RESPONSIBILITY TOWARDS THE MORE THAN HUMAN WORLD AND BEING AN ADULT

I usually talk about becoming a psychospiritual adult in terms of being able to discover and answer three core questions.

•     What are my unique gifts/purpose—the reason why I was put on the earth at this time and in this place

•     Who is the community with whom I want to share my unique gifts?

•     How do I share my gifts (delivery system)

I’m still a fan of these questions.  But I’d want to add these two questions

• How do I steward the more than human world?

• How do I interact with the more than human world?

I think of these questions more as something that psychospiritual adults have a responsibility for more than questions which guide becoming an adult. Let me illustrate this using me as an example, not to boast but hopefully to clarify.

My unique purpose is to facilitate earth based Jewish adults using my gifts of writing and being a creative thinker/questioner.  My audience is people who are interested in earth based Jewish spiritual development.  My delivery system is my website which houses my writings and my teaching.

This paragraph above doesn’t address my responsibilities to the more than human world or how I interact with it. Obviously I have some kind of connection with the more than human world or facilitating earth based Jewish psychospiritual adults wouldn’t be my unique purpose.  But the range of how I might interact with the more than human world while facilitating earth based Jewish adults is really wide.

Further, when I meditate on these questions, I discover that I have an integrity issue in my own life living in suburbia. That’s not exactly news to me, but asking these questions highlights why I am out of integrity.  I live someplace that promotes lawns and landscaping, all of which could be done in ways that have integrity, and usually are not. It’s good that I don’t spray or fertilize my lawn, but my neighbors do.  I also have these useless and not even aesthetically pleasing plantings in front of the house because it is what you are supposed to do and to preserve the resale value of the house.  Somehow I don’t think the more than human world really understands or cares about resale value.

These two questions might look like the same question, and there is potentially some overlap, but they aren’t the same.  Right now my small garden, my organic lawn and my purchasing of local pastured raised meats are the main ways I steward or contribute to the stewarding of the more than human world. But I actually interact more with the more than human world in my prayer practice that is done in the woods and in my regular walks in wooded areas. 

Stewardship seems to me a human responsibility towards the more than human world given that we humans are designed to shape the more than human world to meet our material needs.  We have this capacity to impact the more than human world in exactly the same way that birds have the capacity to fly, deer have the capacity to eat both grasses and leaves of bushes and run away from predators, that foxes have the ability to kill and eat mice and voles. The question for we humans isn’t do we change the more than human world or not, it’s how do we change it.  Even gatherer-hunters change the more than human world and have the capacity to overgather what we need to survive—be that tubers or wooly mammoths or firewood.

The purpose of asking these two questions is to ask yourself how well your current practices are serving you and the more than human world. When I ask myself these questions, my answer is that my stewardship isn’t serving me or the more than human world nearly well enough.  My prayer practice in the woods is OK (pretty damn good for suburbia) and my walks through the woods are good, but not frequent enough (it’s 2-3 hours at a pop, 1-2 times a week).  So I need to do something different to embody being an adult.