“Oh Canada…
part of you pours out of me
In these lines from time to time,
Oh, you’re in my blood like holy wine”

– Joni Mitchell

The vision of a Doctors of Life International group that would comprise counselors for care and cure of habitat diseases inclusive of all species—including sapiens—comes down to the surface beneath our feet. Indigenous ecologist Robin Wall Kimmerer describes how her university students have changed in the past few decades: being in nature or putting hands in the dirt have become alien experiences to the young. Richard Louv and teachers attempting to heed his teachings on nature deficit disorder have taken this consequential alienation to our human nest to heart. Ted Chang, in the story that inspired the film Arrival, explores the relation to time tossed up for grabs by Einstein and barely (as yet) explored by our species. In hermetic priest Cynthia Bourgeault’s new book Eye of the Heart, she explains the imaginal realm, and elaborates the non-temporal chiastic maps of meaning taught to her by Bruno Barnhart. The eternal—that which lives—transcends time; humans have yet to learn to cooperate with Life in Time.

We will not truly find our way to the timeless until we better relate to biological time, which is revealed in The Beak of the Finch to be continuous as well as episodic in relation to conditions such as El Nino, or—in Kimmerer’s work—tides and seasonal flooding. Aside from direct impacts on human mortality and property, these buffeting events we also ignore. In clear-cut “developed” neighborhoods in the Seattle area, most humans still think of the catastrophic consequences of human destruction of habitats as “acts of God”.

We could—as restorers often must—begin from the ground up, with the living substrates of habitats. Or, we could begin with Pachamama or other fertility goddesses. Some preceded the Empire on the Roman Palatine; others, the Vanir, preceded the catastrophe of 536 that gave rise, eventually, to the Aesir of the Viking Age. And so, we can explore the eternal like Ted Chang’s Louise, who, Janus-like, can look both inside and out, forward and back. Then, as Grant Cogswell—the real-life inspiration for Stephen Gyllenhaal’s localist protagonist in Grassroots — used to say, we can begin to act as if we [humans] plan to stay.