I’ve painted the seven ingredients of the Recipe for Life, all within the body of Mother Nature. It is her recipe. I chose what I see as key ingredients for us humans to create a happier, healthier life, for ourselves and all Nature.

This is a recipe of life-affirming values to build our future life on, to ride the waves of climate change, and flourish in healthy ways.

Values are like roots, that feed the plant that grows from them. We need radical change, that goes down to the roots; not top dressing. Radix means root. Values are the basic ingredients of our recipe. We go back to the roots of how our society operates: basic assumptions we never question; we don’t even know they’re there. Read more..

INGREDIENTS FOR THE RECIPE FOR LIFE

Life

I chose the eyes of Mother Nature to represent life, because when we’re alive, we’re aware. We perceive the world through all our senses.

Life is precious. There has never been a more important time to ask, right now  ‘How do the decisions and actions I take most support life’.  Read more

Care for Life

This devoted mother bird shows her dedication to mothering. Mothering is the most central part of the caring we all do. 

There are three main ways to care for life.  
First, practical work such as caring for children, planting trees.  
Second, caring for all our hearts. 
Third, build a way of life that supports and cares for all people – children, the elderly, all living beings in nature. 

We are part of Nature

The light green child on Mother Nature’s belly shows how we are part of nature.

Despite the conditioning of westerners over hundreds of years that nature is an externality to our species, and there for us to exploit, the irrefutable reality is that we are part of nature.  And we are not alone, we have indeed co-evolved with all other living things, our relatives, on earth.  So, it follows that our hearts and minds are also part of nature. 

We are good like Nature

Flowers are good in the way all Nature is. They have no evil in them. They just naturally do their good work, to create seeds, produce more flowers and be beautiful about it. This warm pink represents loving kindness in Buddhist meditation.

The Buddhist teachings are that we humans are made of love – deep love is our foundation. Therefore, there is no ultimate division between good and evil.  In this view even those who act very badly – even the worst of tyrants, are essentially good, even though they also deluded and confused. They are made of love, albeit caught in the suffering of greed, hatred and delusion.    

We are all interconnected

The bee is our key species for the survival of the ecosystems which support us and every other creature. The bee represents how interconnected we all are and how we rely on each other.

At a physical level we humans are inter-related with all living and non-living things on the planet, in nature’s ecosystems.  Those who don’t agree should perhaps at the very least try holding their breath for more than 5 minutes!  Likewise, our hearts are connected to others, our family, our communities, people and other non-human species and places across our earth.  

Deep Mind

Deep Mind very often feels like an ocean with deep dark depths, full of fish and all kinds of other fascinating creatures. 

Deep mind is where dreaming, and the imaginative life live.  It’s like Freud’s ‘unconscious’ mind.  Deep mind is also similar to Jung’s descriptions of the collective unconscious. We humans have a personal mind and a shared mind.  Creative ideas, visioning, memory, beliefs, prejudices, and so on arise from deep mind (whether we are aware of this or not) all the time. In deep mind, deep transformation happens, that changes the psyche at its foundation. Deep mind is, therefore, a fundamental part of the recipe for life.

Great Cosmic Mother

Great cosmic mother is white because she can feel like vast emptiness. She’s called mother because out of her all things arise and dissolve. 

We have two sacred mothers.  Mother nature arises from Great Cosmic Mother, who is is innate in all things.   A way to describe the difference between them  is to think about going into the natural world – into mother nature, where one feels a sense of peace, vitality, a presence.  That is like the full and empty experience of our great cosmic mother.   In a buddhist view, this is ‘the void’ innate within all form. Just as everything comes from the void, every person comes from a mother, so Buddhism often calls her Mother, as do many religions and cultures across the world.  

Those are the ingredients.

We can apply the instructions for how to cook the recipe differently, in these three areas: 
These three things intertwine and help each other along. 

Culture

Envision a future regenerative culture, that honours life, and cares for Mother Nature. To create a culture so different from our modern society, we must imagine it first. With a vision, whatever we do will be deep-rooted in life-giving values.

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Heart

Heal the heart’s climate
Transform climate distress into strength of heart. Embody life-supporting values.  

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Community

How would we build our communities? 
How would it feel to live in such a culture?

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