Sufi master – Fire Season | Myth of Progress and Endless Economic growth fostering Ecocide

Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee – Sufi teacher in the Naqshbandiyya-Mujaddidiyya Sufi Order – writes for Parabola Magazine Fire Season – A Sufi master looks at—and beyond—the approaching flames

“Will the fires and floods finally awaken us, turn our attention back to the living Earth? Or have we lost that connection, that place of belonging? How long before we are forced to wake from this nightmare of alienation? I used to imagine how Spring would come after the hard Winter of materialism, after all those years when we put profit before people, before the more-than-human world.

The fires remind us that our present story is broken, its myth of progress and endless economic growth fostering ecocide.

Nature untouched, thrives.

Meanwhile, in East Africa, the Somali pastoralists have already moved on, after watching their animals die in the years of drought. They’ve left the land they’d walked for centuries, moving into camps. They know that climate change brings hunger and migration, as they suffer the effects of our use of fossil fuels. They did not put carbon into the atmosphere. They are too poor to pollute. But they are among the first to suffer.

I am sure we will find a victim to blame, anything to escape the deep knowing that our way of life is over, that we cannot continue with this story of exploitation and consumerism, this plague that is burning the land.

Years ago I had a series of visions of the future, of a civilization waiting to be born. I was shown how we would find new ways of healing, bringing together the wisdom of the shaman with the techniques of modern medicine. I saw how we would be given a technology as simple as photosynthesis that could provide us all with free and unpolluting energy from the sun. I saw earth magic coming alive, plants speaking to us again after centuries of silence.

The pandemic has taught us about uncertainty, and the need to listen even more closely to the Earth, to sense her present imbalance.

I used to think that I would live to see the future of my visions. Now I only hope that my grandchildren’s grandchildren will walk in a kinder world, alive to a multidimensional kinship, knowing that everything they can see, hear, and touch is sacred.”

Text excerpted from his article. https://parabola.org/2021/08/01/fire-season/

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