April 22 was Earth Day. You do anything to celebrate or honor the occasion? Me either — and I say that with a touch of chagrin and remorse.

Here is our blue-green planet bobbling away in this great galactic soup. She is holding up her place in the multiverse, rotating regularly, and keeping up all afloat, but like many of us, Mother E. is very tired, very depleted and having difficulty maintaining her balance.

All you have to do is to think of the crazy weather patterns of extreme heat, rogue snow storms, avalanches, hurricanes, tsunamis, siroccos, flooding, volcanic activity and dry-tinder, combustible forest fires to know that balance is out of the question.

Mother E is at her wit’s end. Her glaciers are melting; her ozone layer is tattered; and her waters are polluted. Not to mention, her forests and mines have been stripped; her landfills are clogged with plastics, packaging, disposable diapers and Styrofoam bits that will outlive us all. And she is inundated with toxic chemicals. It’s enough to make a grown planet cry.

One person recently shared with me that he had learned that all of our oil drilling (and think huge energy consumption by Western civilization, especially the USA) was undermining the tectonic plates of the earth as the oil reserves acted as a cushion for these structural formations. That’s a new one on me.

I don’t know enough about the science to speak to the credibility of this assertion, but I do know that everything, and everyone, is connected. Think of that television commercial where the butterfly in Japan flaps its wings and how those tissue-thin, small wing beats cause discernible reverberations right in our own backyards.

Remember Mad Cow disease and the Bird Flu? The global boundaries and demarcations often seem more like ink-drawn maps blurred and fuzzy with splashed water rather than concretized entities. We, as a planet, are a pulsating mass of energy that continuously interacts with one another. The idea of separation is a huge illusion. What we do, or don’t do, has consequences.

This brings to mind Chernobyl, which has been called the worst human-made disaster. If you recall, a nuclear reactor exploded in the early morning hours of April 26, 1986. It has been said that 9 million people were directly affected by exposure to the radiation and estimated that 65 million people worldwide were indirectly affected by eating contaminated food stuffs. Today, there are increased thyroid cancer rates as a result of this increased radiation. The explosion may have been in the Ukraine, but its impact was global. To repeat myself, we are all connected.

Years ago, a dear friend told she heard the trees cry. This friend is a super-sensitive type; I wondered if, perhaps, she was projecting some of her own sadness onto the trees. Then, a bit later, totally unsolicited, another person volunteered that she, too, had the same auditory acuteness. This time, I paid attention.

Be it the tears of the trees, the increased deaths of whales, the distorted patterns of bees, nature is clearly trying to get our attention, but our listening is selective and self-serving.

Like flossing our teeth, we know recycling, using less electricity, buying local – all those things that reduce our carbon footprint are good, but to most of us they can seem too much trouble. Our environmental consciousness is still being raised; we have yet to really feel the ongoing pinch that will make us squirm and egg us on to change. Going green has not yet become a mainstream part of the culture.

Remember when we used to smoked cigarettes? We could smoke in the office, on airplanes, in restaurants and bars, almost everywhere. Then the education started, and our cognitive dissonance increased as we became more health conscious. In effect, we woke up to the very negative consequences of smoking, and, over the years, many of us stopped smoking. The tipping point had been reached.

Today, I see us en route to mainstream environmental consciousness. Unfortunately, this runway is very, very long. It leads us towards that moment when the collective consciousness agrees and accepts that Mother E is in dire straights and needs all the help she can get from us, her thoughtless, rude, slovenly, disrespectful inhabitants who, by the way, created this mess.

The indigenous cultures believed in the sanctity of nature. Their relationship with Mother Earth and her elements was their portal to the divine. They cared for the earth; they valued the connection. The physical world was not taken for granted; it was revered and perceived as a symbol of the invisible realms.

Today, Mother Earth is more often viewed as the hard-working servant. We treat this mother with little regard; there is no reverence, and respect is at a minimum. She has become our dumping ground. We have become master consumers; we have created a disposable society and, as such, garbage and detritus abound.

Don’t you think it’s time we cleaned on our rooms here on earth and give Mother E a break? Every little bit we can do to reduce the toxic load on the earth as well as our physical bodies helps.

And while we’re at it, let’s give Mother Earth a place of honor at the table. No more crumbs for our Mother E. She deserves a standing ovation for all of her hard work.

Thanks, Mother Earth. I’m sorry for all my messes, and I promise to do better.


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Dr. Adele Ryan McDowell, Ph.D., is a psychologist, empath, and shaman who likes looking at life with the big viewfinder. Her e-mail address is {email ARMCDOWELL@aol.com}ARMCDOWELL@aol.com{/email}. © copyright 2008 by Adele Ryan McDowell