The Story of the Aina

  Aina is a Hawaiian word that means, "Land."  The story of the Aina is the story of the land.

The story of the land is the story of the body.  Do you see?  Mother Nature is the body of the world, which has been systematically exploited and silenced to make room for man's theories, religions, histories, philosophies, and justifications.  Likewise, our own bodies, which are irrefutably critical to any theory, have been neglected in order to glorify our thinking, neurotic, self-reflexive egos.  Which are terribly embarrassed about being a body, actually.

The story of the land is the story of the body.  If our thinking minds are our conscious aspect, our intuiting bodies are our subconscious aspect.  The story of the land is the story of the subconscious, the story of our intuitive, instinctive knowing, the story of the feminine, the story of Yin.  The story of the land is her story, as opposed to history.  History is the story of how the language we are using came to be, the story of how logic slowly overtook mystery as the alphabet replaced the Goddess.  Her story is the story of the land, the story of the body, the story of water, the story of art.

History is the story of language, and so history may be directly written down.  Her story is the story of the body and the world of the senses, and may not be accurately written down but must be directly perceived.  History is rational and linear and her story is creative play - history is language, and her story is art.  History is the past, and her story is in the present.  The entirety of history is Siva, while the entirety of her story is Shakti.  History is to be taken literally, while her story is seen to be metaphor.  The story of the Aina is her story:  the story of art, and culture, the story of the waters, the story of life.

The land and the body and the feminine and the waters and the arts and music and yin have been marginalized, to our collective disadvantage.  Our uninitiated, imbalanced civilization has worshipped the blazing dominance of yang and feared the shadow of yin.  The story of the Aina is the story of making peace with our shadow, the story of making peace with nature, the story of making peace with our fears, the story of making peace with our bodies, the story of creating healthy relationship with the "other".  The story of the Aina is the story of our ego's surrender at long last to experiential truth.

The story of the ego is all about what makes us unique, but the story of the Aina is about what we all have in common.  To hear the body we must quiet the mind, and to hear the Aina we must quiet our philosophies, our religions, and our politics.  Listening to the body teaches us to listen to the land, and vice versa.

The story of the land has been suppressed in order to propagate the story of the language which conquered her.  The map which reveals the territory has attempted to usurp the territory.  Explanations for why-things-are have attempted to replace authentic, preconceptual being.

Reality is paradoxically illogical.

We have been raised on one story:  the story of the two-leggeds.  There is far more to this story, that we are only now discovering.  The story of the two leggeds has been passed down to us as our story, but the story of the land which nurtured the two-leggeds, the story of the context that nurtured the content, was buried. The two-leggeds have long forgotten the story of the land, because we have forgotten how to be quiet and listen. We are remembering how to be silent, and we are remembering how to listen, and we are hearing the story of the Aina, and we are remembering the time when we all knew this story - the story of how to live.

 The story of the Aina goes like this:  A healthy ecology is the foundation of a healthy economy.  Economics is nothing more complicated than the distribution of ecological resources.  Silicon Valley is fundamentally ecological, is it not?
Eco-logos = design of a household
Eco-Nomos = management of a household

Resource distribution depends upon well-designed, sustainable resource creation and maintenance.
A healthy ecology is the goose that lays golden eggs, feeding and sheltering and nurturing and healing everyone.  Destroying the ecology is equivalent to killing the goose that lays golden eggs.  The story of the two-leggeds is the story of Yang fearing the incredible potency of Yin, and aspiring to conquer or destroy her rather than surrender to her grace, and dance with her.  The story of the Aina is the story of compassion, forgiveness, and healing, in spite of ourselves.  To heal the economy we must heal the ecology, and in the process, we discover that we are actually healing ourselves.

The Aina is telling us that gardening needs to be the centerpiece of public education.   Ecological investment reaps economic dividends, so to heal our global economy the coming generations must be radically competent stewards.  We must teach children to garden.  It's time.