Since midwinter, sunlight has been rapidly increasing, though wintry weather of beautiful snowfalls and seasonably freezing temperatures continued through most of February. Near the beginning of March, warmth began to return, bringing with it melting snows and, amid the melt, heavy rains that swelled to fill riverbanks and, in some cases, overrun some low-lying fields and roads.

After a cloudy and cold winter, the deluge was followed by sunlight bursting forth for several days, warming the still cool ground and bringing forth the first flowers of spring—yellow, white, and purple crocuses, blue and yellow miniature irises, ivory white snowdrops, and yellow and pinkish-purple Hellebores. Though still busy with schoolwork, my regular job, and ongoing projects, I managed to turn some of the soil in our long-neglected garden and my wife and I planted peas and spring greens—Arugula, Spinach, Mustard, Kale, and three kinds of lettuce—Grandpa Admire’s, Red Romaine, and a mixture of leaf lettuces. Most of the seeds we planted are heirlooms that we have kept and bred for years. I also cleared our asparagus bed of the small sprouts of invading plants, giving the two-year old asparagus opportunity to begin new growth.

Returning to the Earth’s flow of life—which we are also celebrating through weekly babysitting of my stepdaughter’s two-year-old daughter—filled me with joy that nourished me like cold water quenches thirst after hard work. In the Earth’s flow of life into eternity is the answer to the questions that we all seek but accessing that joyful and sacred source can be difficult in the workaday world for those, like me, who are mysteriously lucky enough to have received these gifts. An important part of receiving this gift is having begun a news and social media fast for the past six weeks, which has helped clear my mind of the continual hardships of the larger human world.

In my schoolwork, I am seeing once again that many people project onto the world and their larger world projects what they wish for their own lives. A social work professor sent an email for a meeting that intended to bridge university community members with people from other political perspectives and I attended a very small online meeting. The main organizer was a young co-ed whose desire for political harmony stemmed from severe rifts in her family. I mused that her desire for peace in her family was being projected onto the world and wondered if her well-intentioned energy might better serve her in facing the problems in her own life rather than seeking to save the huge US society. Both are laudable goals, but if she seeks to improve the world without facing her personal challenges head on, she is likely to face failure in both areas.

Meanwhile, the Social Work Department and profession loudly stated ideals of social and economic justice seem to be largely responses to social workers ourselves being cogs in the machine of social injustice. Yet, even their ideals contain many examples of social injustice, ranging from an “ethics” discussion where a white male authority tells a woman of color that she needs to accept and adjust to a client she cares about staying in an abusive relationship, despite the centuries long institutional rape and exploitation of women of color by white men, and a film supposedly portraying social and economic justice issues that had barely any women present and which featured a spurned woman vindictively lying about being raped. Most of the film had fictional characters and the Social Work Department head related to me that one of the real-life characters—one of the “heroes”—was having an affair with the wife of another real life “hero” and was thought to have arranged the husband’s death. I wondered how the department chair could be so blind to the murderous vindictiveness of the man, who was politically aligned with her concepts of “social and economic justice” and present a movie that romanticized him.

I was shocked at the depth of patriarchal culture permeating curriculum that claims to be insisting on social and economic justice, however, I came to realize it is the habit of seeking the solution in the larger world, in part, that lies at the heart of the problem. My wife, relating a conversation between her and her son, helped me recognize how the social work faculty seemed to easily overlook these things that disturbed me so much.

My wife and her son spoke of the problem of “teams” in the larger world. People with power-over-others recruit teams of followers and we are supposed to follow them loyally, compromising with evil around us to fight a greater evil in the outside world. We are never supposed to consider what would happen if a man who could kill his lover’s husband was given even more power-over-others, nor why a movie that trumpets “social and economic justice” contains stereotypic views of women commonly repeated by sexual predators. We are to ignore these smaller-world problems as we build a structure that will defeat a “greater” evil.

In my own life, during my brief involvement in local politics I witnessed corruption in my tiny microcosm of the world. In the political world, idealistic people mixed with bullies and corrupt functionaries, forcing the idealistic people to turn a blind eye to the actions of their allies. Witnessing this corruption at the county level in this sparsely populated area, I both marveled and shuddered to think of the mountains of corruption hidden beneath the hierarchies of power-over in the larger world. The Shadow of our Collective Unconscious, as Jung described it, ensures that the towers of power-over will always fall.

The Earthly flow of life through eternity exists in the Earth, in families and communities, with limited reach outside the harmony of a happy, healthy family. The human Goddess—in the sense of the incarnate sacred energy of our families re-creating ourselves through eternity—is bounded into small groups, with teams of all sorts compromising with the bullies and corruption around this flow.

If I join one team of power-overfull people against another, it accomplishes little, especially if there is violence. If “Our” team harms “their” team, we attack the sacred flow of Earthly life in both communities. The question is how we who are practicing good works communicate our good will to those on the “other” team who, likewise, want most of all a better future for their loved ones? This includes, most importantly, expanding the sphere of healthy, happy, and peaceful face-to-face communities living sustainably as part of the Earth.

Sowing seeds in the Earth, celebrating the spring, caring for our family and community, and living in harmony with the Earth, while doing as little harm as possible to all life—these are the tasks that can consume all the time allotted to our short lives. In the feeling of the cool soil of our garden, the quiet of the spring evening, and the joy we experience in caring for the next generation, the flow of life renews our spirits while the larger Earth spins of its own accord. Within that much larger flow of life through unimaginable eons lies the fleeting history of patriarchy and the rule of human power-over-others.