Earth Interbeing Food Commons Workbook

I’m back, Bessie the cow, the Earth Interbeing’s messenger.

This time I get to tell you about place. Here we enter a way of living most of you will have a difficult time getting your head around. Way back in European history, say 3,000 years ago, your ancestors would have a lived experience of place, a way of living extinguished by the early Imperium – the Roman Empire and later the Holy Roman Empire. Be that as it may, let’s do place.

To remind us, all beings share a single purpose: to care for the Earth Interbeing and all its ways of being. The wholeness of Earth Interbeing, its harmony and balance, depends upon the efforts of all beings to preserve, recover, and renew it.

A place inhabits us; we do not own it. We live within a place with all the other beings who also live there. Think about all the people who live in a place with you. Add all the pets, wildlife, farmed animals, plants, trees, and all the other life forms I have not mentioned who also live in the place.

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The way of Earth Interbeing.
Benefit from obeying and yielding to the spirit.

The I Ching has a deep history. Its roots go deep into the oracle bone divination of the Chinese Bronze Age, and its philosophical commentaries dating to the third century BCE secured its place as a central text for Chinese thought. It eventually found its way to the West.

The I Ching teaches us what is important in life. It gives us insights into the fundamental issues of our lives and instructs us on how we can nourish the virtues necessary to connect with the spirit and to manifest its ways within our lives and in the world. It guides us to know our common need to live in harmony with the spirit and builds our capacities to respond to life in ways that benefit all.

People who consult the I Ching have a complex relationship with it. Many approach the I Ching as a spiritual teacher. However, the I Ching shares more than wisdom; through its readings, it offers a conversation.

Louise for the past several years has worked on her own I Ching commentaries, a collection of hexagram essays, which she calls The I Ching of Earth Interbeing, a project, she says, remains very much a work in progress. You can access her I Ching commentary at wayofhumanity.net

We asked the I Ching what it wanted to share in its second Meat, Complicity and Thou reading. We received from the I Ching Hexagram 37 with a moving line in the 1^st place. This appears below, using Louise’s I Ching hexagram essay.

For the words balance, complicity, cosmos, exceptionalism, harmony, interbeing, virtue,  ways of the spirit, world, and worldly concerns, please visit the Glossary, which provides a brief definition of their meaning as used in this essay.

Hexagram 37 Way of Earth Interbeing

The Great Spirit weaves the ways and love for Earth Interbeing into the sacred tapestry of Creation. We know ourselves as Earth and a natural process that has led to our moment of being. The Earth Interbeing has the fundamental responsibility to maintain its dynamic balance and harmony to sustain its ongoing Creation and survival. All beings have the fundamental purpose of life to care for the Earth and all life. The well-being of all depends on that of the whole.

The relationship between the Interbeing and the Great Spirit serves as the model for all life, from family to community to place, to Earth Interbeing, to cosmos. Balance and harmony emerge from the morality of restraint and reciprocity. Kindness, calm, and sharing express the love of the Great Spirit that flows through Interbeing and brings about harmonious relationships. We learn the ways of the Great Spirit and pass this knowledge to rising generations.

The powerfully seductive path of exceptionalism denies the Great Spirit and promotes the delusion that we as isolated individuals have dominion over Earth Interbeing and the whole. Those who follow this dangerous path willingly harm other beings and the Earth for self-benefit and then ignore the devastating imbalance and discord they cause. When people act in ways that separate them from Interbeing and the Great Spirit, arrogance and fear take over the direction of their lives.

The wise choose to serve Earth Interbeing. The harmony and balance they promote come from knowing the sacred within all life and the Earth. By faithfully following the spiritual path, being and actions harmonize with the way of the Great Spirit and restore the balance of the whole.

We value the wholeness of the sage. It takes wholeness to fulfill our responsibilities of caring for Earth Interbeing and restoring its balance and harmony when disrupted. The sage persistently and firmly turns away from beliefs in its exceptionalism and complicity with what harms Creation.

Universal reciprocity subjects all to its rule for it sustains balance and harmony. All life takes from the Earth Interbeing to survive, and all life returns these gifts in some way back to the whole so that it may recover from the taking, a rebalancing and restoration of harmony and balance. Earth Interbeing embodies this complicated web of giving and taking: a bee takes the flower’s nectar and gives back by pollinating it.

People, like all other life forms, have the responsibility to care for Earth Interbeing, a relationship of reciprocity, which goes beyond a transactional exchange as it involves generosity, caring for others, and the sharing of all the blessings we have received. All of nature gives to people. Caring for life and the Earth keeps the community whole. Giving and receiving turns the wheel of harmony and balance. When beings only take, they do great harm.

