Shadow Work For The Planet

You sometimes wonder, don’t you, if Mother Gaia can handle the problems humans cause all on her own? And you see stuff like this , where tons and tons of heroic jellyfish shut down nuclear power plants in Scotland and Israel, and stuff like this, where turtles shut down a major airplane runway for whole minutes at a time(and although that was due more to human sensitivity to the turtles’ presence, who’s to say that humans’ sensitivity to non-human life is not also a guerrilla tactic of the mother? ) and think, hmm, AIDS, superbug gonorrhea , multi-drug-resistant TB….is the planet fighting back on Her own after all?



Well, apart from the fact that the Earth is a complex living system made up of so many interlocking cycles, rhythms and states of being that we can’t parse them all let alone see how exactly they all work, she is also a larger Being who is part of Us, the All, and so Her fighting back, or separate human groups and individuals fighting on her behalf, is really only Us fighting with Ourselves after all.

Note that this does not mean that everything is OK. Competition and cooperation go on all the time within the life which is the Cosmos, and we fight or cooperate with different parts of ourselves all the time – it’s what makes it all go tick- tock. But if you see a woman being raped around the corner, you don’t go “Oh that’s alright then, it’s just part of the All”..no indeed, you intervene on the woman’s behalf, even paying with your life if need be.

It’s about the fight within Us, and We need to continue to struggle for the best benefit of All. If that means we kill the polluters, hang the corporates and blow up the dam builders- then that’s what we do. Hanging back in a kind of transcendental bliss is not what Life is about. We fight. With ourselves. And we die, all the time. Because nothing is fore-ordained. It can all still end in tears, you know.



So I draw the parallel of ecosphere struggle with my own recent and ongoing shadow work.

I don’t tolerate all my demons and love them to death, you know. The five year old little girl full of rage at being a girl- her I let live, and love her into integration with my individuated self. But other demons which constitute the multi-voiced entity I do drag kicking and screaming into the light, and stake to death. I’m sorry, but I’m unable to deal gently with some of my shadow selves.After recognising them and dialoguing with them long enough to, hopefully, understand who they are and where they came from - I kill them dead.

And so should we with some of the shadow beings who make up the totality of this Gaian system – or even wider, this cosmic self – tolerance and loving kindness is not, I suggest, the way to deal with them.



Like the compassionate jellyfish, I think we should consider intervening with violence if necessary, in this struggle within Us for everlasting Life or fairly sudden and equally everlasting Death.