Review of Awakening with Mother Earth

Awakening with Mother Earth – Hearing Gaia Sing
By Fran Moeller Gatins

Our Mother Earth wants our souls to sing. She asks us to move beyond fear and forgetfulness into the light of universal hope and love. So saith Fran Moeller Gatins, who invites us to share her personal odyssey during which Gaia, mother of the ancient gods whose spirit is the very soul of our planet , chooses the author to become one of her “voices” in order to teach humankind that ancient wisdom is not incompatible with the evolution of our physical forms, our sacred structures and the ultimate essence of what we perceive to be the creators of the ever-changing cosmos.

This contemporary “bene gesserit” spent several years writing occasional “meditations” during travels in which she recorded her interactions with spirit guides as well as earth, wind, metal, fire and air before Gaia began the conversations in which she counseled that global shifts in paradigms do not necessarily consign humankind to obliteration if we retain a vibrant sense of openness to and respect for all manifestations of life past, present and future.

Change is a constant even for the goddess. She asks us to maintain our equilibrium through prayer, gratitude and forgiveness while we destroy old patterns of domination engendered by fear and unwillingness to listen to the truth-tellers in the quiet within.

Use this very conversational, well written and buoyant diary as a practical and poetic guide to living with the sacred in our everyday lives through a “spirit of curiosity, adventure and delight, even playfulness” as we join our Mother Earth in the hero’s journey to awaken our relationship with the universe.

"We were dancing on a volcano" Joseph Gatins

Make room Margaret Mitchell. A real-life refugee from the potato famine spawned a dynasty in which his son was among the Madoffs of his day, gaining notoriety and the attention of the Feds a hundred years ago as a wheeler/dealer stock trader known on Wall Street as a “bucket shop man.” His oldest son, in turn, transformed himself into a pillar of social and entrepreneurial respectability on Peachtree Street aided by Atlanta’s adulation of his French wife, the “Comtesse.”

Their son, Francis, the author’s father, joined the circle of American expatriates living in Paris between the great wars during which time he fell in love with a beautiful aristocrat from Colombia. As a French military prisoner of war responsible for opening cattle cars arriving at a death camp in the Ukraine, Francis was witness to the horrors of the Holocaust while his mother played a significant role in providing succor through the Red Cross to those unable to escape Paris during the Nazi occupation.

Once the reader negotiates the initial introduction to the bewildering number of Josephs and Egles , the fact-filled pages fly swiftly through one hundred and forty years of the triumphs and tribulations of this indomitable family which has survived wars, tenuous marriages, the ebb and flow of their finances and the scourge of alcoholism. Through it the women of the family were sustained by the certitude of their strong and rigid Catholic faith.

This searingly honest and well written family history will be my Christmas gift to my most cosmopolitan friends, many of whom now also are “dancing on a volcano” of global uncertainty.

RAYMOND BARRY HERBERT, DDS
Raymond B. Herbert broke the” surly bonds of earth” to “touch the face of God” on May 22, 2009. A pilot, a sailor and a dentist, Ray was born in the Bronx on April 25, 1942 to the late Ethel Bayuk and George A. Herbert. With his younger sister Geraldine (Stinson Wise), the family moved to South Miami where Ray attended Coral Gables High School. After undergraduate work at the University of Florida, Ray obtained his degree as Doctor of Dental Surgery from West Virginia University in Morgantown in 1966. His career included positions in both private and public practice interrupted by a long hiatus caused by serious injury to both legs in an automobile accident in 1979 upon his return from a year in Guatemala.
Ten years later he resumed work in Pinellas County until offered the position of Senior Dentist at the South Florida Reception Center in Miami. He also served at dental offices in Gainesville, Key West, Live Oak, Ocoee, Mt. Dora and Winter Haven. Plagued by continuing medical problems, Ray and his wife retired to Ocala in September of 2000.
In 1970 Ray won the I-26 North American Sweepstakes for the longest tyro glider flight in region 5 (280.0 miles), a record which still stands in any class according to the I-26 Association, terming it “a truly remarkable flight” which has “stood the test of time.”
This kind and gentle and generous soul was a Unitarian, a Democrat, a ham radio operator (K4QKE), a Navy veteran and a lover of classical music who built his own harpsichord. He leaves behind his sister, many Bayuk cousins and his beloved pets Odyssey, Maxie and Joy as he sails “the high untrepassed sanctity of space.” Ray is the love of the life of his wife, Delphine Blachowicz Herbert.

