Working

Sometimes I forget that I work. That what I do counts as work and has value. I don't have an external office with a schedule and colleagues. How can my life have value?
I keep the kitchen stocked and make sure there is dinner on the table and food and snacks to take myself and my husband through the upcoming days. It sometimes seems worthless until I notice it's easy to spend a hundred bucks on a meal for two I enjoy less than what I get at home.
I manage the rental of two flats. That sometimes really feels like non-work, the money arrives detached from effort on my part. Maybe I'm just a parasite. But then the tenants with the new baby suddenly need their washing machine replaced and I am working late at night tracking down a washer, someone to transport it, someone to install it, meeting them, coordinating their efforts. Keeping track of folks who have the skills and tools and strength I don't have that can be needed at a moment's notice. And not everyone is in a position to own their home. Not everyone wants to. The college kids who will only be here a few years don't need the headache and expense. I make it easy for them to belong here for a while, provide them with a nice place at a fair price.

the holy

The Holy

The sacred. It sounds like a thing. It’s not a thing, it’s a relationship. Sacredness is real, but the sacred may not be. What is sacred?

That which sustains us can be sacred. We can make it holy by honoring it and enacting its holiness.

As humans we are embedded in many realm which sustain us. We are sustained by the sun, source of all energy. We are sustained by the earth, the literal ground of being, the earth beneath our feet. We are sustained by water, without which there is no life. We are sustained by the living earth, the biosphere. We are sustained by the primary producers, the plants, who make the air breathable, who bind sunlight into food, whom we ear, whose bodies we use for clothing and shelter. We are sustained by the animals, our companions, who feed the plants, whom many of us eat, whose fur and skin we wear. We are sustained by our families of birth who bear us and feed us and teach us and protect us while we grow. We are sustained by our families of choice with whom we make our home and raise our children. We are sustained by our children, who give us love and a sense of the future. We are sustained by our communities which give us purpose and context, companionship and assistance. We are sustained by our own bodies, our own unconscious functioning, which we cannot control but constantly rely on. We are sustained by art, giving us new ways to see the world. All these contexts, nested, overlapping, sustain us, but we may not see that. We may see ourselves as separable, as independent. We may not realize that separating ourselves from these worlds pulls the ground out from under our feet, and will, in the end, kill us. We may think we can prosper at the expense of our community. We may think we can pollute the water as it flows away and not eat and breathe our own toxic waste. We may think that honoring life is saving the ‘life” of the fetus without honoring the woman in whom it is embedded.  All of these are mistakes of context. Thinking that an individual is the increment of life and can live independent of context creates fallacies. It creates heresies. It creates profanities. The sacred is known in honoring the greater wholes of which we are a part. Since those contexts are greater than our conscious mind, we cannot know them fully. We cannot shape them to our own ends, as their components and their feedback loops are not within our grasp.

As long as one posits no deities

If I consider myself an agnostic, and posit no deities, then why do I refer to Earth as Her?

Several reasons.

The first is semantic. We English speakers divide our world of perception into people and things. Things seldom command respect. They are usually seen as either inert and impossible to interact with or as suitable for use with no concern for our effect on the thing. Usually a thing is considered more valuable for our use of it, our shaping of it. A rock becomes a sculpture or a gem or a paving stone, a tree becomes board feet or carbon offsets.

The second is structural. Any dissipative or self-organizing structure is unpredictable in its transformations between stable states. This makes it somewhat unknowable in our experience. At the scale of the earth, the unpredictability is akin to our experience of a sentient self-directed being.

We don't worry about how an inanimate thing will react, even less, respond, when we interfere with it. Things don't respond, that's a characteristic of individuals.

I may not want to have a conversation with Her, certainly not beseech Her, but I do want to make and honor an intricate and personal relationship, and understand our effects on each other.