Joanna Macy, leading thinker and spiritual activist of the antinuclear and deep ecology movements, writes,

“The web of life both cradles us and calls us to weave it further.”

Rebecca Solnit, brilliant and prolific feminist author and historian, writes,

“Think of hope as a banner woven from those gossamer threads, from a sense of the interconnectedness of all things, of the lasting effect of the best actions, not only the worst. Of an indivisible world in which everything matters.”

Wangari Maathai, Nobel Peace Prize laureate and mother of the African environmental movement said,

“Today, we are faced with a challenge that calls for a shift in our thinking, so that humanity stops threatening its life support system. We are called to assist the Earth to heal her wounds and in the process heal our own—indeed to embrace the whole of creation in all its diversity, beauty and wonder.”

And on my desk as I write this sits an essential anthology on the emergence of ecofeminism, edited by Irene Diamond and Gloria Feman Orenstein, with the title Reweaving the World.

Why do all these words echo and  resonate with each other, repeating the same themes over and over yet never growing boring or irrelevant?

It’s because they are so true, and so necessary.

The metaphor of life as a fabric of  interconnection, a web that must be continually tended, rewoven and repaired, offers a profound contradiction to the mind-set of hierarchy, domination and objectification that gives rise to war, to racism, to misogyny, to environmental devastation. With roots in many indigenous and spiritual traditions, this is certainly not a new theme, let alone simply a feminist one.

But in recent weeks, in the wake of the Russian invasion of Ukraine with its wanton brutality and the release of the latest UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report with its warnings of deepening ecological crisis, it has felt like an urgent call, a world view crying out to be restored from the margins to the center.  We can heed that call, amplify its message far and wide and let it inspire and guide us in the work to build a culture of sustainability and peace, reciprocity and inclusion.

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About the art.  The pieces in this post are part of a series of collages and constructions called “Nature and Culture”.  They combine scraps of unused, discarded or scaled down abstract paintings with found natural materials such as bark and seed pods, and human-made artifacts such as wire, beads and fabric. I started the series as a way to bring the work of my hands more immediately into contact with nature, as well as to consciously integrate an ethic of repurposing and recycling into my creative practice. In addition, exploring the juxtaposition of varied materials is a way to celebrate the multiplicity and unity of the cosmos and the serendipitous harmony that can come from interaction of diverse elements.  Stay tuned for more of these pieces in future postings.

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Land acknowledgment. Big Planet Love is created in Cambridge, Massachusetts on the ancestral and unceded lands of the Massachusett people. We pay respect to Massachusett elders past and present and recognize with gratitude the importance of indigenous wisdom and practices to the themes that animate this work.

Big Planet Love is a project of the Center for Women’s Health and Human Rights at Suffolk University.