Martin Luther King Jr. and Barack Obama

January 15, 2009

Monday we celebrate the birthday of a man of peace, a man who did much more than dream and voice platitudes even when other ministers, both black and white, first quavered, and a large segment of our population branded Martin Luther King Jr. a “communist,” that once most damnable of appellations, for speaking out against injustice and violence against the oppressed both here and abroad.

With a biracial man and his wife now moving into a white house built by black slaves, and their young daughters enrolled with other children of privilege in a Quaker sanctuary, part of Dr. King’s dream is being realized.

Yes, the great civil rights leader went to the mountain top and saw the promised land, a land in which little black boys and black girls join hands with little white boys and white girls as sisters and brothers. But today’s little children still must surmount even greater peaks in the mountain ranges beyond integration – the peaks representing war, pestilence, famine and death , the peaks even now patrolled by the four horsemen of the Apocalypse who ride among us as munitions manufacturers, diseases decimating millions each year which could be controlled for pennies per capita, exploding poverty as the seeds of the earth are deliberately sterilized for profit, and lastly, the primordial lust for power in the DNA of many of our “leaders” which renders our fragile planet subject to war without end..

Dr. King was a man of peace but he was not a man of fear. He was jailed 30 times for leading nonviolent efforts against injustice He spoke out against the pious irrelevancies and sanctimonious trivialities that mark so many of our public discourse. True, you and I are far more frail vessels, but working together we helped elect Barack Obama, another transformational figure in our nation’s history.

Now Barack, like Dr. King, is asking us to develop a kind of “dangerous unselfishness” by working in community for the common good. As the world collapses around us, how can we recapture the ability to “work unceasingly to uplift this nation that we love to a higher plateau of compassion, to a more noble expression of humanness?” Through service to others, through the “audacity to hope” that one’s seemingly meager efforts may make a difference.

Wendell Berry wrote in The Hidden Wound that the urbanization of our population has deprived us of the competence of knowing how to take care of ourselves. People used to be skilled in the art of making do and subsistence living off the land. . But with the relocation of most of our population to the cities, Berry writes that our ability to do things was replaced by the ability to buy things based largely on our subservience to modern incarnations of the company store. This dependency, along with our self-centered gluttony and greed, has led to the collapse of the worldwide economic system, impoverishing not only our bodies but our souls as well.

But today there is a great awakening to the fact that our world is not working. Not only are there wars on four continents but the very earth itself is rebelling against our short sighted rape of its riches as the seas rise and the oxygen producing forests disappear.

Many people now see that they must adapt. They must become the change that Obama calls for. Service to others, not lives of tepid comfort in our little boxes of urban isolation with an occasional bone thrown to the needy, must become our greater aspiration.

Martin Luther King Jr. was cognizant of the interrelatedness of all communities and states. He wrote in his Letter from the Birmingham Jail that “We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly. . . Anyone who lives inside the United States can never be considered an outsider anywhere within its bounds.”

Barack Obama extended Dr. King’s words when in Berlin he said he was a proud citizen of the United States and a fellow citizen of the world. Let’s help him and ourselves by making sure that the world we leave our children is better than the world we inhabit today. In other words, think globally but act locally with vigor and courage. The light and love you radiate toward others will become the light which drives out darkness, hate and fear as together we climb the mountains encircling a promise of peace and justice for all..