From the website GreekMedicine.net comes this….
“The first Greek god was actually a goddess. She is Gaia, or Mother Earth, who created herself out of primordial chaos. From her fertile womb all life sprang, and unto Mother Earth all living things must return after their allotted span of life is over.
Gaia, as Mother Nature, personifies the entire ecosystem of Planet Earth. Mother Nature is always working to achieve and maintain harmony, wholeness and balance within the environment. Mother Nature heals, nurtures and supports all life on this planet, and ultimately all life and health depend on Her. In time, Nature heals all ills.
The way of Mother Gaia is the passive, feminine, Yin way of healing. All we need to do to regain our health is to return to the bosom of Mother Nature and live in accordance with Her laws. The Gaia archetype underlies all notions of the Nature Cure. Mother Nature is a healing goddess.
In the 1960s, James Lovelock formulated the Gaia hypothesis. It states that all life, and all living things on this planet, are part of a single, all-encompassing global entity or consciousness which he named Gaia. It is this global consciousness, Mother Gaia, that makes our planet capable of supporting life, while our near neighbors in the solar system are barren and lifeless.
Through the global consciousness of Mother Gaia, all living things on this planet, from their most primordial instincts, are constantly interacting with their environment to ensure the harmony, balance and continuity of Life. Live in balance with Mother Nature and health and healing are yours; violate Her laws and get out of balance, and you pay the price in suffering and disease. In this sense, all medicine and healing can be seen as a system of ecology.”
But nature does not heal all ills. Life has its limits, and so does Gaia, especially for life on earth if we throw it to far out of balance.
Our notion of our human Mother’s, especially when we are growing up, is one often of naivety. That is, we start off assuming our “Mother” never gets sick, lives forever and will protect us from harm at all times… forever.
Yet, with these changing global atmospheric presses mankind is putting on our Mother Nature, from burning of carbon fuels that heat the atmosphere, the tundra and the oceans, to fracking and agricultural pesticides that are polluting ground water, to the resource pressures overpopulation creates, we are immaturely assuming our world, our Mother Nature will heal herself as we think she always has.
Well here is my take, we need to wake up to the reality that just like our own human Mothers, our planets environment does have a limit and a lifecycle. If we push her limits too hard, she may not be either hospitable to us, or even die an early death in such a way that we will be the ones unable to save ourselves from significantly raising temperatures, and cycles of extreme flooding and draught.
Oh, our rock and water planet earth may still continue spinning around the sun, but we and other forms of life may not be on it while it does. If we fail to protect life on earth, including our own, the world as we know it will be altered in a way I’m sure few will want to live on.
High temperatures and suffocating humidity, flooding and droughts will likely be the new normal. Disrupted agriculture and commerce will make the predicable constant of Mother Nature a thing of the past where nothing will be found to help us out. In time, even nature will not be around to save us.
So, let’s treat our Gaia the same way we should treat our own nurturing human mothers who treated us well, giving us all the gifts she could and providing opportunities to us to live better lives.
Let’s honor our Gaia, our home, by giving her the love and concern, appreciation and awareness she deserves.
As many of us know already, the more we give compassion to others, the more love, respect and sense of well being we get in return. There is never any price you can put on that. Especially if our own survival depends on it.
