Letters VIII-XVI: Life
Letter VIII
One of the clearest signs that a planetary renaissance is in emergent progress is that both life itself and the definition of life are struggling for redefinition and resacralization.
Renaissance means the rebirth of life.
Love is eternal sacrament.
Love and life are one and the same. The awakening to that unity is the defining nature of your emerging planetary renaissance.
There is now no sensible boundary excluding anything however small and ephemeral from the concept, identity and enactment of life. If, for example, you eliminated the photon of light or the particle of energy or the atom of matter from membership in the family of life, you would have no universe nor life yourself to consider. It is for this reason that I have declared for you that: All is created equal, sentient and sacred in love.
If the infinite eternal wisdom of love is embodied in light and in all that has emerged and derived from light including your own life, how could you possibly consider light absent from the family of life? Or any other necessary minuscule member of Cosmic Order?
Such expansive thinking is the mark and the measure of your emerging planetary renaissance.
Letter IX
The value of life is a principle of heaven. Since life is a sacred gift, learning its sanctity is the soul work of humanity.
Since the all too pressing need to eat and to drink seems superordinate in human life, you have no choice but to build your new political economy on that factual necessity. That reality is now mystery to humanity but reality to all other life. So the time has come in your struggle for survival to regain your reverence for the plants and animals and all forms of life which help make Earth your holy sanctuary and heavenly kingdom.
You are awakening once again to the unalterable demands of life itself. Your honest exploration of these devoid of the sins of greed and aggressive dominance will, in large part, determine your personal and public survival. For your current infatuation with money is soon to be swept into oblivion.
Financial collapse, a source of great personal pain to me in my final days, will be visited on all of you in the near future. You, dear ones, will garden your way out of crisis into celebration and salvation. Would that I had had the forbearance and wisdom to achieve your coming triumph.
I had the love of gardening, but not the wisdom of frugality and self-restraint that will mark your future success. For naught in the rest of nature except swine are overweight.
Letter X
As I have often said, the learning of the citizenry is the only defense against tyranny. The challenges thrust upon each generation require that they reinvent what they must learn and how they must learn it.
You, America, are now blessed with a new understanding that the stages of the ever-maturing individual life are also enacted in the stages of your collective social maturation. The citizen and his or her society must walk the exact same path as found within the general growth dynamics of the infant, child, adolescent, adult, parent, mentor, sage, creator and transcendent being.
Finding your place on this well known path of life enables you to plan your next stage and fulfill it with the greatest degree of excellence you can summon with your heart and soul.
And so, when the sacred American experiment in self-governance and the fulfillment of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness comes to a crossing point to ford the transformative stream of life challenge and stage change, courage and honor demand the stream be crossed, however deep and swift the current before you.
Now the crossing to the safe parent stage reunion with all life is before you, and I am proud of the strength, hope and idealism with which you enter this apparently terrible turbulence, certain as I am of your triumphant passage to your noble destiny in higher love.
Your learning together is the sacred song of your social soul. Press on!
Letter XI
America! It is alright if you let your current currency devalue to meaningless paper as long as you replace it with something of more lasting value.
You cannot avoid the cycle of all empires and nation states from agricultural beginnings, to industrial production, to service sharing, and finally, to pure monetary valueless manipulation where you are now.
The question at hand is whether alone in world history you can come back from your precipitous decline to ascend again to planetary leadership on the strength of new people-powered courage, creativity and compassion.
America never was so much a nation as it was an experiment in human aspiration and maturation. So it is fitting that your currency and your morality are in freefall in the world’s eyes. For some lesser destruction always precedes some greater construction as I provided in my seemingly endless architectural struggles at Monticello.
However, if you fail in this hour of your decline to seize upon life itself on Earth and upon love itself as heaven on Earth as the way to create and enact your new political economy, you will have failed in your natural comeback and in your responsibility to the spiritual destiny for which you bear the name American.
Letter XII
The environment is the economy and the economy is the environment. So it has always been and is now for the world’s traditional indigenous natives and for some of the world’s farmers and fishermen.
Only since human industrialization of manufacturing and of farming and fishing has humanity lost that primal one-to-one relation between land and life. All that is on and within the earth’s land and water and air is all that is on and within your bodies. Earth is your mother because you are conceived, born, and grown of her substance and intention.
Industrialization, for all its triumphs of replication of value, gets its power from fragmentation and standardization. Industrialization is the making of commodities for monetization. These forces which are the values and processes of industrialization diminish and marginalize the primal power and wild beauty of life and leave you lost and lonely, alienated from your soul’s connection to the soul of Earth.
There is little hope for humanity’s future if you do not venture to walk barefoot in the grass and bareheaded in the rain when your soul feels dull and lost. For the primacy of that simple joy is the pathway toward the joy of planting and growing something. It is the same joy as your affection for and from animals you care about. Slowly and surely, your heart and soul will come alive as these friendships with life widen and deepen. Simple as they are, these acts of kinship are the seeds of your salvation.
Grown all together, these seeds from all humanity will garden your planet into a springtime for the soul of the Earth, into a planetary renaissance, into a garden of goodness for all life.
