Mother Gaia's Knitting
The Web of Relationships & the Field of Karma

By Stephen Wing

“All is One,” said the mystics.

So the leaders of the Free World created a unified global economy under the banner of Free Trade. But the more our corporate executives and public officials strive for the economic Oneness of everyone on Earth, the wider grows the income gap between us.

“We are all related,” the Native elders said. We're related by blood, if not by marriage: the blood that seems to frequently flow as a necessary lubricant for the gears of the world economy.

In the 21st century, as more wild land is colonized by the industries that feed us, much of that blood is still indigenous.

“Everything is connected,” the ecologists said. A breathtakingly bold experiment is now proving it once and for all by filling the upper atmosphere with greenhouse gases, altering the entire planet below. But while we're waiting for the oceans to rise, why not take our SUVs to the beach?

In our individualistic era, when an experience of Oneness with the Universe can get you medicated, we're so busy celebrating our diversity that we've forget this fundamental unity.

“Create your own reality!” say the New Age channelers. After all, you can't change anyone but yourself. We are each evolving at our own pace on our own spiritual path. Other people enter our lives only to teach us what we need to learn walk-on  players in a script created by our past actions.

And for all the victims of global warming, Free Trade, indigenous land-grabs, etc., a corollary mantra applies: “Tough karma!”

As Jesus warned, the poor will always be with us. If the sick, homeless and war-ravaged are responsible for their realities like we are, then we can relax and focus on our own challenges. Perhaps they're reincarnated slave-traders or Indian-killers coming back for a dose of their own medicine. We say prayers for them or donate money to improve our own karma, not theirs. Perhaps. But back in my hitchhiking days, every now and then I would find myself riding with a driver who'd been drinking and had passed another car dangerously. I would close my eyes and picture myself pulling out all the good karma I had and pooling it with the other driver and passengers and it always seemed to be enough good to get us all through.

It seems I've always lived and moved in relationship to others: strangers, if not family and friends. Whether my actions are reactions to theirs or theirs to mine it seems impossible to untangle. My livelihood depends on people I've never met, the customers at work; my life itself depends on others who grow my food. On every level – emotional, economic, ecological – my life is relationship.

If I close my eyes and visualize my relationship to you becomes a luminous, flexible thread between us that tenses and relaxes as I respond to the pull of my other relationships and you to yours. A web of similar strands stretching invisibly from person to person all the way around the world. Connecting clusters of friends and relatives into intricate designs that shift and change. Just close your eyes and you'll see them, glowing and pulsating, connecting all our diversity into One: the Web of Relationships.

From a distance, it might resemble a field that enfolds the planet – invisible, like the electromagnetic or gravitational fields, but subtler and finer, undetectable with any instrument yet devised: the Field of Karma.

Undetectable, yet its ongoing effects are easily observable in our actions and reactions as the moral and ethical experiment of life on Earth unfolds. We are its instrument.

Human history is an epic tug-of-war between people ignorant of their karmic interdependence, just as geology records the push and pull of continental plates. Current events are only the latest seismic ripples in a long chain of complex relationships.

Presently, through an unspoken economic arrangement inherited from our parents, we in the “Free World” benefit personally from global injustice in subtle ways every day. Millions of people toiling around the world feel us tugging on the invisible web, demanding what they supply. Species go extinct every hour as our collective impact destroys living communities of relationship called “ecosystems.” And We the People still send millions of dollars to Washington every April, as if nothing was wrong.

If we can't change anyone except ourselves, what can we do?

I was born already me. But the person I've since become was shaped by contact with other people – parents, siblings, teachers, friends, even the playground bully. That means I can potentially influence others in turn, if only through my example. None of us is powerless; none can escape the awesome responsibility of our example to others, especially our young.

Create your own reality! It's good practice. Then join a conspiracy to co-create a new reality on planet Earth with millions of other conscious spirits. For starters, come out and help co-create Spring in Atlanta with an interfaith Equinox circle in Freedom Park, Saturday, March 19, 3:00-4:00 p.m.

Thank you, Creator Spirit! Thank you, Mother Earth! Thank you, all my relations!

Stephen Wing is an Atlanta poet and activist, author of the immortal hitchhiking poetry classic Crossing the Expressway: Poems from the Open Road. To help plan and prepare the Spring Equinox circle, email Stephen: stevew@newleaf-dist.com