Growing up near Philadelphia, known as the city of brotherly love, a certain loving feeling was hard wired into my operating system. We were constantly reminded of the importance of community, to literally love our neighbors. This association set me up to embody a storytelling practice as Biophilia. For those new to Biophilia, let's break it down. Bio in Latin/Greek is a root word, meaning 'life’ and Philia/0 Philo means philosophy, the love of wisdom. Core DNA for Mel's Love Land activities is the definition of Biophilia as the love of all living things. Each company, person, organization we work with aligns in this space of loving and its call has co-created a connected network of Biophiliacs. It is another way of viewing, experiencing and sharing our gifts in the world. The reasons for this are many, and, the need for this work obvious. The worlds, art, story, creative development, bottom up payment systems, collaborative and connective sharing, a new way, a new day for us to build out an all systems love new way of storytelling.
You come to love all living things as you come to it. Maybe its the calling of the trees swaying in the wind whooshing gentle lullabies nourishing your heart. Perhaps a delight filled torrential rain storm in summer you dance through, a calling of the deepest stretches of the soul, maybe the sensory intoxication of jasmine in full bloom. We each find a moment of reconnection with our soul's inner grace, a necessity of remembering what we've known for all time. Yes. You also can find this innate inner power relationship through heart break, harmony, connection, collaboration. It matters not. Love is a recognition of everything as it is, exactly, with no spin or judgement. It is a presence that allows for all that exists to remain in harmonic connection. It is the moment of recognition there is a wholeness pattern of which we are a part of all. In Biophilia a way of knowing your place is necessary in the ecosystem and your gifts you were born to give are critical for the fullest healed vibrant expression of life. It is part of our bare melcessities, that which is necessary, essential and part of our harmonizing with the worlds we encounter.
At a recent gathering of our Biophiliac community choir, Band of Singers, a certain blossoming of the heart happened as we gave tone and music into a certain feeling of purpose and possibility for this love of all living things, where the definition of biophilia filled itself up into words, and in the sizzling offering of these sacred seed sound gatherings, it wasn't just the first part of it, the love of all loving things, the addition of, the willingness to take loving action, resonated across time and space. we were here showing up to love our neighbors, to take that love into everyone and harmonize, allowing all masks to fall. This session of the year where winter's light beckons, and veils dropped and the walls between this state and the others breathed open it was the insight of practiced biophilia, appreciation and grace. We sang, toned, moved, harmonized the connection of Mycelium by Kristin Kreeg, we took a journey into the beginnings of a flower rock opera, Begonia, being worked on by MAESA, the groups conductor to explore that temple into the heart of the flower, to enjoy a world of magic, musing, miracles.
Make no mistake it is in our willingness to love, the world changes. It’s this willingness we work with in the Mel's Love Land universe, this willingness means we have a choice about all the choices you make, the actions we take. This listening provides direction based on perceptions which are fueled by experiences the world you’re weighing down or lifting up.
If you are starting to wonder about Biophilia and are ready to consider the possibilities of a world in relationship with loving all that is, now is a good time to practice. Now is the time.
There are windows that frame realities that flow straight to the heart of the matter, flowing, with and by nature. When you find yourself in these spaces, where the inner and outer expressions are alive to what is you are beginning to the beingness of Biophilila.
For biophilia, Ernst Haeckel offered a first breath defining it as the study of the relationship of organisms with their environment. Folks ask me who broke ground on this topic and it is nature itself, it is the vibration of the universe, singing its one song, so deeply known 'that we move to it even when we can't name the tune." And it is. In the 70's Edward Wilson introduced to polite society the idea of, observing humans possess innate tendencies to seek connections with nature and other forms of life. This urge in his definition is "the urge to affiliate with other forms of life." In 2011 enlighted artist Bjork's 7th album titled Biophilia deepened the interconnections between art and our relationship with our natural ecosystems and a society coming into relationships with technologies.
We've repped an ever forming active definition as the love of all living things, open to understand more of the urgency, and, it is in this we see the expanded definition- the love of all living things AND the willingness to take loving action. We come into alignment, we further see each part as an authorship, informing the ecosystem's strength and vitality, inviting us to be our true authentic self, in love's fullest expression. It is in our connection to these systems, what we call, all systems love, our relationships, our nourishing, our life, our loving, grows and thrives, in ever deepening, beautiful cycles of life and death, seasons of change, as we know 'birth-less and death-less do we remain, Dear soul.'
CULTIVATING THE CONDITIONS TO LOVINGLY RECONCILE OUR HISTORY
Somewhere in the middle. I think we lost our way. There are reasons and seasons for love.
