I felt like it wasn't appropriate for me to be in your book until I saw the original subtitle, "Choosing to Parent the Earth." Then I realized that any choice for me about having an individual child, a child of my own, really comes out of that other choice that I've already made, to parent the Earth. I don't know yet, if in parenting the Earth, it's going to be appro-priate for me also to have a child of my own to look after or not - and that's where the ambivalence is. What I realized is that at this point in my life it's important to take the time to explore very,very deeply to find out in what ways I can best parent the Earth.

So many of us talk about humans walking on the Earth, but this body - my body, your body - is Earth. There is an arbitrary boundary we've established that is not real. So when I talk about parenting the Earth, I include human beings in the Earth. Because our bodies are of the Earth, part of parenting a specific child is part of parenting the Earth.

There is a field called deep ecology. Last fall, we took a group up on Mt. Diablo for a weekend, and explored the consequences of deep ecology. We did what is called a "Council of All Beings," which is a ritual format in which people speak for other life forms. There are a lot of exercises and meditation time that lead up to that. People can really tune into whatever being wants to speak through them that particular day. Unlike power animals, this being is spontaneous for that moment, for that gathering. It's a format that is being used by several people now around the planet to work with this issue of ecological identity, reclaiming our "ecological self."

The ecological self I think of as a concentric circle. It is an inclusive circle where there is no boundary between what we consider our person and the Earth. So the wind blows through our bodies, and oceans are in our bodies, and if something occurs in the Earth's body, it reverberates through our own system and every lifeform. So we begin to identity with a rabbit, or a rock or the trees. We're continuous with all the Earth. And when we truly grasp that, there's no way you can go about living a harmful life in terms of dumping wastes and feeling separate from the conse-quences of our actions.

In thinking about how to parent the Earth, I think of two of the principles of deep ecology: interconnectedness, and the right that every lifeform has to self realization. This requires love. Love is the willingness to stretch one's self, and to keep going in order to facilitate another's spiritual growth, and our own in the process. I think this is what parenting is, too. I wonder how to distinguish love from parenting really. Yet in parenting, there tends to be a relationship where one being is less able to take care of itself, so there's a looking after, and that's a particular kind of loving relationship.

Parenting is a term that evokes a lot of emotion from people, but it's somewhat undefined. I think in this book, we're in the process of defining it from an expanded point of view. Parenting humankind, extended parenting. There needs to be a willingness to be a little fuzzy and unformed at this point. It's very much a cultural definition. We tend to associate it in our culture with biological reproduction. The real parents are considered to be the people who conceived this child. Then there are foster parents, adoptive parents. That's part of the materialist point of view, that the physical is the bottom line. That's what really counts. We get into all sorts of conflicts, due to our own cultural conditioning. In other places there is social parenting and biological parenting. One's bio-logical father might be a particular man, but one's true, real father in the cultural sense is the social one.

Our traditional view of parenting is linked to our institutions which are based on power and control. We tend to think that we have power over our children, and that we have a right to that because they're from our seed. It's enslavement. In a certain psychological sense, people have to unburden themselves from it. In therapy we often have to deal with this parental expectation.

I have ambivalence about actually having children. There is a tremendous amount of very real attention and energy that needs to be focused on children to raise them. And a huge amount of work. There are other things we need to give up in order to do that.

Several of the childless people that I know have said that people tell them that they're selfish for not having children. What a projection! But it fits in with our beliefs, with our culture. It's odd isn't it? In-dividualism is one of our prime values, and at the same time, selfishness is one of the worst things anyone can be whether it concerns children, money or love. The same actions can be either called selfish or individual, and you never know which one you're going to be labeled.

I was pregnant once, in India. I didn't realize that I had left the country pregnant. I got really sick over there, probably from some contaminated food or water. When I came back, I got a medication for parasites, one which is contraindicated for pregnancy. And then I found out I was pregnant. So we were in a bit of a dilemma, because the drugs I had taken were very bad for that first trimester of pregnancy, and I really didn't want to have a baby right then anyway. It was just a year after we had gotten together, we had very little money, and our lives were really in flux. So I was pretty clear about it. "Okay, I don't want this, it doesn't feel right, I'll have an abortion." Interestingly enough, it was much harder for Djann. He didn't want to have a child right then, but he felt really bad about abortion. I didn't feel bad at all. I felt like I was being very conscious about it. I was tuned into the being and had a sense of communion. I conveyed the place that I was in, that perhaps there would be a time when it would work better. I had an abortion, and forgot about it pretty much after that. It was an event that felt complete. Having children wasn't an issue for us in the intervening 7 years. We focused on our relationship and on our work.

