I have been initiated into a shamanic tradition where one of the principles is: Love Yourself. Love the People. Love God. Love the plants and the trees, the sky, the wind, the sea, the fire, the sun and the
moon. Somewhere the British physicist David Bohm writes that it is our thinking that creates our ecological problems: we think we are separate from the earth in whom we dig, the sky we breathe, the sea that contains us and so we treat them as something else, something that is not us. I wanted to write about astrology because I am guided by the Ancients when they say As Above So Below, but then one morning in a beautiful house near Stellenbosch where water and earth and air and fire are lovingly transformed into the elixir of Bacchus, that most loving god of exuberance, I saw the big sea washing over an island, and that night we were all stirred into reflection on food by the lot of the Japanese, that nation of cruel whale hunters, as we all know. And somewhere an animist wanted to know if the sea was angry and how she could be appeased, and a mythologist concocted a tale of passage in which the dark unconscious forces of the sea errupted to spur us into a new vision, and a rationalist explained everything as physics and geology, and one with a green heart called on his friends to help save the planet. And here I am, knowing that all of that and everything that happens is us, nothing is separate (what a crazy thing that would be!), and the only way that makes any sense is to love the sea and the whales and the whale hunters and the builders of nuclear plants and the people who live on islands and the people who live in the mountains and the battery chickens and the feedlot cattle and all of us incorrigible carnivores and vegetarians alike, because in Love nothing is unlike.