To me it’s an adjunct of the 'Walden Pond' philosophers born of the woods, nature, water's edge, the elements of an ecosystem, speaking out against, at that time an industrial expansion, with a full throated thirst for power that had lain waste, trauma, terror and distrust across abundant lands. The Naturalist movements of the 19th/20th centuries remembered the indigenous practices of life, that there was more atonement required for the reconnectio to flourish as earths inner and outer expressions. This movement influenced and sparked a necessary liberation work we continue to this day, aligned with nature, to stand beside her and return her home. This 'first' expression, a reckoning of what was done in the name of freedom on what we now call 'the Americas,' these United States. The murder and degradation of the original stewards of the land will be known, as we collectively attempt at heal, by stepping into interdependent relationship with nature, our nature and the nature of our environments and reconciling all atrocities.
Knowing history is a beginning of understanding, listening with love, sharing our gifts to nourish and create community care and work continues to be the light across the skies of possibility. If you consider the possibility there is another way, in each present moment, we all have the possibility to shift our POV toward a more loving timeline.
It's all there on the pages of a book born in New England, 1845. A young man of 27, Henry David Thoreau built a home on the shore of Walden Pond on land 'owned' by writer Ralph Waldo Emerson, inspired by former enslaved woman, Zilpah White, who lived in a one-room house on the common land that bordered Walden Road as she made a living spinning flax into linen fibers. Zilch White's ability to provide for herself at a time when few women lived alone was a singular accomplishment and an inspiration to Thoreau. Artists would unite around this movement, leading to a 20th century demanding to cultivate the conditions for a thriving, balanced, connected, loved, world. In what would be transcendentalism, (the belief in the inherent goodness of people and nature), creating a bridge for naturalists and activists to take the actions they were here on earth to do, to fully integrate a reconnection with all that is.
In Thoreau's essay On the Duty of Civil Disobedience, Thoreau wrote "Government is best which governs least;" and I should like to see it acted up to more rapidly and systematically. Carried out, it finally amounts to this —"government is best which governs not at all;" This activation essay spoke to many who heard the call, who believed in the soil and sovereignty, in bottom up governance, in the guts of thriving matter, turning the inner gears of resolve for Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Jr., suffragist Alice Paul, John F. Kennedy and various writers such as, Marcel Proust, Ernest Hemingway, Upton Sinclair, Sinclair Lewis, Walt Whitman, William Butler Yeats, Sophia Ripley, Margaret Fuller, Elizabeth Peabody, Ellen Sturgis Hooper, and Caroline Sturgis Tappan.
While we could definitely write for hours (and we have) about our connections to love and our all systems love movement, that calls for US to return to balance and harmony and grace of the path forward to what is healed and whole and well, and the influences on whose shoulders we stand upon. This movement of what we are now calling, biophilia, inter-relates with an eco-storytelling framework, that moved through transcendentalism and demands we express stories of wholeness, healed, thriving, beautiful stories that express what the 21st and 22nd centuries require of the history we are building now.
BE, FOR LOVING
Love is a knowing of our eternity. It is an action not a vacuum. Each act has an equal reaction as no energy is lost. In our loving we are returned to grace. There is no doubt the world is meant to go bump in the night, to make mistakes in, to not understand, to experience through, to fail outward, to keep going. It’s often said, if there isn’t an experience of peace, the story isn’t over. The world is meant to be beautiful in to find the perfection of balance of the ecosystems to live in the divinity of our inter-connections. It’s a ways to go but for a while we’ve been practicing community care and meeting up in the world’s of biophilia, a neighborhood gathering to understand, the ways of the love of all living things, years of loving, expressing and centering into the love of all living things, the mistakes, the breakups, the ups and downs and here we are in a return, a wholeness pattern known to others, and not to our heart.
There are folks who do not have your best interests at heart, who would rather see death and destruction than change their minds. Please do not get caught up in thought forms that spiral you away from your soul center allowing them to bring you down. Take loving action, practice the willingness to do what you can, where you are and with what you have in nourishing movement with what your soul is longing for you to do. The sunrise will always come no matter what. In every environment, it is the willingness to love and in that love, take loving action, to share the gifts we’ve been given, the yearning of life to find connection and collaboration through our loving.
If it all seems like a lot, and life is meant to be 'the most,' It might be. Maybe take a page from an old standard, 'sometimes, you have to fall to rise again.' Falling is when you choose-- to rise -- by getting up and lovingly taking action or to shutter in and remain in stasis. Perhaps today is a day you fall into the practice of listening, being aware of all the love that surrounds you and the pure hugs-ship of deep connections to our greatest neighbor, Mother Earth. as we learn to love more actively.
We are always in a practice, a cycle of considering the possibilities of what love would do and exercising our practices in 100 day cycles. Be about love, now and forever. A love so fierce it is fully known in every relationship you entertain. Be a biophiliac if it speaks to you. We are open to all ideas that allow folks to share the gifts they have been given and to build community care through the work of loving all living things.
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Melanie Lutz – Mel's Love Land
All Systems Love
Writer/Producer/Love Activist
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