Goddessing: A Goddess / Pagan Blog

Teetering at the end of a pier in coastal Connecticut, the boy screamed and sobbed and threatened to jump. It was warm and sunny, an otherwise perfect New England day in a seaport called Mystic.

A crowd gathered as the boy's father inched close and talked him from the edge.

"I don't want to be here," the boy shouted.

"Where?" the father asked.

"On this earth."
(Antidepressant use growing, even among children)

According to a Reuters report, pre-school children are the fastest-growing group of patients in the United States getting antidepressant medication.

Of course, I have no idea what the scientific explanation might be for this phenomenon, but spiritually, I'm all over it. It seems like the Earth is a really hard place to live on these days. If taking in all the bad news is hard for me, an optimistic 50-something who understands content-bias in the media, think what it's like for children. We're bombarded with bad news on the TV and online, bad news not just about X or Y situation, but about the future of life on this earth. I can't imagine a childhood full of this planetary doom and gloom. It's hard enough coping with gendered identity and schoolyard bullying, let alone coping with the news that there may not be enough water to drink when you grow up.

To make things worse, many children live in families that believe in a biblical Armageddon, famlies that actually hope and pray that the end times are near. Most kids don't have the benefit of the Pagan perspective:

Come the Rapture, can I have your car?

You don't have to be a fundamentalist Christian, Muslim or Jew to believe in Armageddon, to live in fear of it, to anticipate it, to be fundamentally shaped by the possibility or potential of it. I'm personally guilty of loving post-apocalyptic fiction. Many of us, of all manner of secular and spiritual stripes, secretly hope for some kind of apocalypse, or believe it's inevitable. We may think the Mother will rebalance things through ecological and population disruptions. Perhaps from bad times will come a much-needed fresh start. We theorize that if humans are thrown back to thinking daily about where and how to get water and food, we won't have time for thinking about how to blow each other up with landmines or weapons of mass destruction. We want to get back to the land, to live off the grid, to be better prepared for the bad times ahead of us. After all, some of us think, we are in the end-times: the Kali Yuga, the end of the Mayan Calendar.

Well, I've had enough. Certainly the population of Pagans and Science of Mind practitioners and Wiccans and New Age folks and Heisenburg Uncertainty Seculars has reached a critical mass such that, if we put our minds together, we could create a thought-form to counter the well-constructed and potent Armageddon/Apocalypse thought-form that our Christian brothers and sisters here in American have been building stronger and stronger with each mid-East situation and every piece of news about earthquakes, mud slides, extinctions, pollution, and near-miss comets?

What would happen if we all agreed to believe in an impending event that will renew the earth, restore the health of oceans and skies, remove from danger the endangered species, catalyze the production and use of earth-friendly forms of energy and housing and locomotion, instill in human beings an instinctive consciousness of cooperation and compassion? What if we embodied our beliefs? Made bumperstickers, gave public talks, prophesied, wrote books about the impending ... what should we call it?

The Awakening?
The Cosmic Fresh Start?
The Great Evolving?

What do you think? Is environmental activism enough?

Reduce, recycle, reuse, rethink.

Permalink posted by Sage -- 12:01 PM.

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