Then this issue about having children came in with a huge bang for me last fall. I really felt like someone was going "Knock knock - Let me in." It was very, very strong. I felt an intense longing. And when I stopped and listened, it felt like communication. I was very aware of this being. I had just come out of a period in my life, a few years of really painful relationship issues, a lot of rethinking about "love," romantic love, passion and sexuality, a lot of things, and I began to experience in this "knocking on the door" another aspect of myself that I'd never encountered, which I'd have to call "the mother." It was a wonderful mother.

I always associated mother with control. I haven't had very positive feelings about that. My idea of it was entrapping for both the mother and the child. I'm not alone in that. It's part of our cultural heritage. I don't think it reflects particularly on my own mother. My mother and I have gone through a difficult period, and come out positively on the other side.
Being the "wonderful mother" was definitely a physical, emotional, and heart experience of "Oh my goodness, so this is part of me too!" When I felt these maternal urges, I really felt good in the role. It is a part of me I'd really like to know more. It was quite amazing, very moving to me. I realized that some of my love had really been displaced love, maternal love inappropriately interjected into adult relationships. I told Djann about this feeling, but he was still ambivalent. A friend said, "Why don't you and Djann look inside for your own answer?" The message we got was that there is definitely someone who wants to come in to participate in the great healing, and that it's a totally free choice for me and Djann. The questions we should ask ourselves about it were, would it be fun? Would it bring us closer? Would we grow? So we sat with that. I said to Djann, " I'd really like you to think about the questions, and I will too." I was really clear. I was scared, but I wanted a child.

So Djann thought about it for two weeks, and I didn't mention it, and I wasn't on pins and needles either. A couple of weeks later he said he had thought about it, and he really wanted to have a child.

I was very moved. I've had a few relationships - this is my second marriage - but I've never been with a man who really wanted to have a child with me. I realized I haven't been with someone who wanted one regardless, and that's been part of my disinterest in having one. No single parenting for me. It was part of my idea of romantic love, really.

I was not feeling very well last fall. I was really depleted from my couple of years of emotional trauma. So I said, " Great, I'd like to really get healthy. I'm going to spend a couple of months cleaning myself out, giving up coffee, and various things, and then next spring, March, or April, let's seriously start this process." And somehow we just felt like it could happen then, because there was this creature wanting to come in. Just as these discussions were happening, as we were coming to a decision, I missed my next period, which was really surprising. We'd been a little bit casual, enough to give me a margin of doubt. The real irony was that we'd been camping earlier in the summer, and I had gotten something. I thought I had giardia. I had some sort of infection, and I had been given the same drug I had had when we'd come back from India. Here I was in the same situation, thinking that I was pregnant, having taken the same drug. I couldn't believe it, I just couldn't believe it. And I thought, this is really strange but here I am, and what am I going to do? Djann and I decided we would have this child anyway. It was crazy for a little while. But we really decided to go ahead with the pregnancy. I got one of the home pregnancy tests. I was absolutely convinced that it was going to turn out positive, and it didn't. By this time, my period was three weeks late, which has never happened, and I was feeling all the symptoms of pregnancy. Actually, I was feeling about 5 months pregnant. It's amazing. I mean, my clothes were starting to feel uncomfortable...I was swelling up. We were crushed. Djann and I were really disappointed. Which in a way felt good, because it made me realize that we really wanted to have a child.

I think the same day I took the test, or right around in that period, I picked up a magazine, and there was an article in there about a woman who had had a baby who had Down's Syndrome. It was her third child. She had been persuaded by her doctor to put it in a home very early. She had visited this daughter over the years, she was now 11 or 13, and she decided to bring her home. She didn't want to leave her in that institution. It was a very touching article about getting to know her daughter, and the kinds of things they could do together, and teaching her how to swim, and what a healing it was for the mother. I sat there and released this incredible grief that I didn't know I had about the abortion 7 years ago. And when I calculated, it was exactly, almost to the day, 7 years before. I had just been in a group that was talking about 7 year cycles, and I couldn't think of anything significant that had happened 7 years before. Right after that, I had what might have been a miscarriage, a tremendous amount of cramping, and then started a period. It is conceivable that I actually was pregnant, but what happened was this enormous relief, and cleansing, and prayerfulness, and healing the part of me that had abandoned the child that I had never received. After that, the whole issue just faded away. It was such a strong,wordless experience, discovering for a short time the real mother in me.

