interdependence with one another and to the planet. Choosing to connect with this wisdom is a beginning of shaping our evolutionary trajectory.