The World has devolved into a culture of dissociation, where we as a people have become estranged from our natural World, from community, from our bodies, from our creativity, from the mystery.

You are hurrying through your life, receiving information and entertainment mediated by electronics, driving past each other to get home, eating mass-produced food grown and prepared by strangers.

You are forgetting, in this hurried and stressful culture, that you are a creature moving and breathing on a living planet.

This forgetting of your place on Earth is the source of personal and collective loneliness, grief and disempowerment.

Depression, stress, drug abuse, divorce, crime, terror, war, poverty, social anxiety, food insecurity, unemployment, economic inequality, suicide, waste, pollution, natural disasters, climate change …

the more we upgrade our technologies and policies, the overarching trend is one of decline.

From existentialist philosophers to indigenous teachings, to cosmology and Buddhism and other faith traditions – all have a lot to say about the respect for the interdependence and connection of all existence, of which we are a part.

Interdependence is about life. It is about the big changes shaking our World, in technology, the environment, education, economy, culture, Society, people … everything.

Interdependence means that everybody and everything is intertwined as a single system. It means that every action you make, even every thought and feeling you have, exerts its influence on this system.

Likewise, interdependence also means that every action, thought and feeling of every person is influencing everybody simultaneously. So, interdependence has enormous implications.

Spirit of Life, remind me of my deep belonging to this World.

May I know in my bones my true place in the family of Earth.

Just as the roots of a tree belong to the soil and microbes,

and the branches of that tree belong to the wind and birds that come to perch,

may I know my own deep roots and wide branches

as belonging to a greater forest of life.

As such, may I know regularly the gift of grace,

and act whenever I am able in service to the whole.