I ask myself the question, can the emergence of the positive mother within myself manifest without a biological child? Are there ways in which I can be that person, or be that energy, or allow that energy to come through me without a physical child? This has become the challenge. I can't answer that yet, because I don't really know. I associate the positive mother with tremendous compassion and acceptance of other people just as they are, and I have to say that my moments for being able to be in that place with people are getting longer, which feels really good. There's a quality of tenderness and "looking afterness," and a willingness to put my self concerns aside. What I discovered was that it wasn't a feeling of actually putting self concerns aside, but honoring self through the energy and attention directed toward something that couldn't care for itself. A change in my sense of self, setting aside an old self.
I have certainly been in love with the Earth, and had a very strong feeling of wanting to give to the Earth for a long time. I've written about it and taught the deep ecology I'm doing right now, but I oddly enough don't suffer for the Earth in the same way since all of this happened. I feel instead the same compassion and acceptance that I associate with the "mother."

I'm accepting that Earth's body, like our own, will eventually die. I'm noticing the change from loving it and suffering with it as victim, to loving it and really feel committed to learning how to care for it. So my life right now is about Self discovery, capital "S" I would call it. It's very personal too; it's an ongoing recognition that I'm not operating at full capacity, that I don't know what my contribution really is, and that I really want to find out. I've had to initiate a lot of cleaning up, I mean a huge amount of very painful cleaning up.

Why am I here, what am I here for? What do I really want to be doing that has heart and joy in it? It's really to be working with and sharing with people who are deeply committed to self-exploration and to being as fully themselves as they can. Particularly working with their ecological and cultural identities.

Part of me wants to speak that hasn't spoken yet. I've just been sitting here realizing that for me parenting the Earth has a lot to do with preserving the cultural gene pool, the cultural diversity we need to survive. That is part of why I am an anthropologist. For a long time I've been attracted to helping people understand that what may appear to be threatening and disturbing in another culture or in another person is just a different way of meeting the challenges of life we all share. That motherly feeling I spoke of earlier is familiar to me as a teacher of anthro-pology. I feel it fairly consistently in a classroom where I facilitate students in their opening to the cultural dimension of life, and to the parts of themselves that resonate with other cultures. There is something of parenting, of love, in teaching.

There are a lot of organizations working to preserve and help other cultures, but none have really called me. None is right for me. I'm not sure why. But I recognize that the process I am going through now is important for me.

My children are the cultures of the Earth, and I am also a child of them. I was born in the highlands of New Guinea and I come right out of the womb of India. Other places too. There's an image I have of these many cultures around the world being children in need of some protection, or some voice to speak for them, or for their own voices to speak for themselves. This is what a good parent does. This feeling is very deep in me and makes me want to cry, because the frustration is that I haven't quite found how to do that.

I went on a short vision quest last year, asking questions like Who am I? What is my real work? At dawn I got up to dance and pray to the rising sun and this poem came through.

I am Indian maiden,
I am woman of this Earth.
I am weaver of the baskets,
I am keeper of the hearth.
I am teacher of the children,
I am speaker of the truth.
I am seeker of the spirit,
I am dancer full of mirth.
I am lover of this planet.
I'm preparing for the birth.

When that came through, it was really unexpected. I haven't written poetry for years. But preparing for the birth felt like my own birth, the birth of any child, and the birth of Earth. Earth at a new level. Earth emerged, Earth revealed. Gaia revealed. In a way I think we really can't separate out parenting the Earth from parenting ourselves. Parenting the Earth includes parenting physical children, and parenting ourselves. The duality between the parent and the one who is parented also disappears. Parenting our children includes teaching them, or embodying for them, how to be parents for ourselves.

I think my work lies in communication in some ways, teaching, speaking and writing. Working with people. And I need to honor the world we live in. Nurturing the Earth now comes from a delightful caring rather than from fear. I don't know what the outcome is, I have tremen-dous faith in the healing process in the largest sense. I believe, I have faith that we're not going to destroy the Earth. I have faith that we'll in fact restore it, and restore ourselves.

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