Declaration of the Four Sacred Things

On this first day of the New Year and new decade, it seems to me only right and appropriate to post a declaration I once read in a book entitled The Fifth Sacred Thing, by a gifted writer named Starhawk in 1993. This book and the story contained inside was a powerful writing on the importance of paying attention to how we do what we do in the world, and how that impacts and affects others. This declaration sums up in a few short paragraphs the essence of what it is to be a responsible and accountable human on the planet…more so now in these times than ever before.

The following is my gift to you to carry in your mind and heart for the coming times.

Don Kirchner

New Year's Day 2010

“The earth is a living, conscious being. In company with cultures of many different times and places, we name these things as sacred: air, fire, water and earth.

Whether we see them as the breath, energy, blood, and body of Mother Earth, or as the blessed gifts of a Divine Creator, or as symbols of the interconnected systems that sustain life, we know that nothing can live without them.

To call these things sacred is to say that they have a value beyond their usefulness for human ends, that they themselves become the standard by which our acts, our economics, our laws, and our purposes must be judged. No one has the right to appropriate them or profit from them at the expense of others. Any government that fails to protect them forfeits its legitimacy.

All people, all living things, are part of the earth life, and so are sacred. No one of us stands higher or lower than any other. Only justice can assure balance; only ecological balance can sustain freedom. Only in freedom can that fifth sacred thing we call spirit flourish in its full diversity.

To honor the sacred is to create conditions in which nourishment, sustenance, habitat, knowledge, freedom and beauty can thrive. To honor the sacred is to make love possible.

To this we dedicate our curiosity, our will, our courage, our silences, and our voices. To this we dedicate our lives.”