“Songs Of Earth”

Excerpted from Foundation Earth, a compilation by Ken David © 2011

“Over mountains, through wars, throughout history and beyond

life, we come, finally, against daunting odds, for one another.

What happens then when yearning hearts meet burning genius

and ambition in restless creativity? Or single-purposed souls the
surging brilliance in questing minds?

What happens when sheer guts and a hunger for transcendence

call talent into something larger? Or knowing breaches into the
universe to delve and summon?

What happens when dreams deferred irrupt, and gifted men and
women share a compelling awareness of the potential and the
need for a sudden and dramatic evolution in human capabilities?

And then, in an astonishing union, reach out together and

achieve it?

What happens to human possibility? “

Some 150,000 standard generations mark the way between the Plains of fhe
Serengeti in the highlands of East Africa, and the Sea of Tranquillity on the
near side of the Moon, mute testimony to a fierce promise that wrote a
staggering odyssey in the annals of human childhood. Richard Leakey,
speaking from the Olduvai gorge in Kenya's Rift valley, reminds us that this
time, like the one before us, is unique: " the clock is turned back 10 million
years, Africa's lush plentiful forests are vanishing. A group of small, man-like
creatures embarking on nature's greatest journey walk upright and naked
onto the dangerous savannah. Within a mere flicker of geological time their
descendants will walk on the moon."

The watch-bell tolls and the light of dusk is gone. We are once again on the
edge of history, outward bound, where there is no safe course to chart,
where the wind is high and rising, and the morning's light has not yet shone.
Around us, between us - from within us, life is astir and an age is quickening
about as an edge of becoming steals again through the forest dark, towards
the brink of lyrical wholeness and lambent storm. You and I are a part of a
larger system of life that is once more poised to flower, and yet, like a candle
in the wind, we may instantly perish. In the moment years between the
lightning and the thunder we have come centre stage, an adolescence
struggling in its rights-of-passage to become something new and it's time to
lend a hand to life.

Humanity has reached the point of no return. Acceptance of the community

of interest has become a requirement of human survival on Earth and it can
no longer be dismissed as an idealistic concept unrelated to realities. In the
millennial shadows of the twenty-first century, and well beyond, we face
challenges in all directions - from the accelerating forces of historic cultural
and social transitions, to an evolutionary transformation in sentient
consciousness and the stirrings of a fundamental spiritual awakening.
Indeed, from the pressures of almost unfettered technological convergence
and assuredly catastrophic changes in local environments and the planetary
ecosystem, to the threats arising from population dynamics and geo-
economic competition, to regional wars and both terrestrial and
extraterrestrial surprise, we confront unprecedented perils and extraordinary
promises.

Humankind is part of the fabric of life and dependent on the whole fabric for
its very existence. Technology is making us one people on one planet,
realizing our interdependence with all life, whether we acknowledge it or not,
and we are both shaping and responding to nothing less than the transition
from one civilisation to another. Let there be no illusions - time is short and
the need for change acute. Taking effective action will require a mobilisation
of will, co-operation and sacrifice unknown, except in wartime, and ask of us
to alter both our personal values and the institutions which were formed in
this passing industrial era.

We need now to rediscover what was once known and to build new
coalitions, across sectors, generations, and nations. We must quicken past
powers, new ways, and the different actions of a larger wisdom, and build a
new collectively global ethic fashioning a compassionate concept of security
that will embrace all of us, our common survival, and the urgently needed
reality of sustainable economics and non-cancerous development; an ethic
that transforms poverty to prosperity, redresses the unequal distribution of
the use of our common wealths, the relentless degradation of our
environment, and the ongoing exponential depletion of our resources.

We must use our human, scientific, and technological resources, which are
richer than at any time in history, in a war in which all peoples must be
allies, mobilising the tremendous capabilities for compassion, innovation,
dynamism and resourcefulness that exist in our societies. We feel the Earth
under our feet and we have seen the Earth from space. Its all one world.
What needs to be done can't happen overnight, or be done by any one
individual or one organisation, yet everything we do, or fail to do today, is
decisive for our immediate future and future generations. I am convinced we
can succeed. The potential of life is infinite, compelling and stirring - both a
heritage yet leashed, and a challenge still unanswered - and on this greatest
of adventures, we must nurture its growth and development. In the words of
Sean O'Casey: "The bells of the world have tolled long enough for death, let
them now ring out for life…"

Our mission is to be a promise kept, in greater awareness become greater

realization, in dreams made deeds which from moment to moment and act to
act, enact, enable, and substantially contribute towards efforts that
altogether grow the person and care for the community, mend the web and
heal the planet, and explore the universe and seek out the mystery of life.
Our purposes here are to empower life, to catalyse the caring of life for life,
to foster the growth and development of life's potential, and to use the
deepest teachings and most advanced tools, precepts and methods of
Earth’s civilisations in taking up and overcoming the ultimate challenges
these journeys bring forth.