Balance and harmony depend upon the flow of good feelings within interactions: love, patience, respect, and gratitude. The culture of Earth Interbeing sets these positive interactions as its norm, and beings thrive on these feelings. Children learn the ways of good feelings from how adults interact with them and each other and from the encouragement they receive when they relate to others in the same ways. Before misunderstandings solidify into conflict or isolation, others help to resolve the difficulties in ways that support kindness and gratitude. The culture further supports these values through celebrations, feasts, and cooperative efforts, which bring the community together to enjoy each other while doing needed collective work.

Sages respect the wholeness, strength, and knowledge of others. Thus, they refrain from imposing their will upon others as that would diminish the others’ wholeness, strength, and knowledge. Every being of the incredibly diverse Earth Interbeing has its own ways of understanding a situation that differs from our own. The sage has the wisdom to learn from the points of view of others. From this collective wisdom, the Interbeing discerns how to respond to challenging situations in ways that all benefit. In a society of equals, we need to have a proper perception of others.

Diversity only makes the Interbeing stronger. A community of equals recognizes and values differences in individual skills, knowledge, and abilities. The talents and gifts of individuals do not make them special nor give them power over others. The willingness to understand and learn from others comes from valuing others and the knowing that everyone belongs and has a voice.

Actions have consequences for the actor and the cosmos. We have responsibility for our choices and take it upon ourselves to make amends for any harm we inflict upon others.

Natural and moral limits constrain all beings. Exceeding them degrades the Earth and life relationships; thus, living within these boundaries protects us from danger. The wise community disciplines itself by limiting its needs and remaining ever grateful for all its blessings. It lives contentedly within the natural and moral bounds that it voluntarily accepts, knowing that its well-being depends upon the well-being of all life and the Earth.

The community guards against behaviors that disrupt the balance and harmony of Earth Interbeing. They vigilantly discourage the accumulation of wealth or asserting power over others. The community upholds equality as a moral principle to hold everyone to the same rules and to avoid hierarchical relations and authoritative leadership.

The purpose of life centers on the well-being of whole within all its spheres. The family centers on the well-being of the community. The community centers on the well-being of its place. The place centers on the well-being of Earth Interbeing. Imagine Earth Interbeing as circles overlapping circles within circles and including other circles, each with their own centers and all wanting this mystery of creation to continue, all having the responsibility to keep it going. Within our lives, all these ways of being intersect within our center, the place we live. This place becomes our temple, refuge, responsibility, and family.

Line 1:  A community needs clear rules and standards for behaviors to protect the integrity of the community and of all those living within the community to avoid regret.

To free ourselves of complicity with the Imperium, we must stop living the ways of a colonizer.

The spiritual path to healing ourselves of complicity and turning toward caring for the Earth and all life begins with the moral discipline of reducing the harms we inflict on ourselves and others and increasingly acting in ways that benefit all. A spiritual healing path naturally assumes a spiritual quest, the active seeking for the meaning and purpose of life, a relationship with the sacred, greater awareness and wisdom. A spiritual path of healing presupposes a loving connection with a transcendent dimension of reality, the unknowable but known.

People enter the spiritual path because they want to move closer to the spirit. We do this by removing what separates us from the spirit: our willingness to harm others for self-benefit and then ignore the suffering we cause.

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by Bessie the Cow

Hi! Welcome back to the Interbeing. As I said earlier, I have the job to reacquaint you with the sacred Interbeing. Yet before I do that, we would best start with an understanding of what I mean when I use the word sacred.

Lao Tzu got it right when he said that the words we use to name the sacred do not define the sacred. Our understanding of the sacred goes beyond words, but we still have a sense of the sacred – the unknowable yet known. While words may not capture knowing the sacred, we have a relationship with the sacred, a relationship that goes beyond perception.

We know the Creator’s creations – the Earth and all life, the Sun, the sacred universe.

The setting of the orange-red August moon,
The feasting on Earth’s bounty,

The delight of children discovering snow,
The careful dance with other hungry beings,

The frolicking stream freshened by melting ice,
The trumpeting of the high-flying returning geese,

The long days of growing and putting aside,
The reflection of the moon in the breathless pond,

We turn to Thee.

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Keeping a Glad Mind

Oppressive situation.
Blessings.
Proving the sage.
Be trustworthy
Words untrustworthy.

The I Ching has a deep history. Its roots lie reach down into the oracle bone divination of the Chinese Bronze Age, and its philosophical commentaries dating to the third century BCE secured its place as a central text for Chinese thought. The I Ching eventually arrived in Europe by the way of the Jesuits. The German philosopher Leibniz and psychoanalyst Carl Jung brought to it an ever-widening circle of attention and respect.

