Please go and read Dayan’s entire essay at Atroposian Musings. Here is a short excerpt:
“…the [Pagan] movement has not prepared most people involved in it to step beyond their personal self-healing/comforting in order to grapple with larger issues….
…We are meant to be a healing balm for our ancestors and our modern cultures, going forward. We are meant to make peace with a tortured past so that institutions might be restructured. We are meant to be the chorus of the dead, for those beings that pass without notice. We are meant to give voice to those that yet remain, and affirm the relational bonds that weave the Immanent Divine.
With every calling of Mother Earth, great and bountiful Gaia, we are meant to assert the irrevocable obligations life makes upon life and all other beings of Nature. We are supposed to make kin with beings whose lives are our fortune and live in ways of mutual benefit. We are meant to teach this way of living–more than just a way of believing–to a world much in need of it. By creating little and grand rituals, we are supposed to reaffirm the belonginness due to every human….”
I respect the calls for authenticity and service to community, but here are a couple of responses I have to this type of piece: 1. A doom-and-gloom approach to climate change is unproductive, and I refuse to cede my power to it; and 2. The notion that paganism is supposed to save the world strikes me as grandiose and narcissistic.
I don’t think we are “supposed to save the world “, but we should certainly be a PART of saving the world, and right now, most Pagan traditions really are not at all focused on that.
Thanks for linking to Dayan’s post, as I didn’t realize he had a blog.
Please check out the excellent article on creating wildlife refuge gardens — pockets of biodiversity — on The Druid’s Garden.
Link: https://druidgarden.wordpress.com/2019/02/17/druidry-for-the-21st-century-dealing-with-mass-extinction-and-the-age-of-the-anthropocene/