Our task lies exactly here: to foster compassionate awareness become

compelling realization - and to act for, in, and on that in all ways as a
significant catalyst that employs personal action and world-class means in
engendering vitally needed skills and an inextricably interwoven personal
and planetary awareness; and which properly encourages and effectively
supports the persistent collaborations and longitudinal assistance required to
wholly develop extraordinary persons, produce breakthrough capabilities,
and collectively strengthen individual, local, and global capabilities.

Our role is to employ the spirit that wells from the very depths of life to help
develop the latent qualities of wisdom, courage, compassion, and life-force in
each individual amidst the, at times, harsh realities of everyday life, and to
assist in the expression and harnessing of each person's full powers and
talents in achieving the missions set out. Our guise herein is as a rouser of
memories, intention, and action about that which we can only forget when
we forget ourselves, about the inherent promise of what and who we are and
what we still might yet do; and as a call to higher arms and deeper
awareness in a positively meaningful presence in our sojourns here.

Our childhood is almost over, and, still a doing yet remains within our hold.
For a moment longer, the circle lies unbroken in our hands, a rainbow-
stranded thread of being, acting and becoming through which we can both
realise our individual selves and larger human and other possibilities. We are
not meeting here, even in this reading, by chance or accident. The wind that
ruffles the hem of personal history is sometimes the precursor of
extraordinary possibilities, and however bright or faint, or great, or humble
the thread we weave in life's tapestry appears to be, our – yours and mine -
presence here has purpose and a larger meaning than ordinary reflection
might allow.

The particular circumstances of our lives are unique to each one of us and no
one else can fulfil our particular, individual mission which is the expression or
fulfilment of our lives as a whole. We believe You are a part of the Earth's
greatest treasure, that which lies in sentient awareness, in a reverence for
one's ultimate sources and posterity, and in the active caring of life for life.
You are not just a leaf in the wind. No one in the world was ever you before,
with your particular gifts, abilities and possibilities. You can choose to live
your life on purpose, that is, deliberately, with intention and direction, in that
each of us is a calling with a calling - our authentic nature and chosen
vocation in the world which is the work and the way of being that belong to
each of us - a seamless weft of our own individual uniqueness and some
great purpose. "This is the true joy in life", wrote George Bernard Shaw, "the
being engaged in a purpose recognised by yourself as a mighty one."

This vocation can be transcendent - in that it goes beyond yourself and

involves seeking and purposeful effort in the striving toward meaningful
goals - goals that relate the individual to a larger context of purposes; and
also deeply personal and satisfying in its achievements of closeness to one's
God(s), self, family, community, and nature. When within and without we
come upon it, we recognise it from something deeper than instinct, for like
light and music cohered as through a lens, a calling aligns and attunes us to
the pattern and rhythms of some immense yet very personal endeavour
above, beyond, and within us; and it refracts and empowers our actions into
a congruence of the heart, the head and the hands.

This 'calling' is a mission, and is a part of the unique purpose of an

individual's life and, therefore, is a way of describing the achievement of our
full potential as individuals and members of society. As each mission is
unique to each individual, however, all are worthy of respect. It was Martin
Luther King who said: "If a man is called to be a street-sweeper, he should
sweep the streets even as Michelangelo painted, or Beethoven composed
music, or Shakespeare wrote poetry. He should sweep streets so well that all
the hosts of heaven and earth will pause to say, here lived a great street-
sweeper who did his job well". Or as Oliver Wendell Holmes perceptively put
it: "Every calling is great when greatly pursued".

We are all songs of life, and in that, in the here and now, each of us is a part
of life’s curving edge, history’s unique forward sum running out along the
frontiers of possibility calling all at once, again and forever, in celebratory
discovery, both from and towards something awesome, shattering, and
compellingly eloquent. “Life is not about finding yourself,” wrote George
Bernard Shaw, “Life is about creating yourself.” We are not bodies with
hearts, minds and souls, but souls, with hearts, minds and bodies. We are not
human beings abroad in the universe on a fantastic material and spiritual
adventure, but, as ongoing expressions of the infinite that come and go, we
are spiritual beings alive in the universe on a fantastic human adventure.

“In dreams begins responsibility," wrote Yeats. Our business here is to rise up
to a call that resonates with the deepest needs and farthest dreams of the
individual, and also with the needs and hopes of the planet and its
interdependent web of life. Nothing is ever finally safe. Life is tumultuous, an
endless losing and regaining of balance, a continuous striving and an
assured victory only in that our keenest efforts are directed and done so
through developed awareness and action that is rewarding, that engages the
heart, as well as the mind and body, that develops selfhood beyond
selfhood, empowers the soul, fosters companionship and nourishes the
Earth.

Terence McKenna wrote: “When a species prepares to depart for the stars the planet will
be shaken to its core. All evolution has pushed for this moment, and there is no going back.”
There is no way back. The way home is the way forward, deeper into the
forest that is refracted all around and from within us, and our efforts here are
a part of an irrevocable commitment to evoking a compassionate new
reality, to the race growing into new awakenings in consciousness, and to
taking our human family through safely this cycle of trials and successfully
out into the universe.

Contact: kilamanjaro@mac.com