People who consult the I Ching have a complex relationship with it. Some approach the I Ching as a spiritual teacher. However, the I Ching shares more than wisdom; through its readings, it offers a conversation.

Louise for the past several years has worked on her own I Ching commentaries, a collection of hexagram essays, which she calls the The I Ching of Interbeing, a project, she says, remains very much a work in progress. You can access her I Ching here.

We asked the I Ching what it would like to share with you in its first Meat, Complicity and Thou reading. We received from the I Ching Hexagram 47 with a moving line in the 4^th place, which appears below, using Louise’s I Ching hexagram essay.

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It began with perceiving our differences as special, a delusion that ultimately festered into the disease of exceptionalism. We came to believe that the Earth and all life have the sole purpose to meet our demands of them and that we can freely do what we want to them without moral or natural constraints. Welcome to the 21st century.

It continued with exalting the specialness of our differences into the deluded belief that the Creator gave us dominion over Creation. We came to believe that our special differences made us the image of god and his promised people with the power to use violence to impose our beliefs and our ways upon others. Eventually, we came to believe that we no longer needed a god as Western science and technology gave us the keys to unlock all the secrets and riches of nature. We relegated the Western god to Sunday morning and eventually secularized all his spaces and meaning.

The spiritual disease of the Imperium spread to all corners of the Earth, enslaving people, taking the land from those who lived upon it, and desanctifying what they held sacred. The racist settler colonies plowed under the cultures in their path, replacing indigenous ways with the exceptional culture of Western white Christians, the Imperial culture. The ongoing corporate colonial project further disconnects us from our responsibilities to one another and to the land. Welcome to the 21^st century.

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by Bessie the Cow

The Interbeing chose me to speak to you because I know people-talk and people like cows. I rolled my eyes and said, “Yeah, they like us so much they eat us.” But they insisted and wore me down. How do you say no to a mountain?

So let me introduce myself:  Bessie, the messenger of the Interbeing. You might wonder about for whom I speak, this Interbeing.

The rising sun brings the light
of a new day to our place,
a new opportunity to love and care for all.
All sacred.

Here on our beloved Earth,
we breathe its air and
drink its water.
The spirit within us all.
All sacred.

Green leaves turn toward the sun
to make food for all.
Great trees rise above us
sheltering all below.
All sacred.

The soaring, joyful birds
lift us upwards and
beyond the moon and stars
to bring us back to where we stand.
All sacred.

I send you the Interbeing’s greetings and our wish for you to have a good life wherever the Great Spirit has placed you.

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The corporate food regime’s status quo offers a food system that harms people, cultures, other life forms, and the Earth. According to most researchers and the actual experience of affected people, meeting the challenges of world hunger depends upon increasing local food production in the Global South to feed the hungry within their countries. These countries already have a high dependence on agriculture for employment and income. Nations committing to self-sufficiency through domestic production would feed the hungry and increase the economic viability of growers. This option requires the breakup of large corporate farms that now grow for the Western market and the return of the land to the growers from which the land was taken.

Corporations do not feed the hungry. They ensure their continuing economic growth and profits by promoting the ever greater transition to the Western diet to those who can afford to pay its price.

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Ann Arbor is set to celebrate its 200th Anniversary Celebration in 2024. In preparation for that, we did some limited research and came up with a timeline of the history of indigenous people living in southeast Michigan from the time of first contact with Europeans to the Indian Removal Act of 1830.

We felt the need to explain the lack on indigenous communities within Washentaw County and how this Great Absence came to be. Without access to a Potowatomi history of this this time region in southeastern Michigan, we had to rely upon white history and accounts.

Please consider this timeline a very rough draft. As new research gets published, it can get updated.  See the timeline here.

The Doctrines of Christian Discovery originate with 15th century Papal Bulls that were issued by the Vatican and implemented by Monarchies, sanctioning the brutal Conquest and Colonization of non-Christians who were deemed “enemies of Christ” in Africa and the Americas. The papal bulls gave the Vatican’s blessings to

“invade, search out, capture, vanquish, and subdue all Saracens and pagans whatsoever, and other enemies of Christ wheresoever placed, and the kingdoms, dukedoms, principalities, dominions, possessions, and all movable and immovable goods whatsoever held and possessed by them and to reduce their persons to perpetual slavery, and to apply and appropriate to himself and his successors the kingdoms, dukedoms, counties, principalities, dominions, possessions, and goods, and to convert them to his and their use and profit”

Continue to read here.