Letter XIII
Salvation by integration of your citizenry, communion by community of the family of life, that is your American opportunity and destiny. That is your winning life strategy.
Conscious compassionate community is the soul of humanity the species, as it is with all species now and ever shall be.
Fulfillment of soul in service to life is the life worth living. Such fulfillment is the only true profit in any transaction. Such profit is achieved by the measure of creative and collaborative social union. Unity is your best freedom and your best vessel for the flourishing of infinite diversity, just as the hexagonal core of all snowflakes binds and promotes all their glorious unique differences of elegant structure.
Community is the fulcrum of human evolution in that the collaborative intelligence of a local citizenry of all living creatures and forms of growth will guide human health toward physical and spiritual maturation and soul fulfillment.
Letter XIV
The voice of the people, the power of the word We, the power of the people from whose consent and from whose strengths of combined wisdom governments are instituted and draw their authority, these precious contexts of political power have their natural home which is local geographic community. Not executive mansions, not the halls of legislation, not the courtrooms of justice but the community is the seat of the power of the people directly active in the determination of their rights, freedoms and responsibilities.
It has been rightly stated by Frederick Hegel that “Freedom is the recognition of responsibility.” Ultimately, a citizenry cannot send away its responsibility for life, liberty and happiness in the person of some representative traveling to some center of supposed higher authority, be it state, region or nation.
There is no other species of life on earth that would give away the security and fulfillment of life to some distant member of its kind. It is precisely such taxation through distant presumed authority and presumed representation by members of the distant English parliament which caused the grievances that lead to America’s fight for the triumph of independence.
Perhaps, in our founding, it was our fear of unlanded men and unempowered women which lead to their exclusion, along with slaves, to have the rights of political self-determination. Today such fear stands in shameful disgrace in the evolutionary march of political power forward into the necessary and functional care of the common good.
Today that march has come to the threshold of the doorway to the rights of and protection of all life on Earth. Therefore, there is no other seat of power for all life than the geographical and ecological community whose working integrity is its natural home.
Community, I say again, is itself in its creative interaction, the only true form of profit, for without its collaboration and compassion, there is neither private good nor public common good. Community is now, again, as throughout all history, the setting of, by and for all life forms to live to mutual fulfillment.
Community is small enough so that its members may all know each other if wise enough, and large enough to be known by all life on Earth for its exemplary wisdom and beneficence to the common good. Treat well, therefore, your communities; for they are the new and emergent citizens of the world’s politics of salvation.
Letter XV
In the long life story of local community, as old as any moment in the history of life on Earth anyone might chose to pick as a moment of origin, the ability of community to learn all together as one being, one organizational integrity, has been all life forms’ creative strategy. Predation and parasitism are necessary dynamics in the struggle of lives to survive. But they are as small beings in the vast web of symbiosis. Symbiosis is the dynamic of living in mutual supportive harmony within, among and between all species. It is the predominant dynamic that has been the carrier of ever-emerging and evolving life on Earth. It might well be said that through all the annals of life, past, present and future, life is symbiosis. Of course, all life must eat however it can, but what it eats is the fruit of symbiosis, the fruit of mutual communal support and synergy.
So it is not surprising that there is now re-emergent a social invention returning humans forward into a new ancient form of communal learning, today being called a Communiversity.
In the years of the tenth and eleventh centuries what today you call the university was first formed and instituted wherein groups of students and teachers pursued an understanding of the universal essences and principles of all things in life. It is said by historians that the first such group in the nine hundreds AD met in Salerno, Italy to study the medical practices and principles of the ancient Greeks. There followed universities in Bologna, Paris, Oxford and Cambridge. In some measure and in hindsight, you might say these were early blossoms on the tree of knowledge signaling the emergence of the European renaissance.
Today, the Communiversity within the planetary renaissance is a new and different social invention in the history of human learning. For like the dance troupe or symphony orchestra, the whole membership of a community are all life- forms now learning to learn together in real time.
Such learning must of its nature be present to the continuous consciousness, consideration and compassion of the whole local family of life.
The family of life, excluding no life-form, is a new single student and teacher whose needs and whose priceless gifts are a unified and singular celebration. Learning as family celebration is an ancient wonder now re-emergent as a creative challenge. That humanity, of all beings, can host and honor this celebration is our happy destiny, it being that the rewards are so bountiful as to be scarcely imaginable.
Letter XVI
If you feel that you must vote your budgetary and other serious matters in the privacy of the voting booth, henceforth all done by the signatory touch of the pen to paper signifying your personal preference and commitment to social allegiance, save those issues which truly matter most for open public gatherings and town meetings wherein you can relish and glory in the power and sanctity of the human soul as your only enduring security and salvation.
For openly felt and observed community is your only true profit; and community enacted in the open is the soul of your society; and finally, in this time of terrible necessity for transformative change, community is the fulcrum of human evolution. Depending where you place the public fulcrum in your community, the weighty considerations of just a few citizens can lift the weight of all humanity in the service of all life.
