Practitioner Articles
On remembering what is Holy by Ais Esther
On remembering what is Holy
This earth will grow cold,
a star among stars
and one of the smallest,
a gilded mote on blue velvet—
I mean this, our great earth.
This earth will grow cold one day,
not like a block of ice
or a dead cloud even
but like an empty walnut it will roll along
in pitch-black space . . .
You must grieve for this right now
—you have to feel this sorrow now—
for the world must be loved this much
if you’re going to say “I lived”
These past weeks I have found myself deep in contemplation. Like many people I know, the experience of watching the Amazon consumed by flames has been utterly wrenching. I have felt acutely my love for beasts, organisms, and life in all forms. I have laid my hands upon trees as I passed them. The great space-holders of nature, churning the chemical balance of the planet into the exact alignment that supports life. I wake up with the voice of Caroline Myss in the room; ‘all life breathes together’. I sense a nameless horror in the air. I have colluded in a great trespass here.
In the new-age, esoteric and healing-arts community, it is rare to hear the language of what is Holy invoked. Organised religion has left scars that mean we choose our verbiage cautiously. Sacrosanct; extremely sacred or inviolable. Hallowed; things holy or sacred. These words, I have forgotten them.
One of the most ecumenical spiritual teachings is that what is in one is in the whole. In the tarot it finds form in ‘as above, so below’. In Biblical terminology the mantra ‘whatever you do to the least of these, you do to me’.Indian teacher Prem Rawat notes ‘you are not only a drop in the ocean but the ocean in a drop’. We live in a connected universe, it was thus ever, and so goes the Amazon, go we.
And so, I found a tree, and I prayed with it. And it went like this.
Dear God,
Help me to remember what is Holy. Help me to preserve and protect the environment that gives me life. Help me to live in balance with things sacrosanct. Help me not to trespass on Hallowed ground.
Amen
Ais works out of Qi offering Tarot Readings and Metaphysical Counselling every Sunday
