Tricycle | Awake in the World

This week we are reviewing Step Three of Clark Strand's "Green Bodhisattva" series, which is now online. In "The Care of Earth," Strand introduces the third step towards an ecofriendly recovery: "Made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of the Earth as we understood Earth." The original Alcoholics Anonymous step reads, "Made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understood Him"—but Strand's higher power, as you might expect from any aspiring Green Bodhisattva, is not God but the Earth:

For me that Power is the planet—the Earth that created all life, that sustains all life, and toward which all life is moving with every heartbeat and every breath. And so the sentence that is going to keep me alive, for as long as I am alive, is this: “Made a decision to turn my will and my life over to the care of Earth as I understand Earth.” Leaving aside for a moment the grave environmental issues at stake, why waste a lifetime pretending I know how to run the planet better than the planet knows how to run itself? For that matter, why pretend that I know better than the planet how to run my life?

There's been a lot of discussion around Strand's "Green Bodhisattva" series, so make sure to check out the first step, "The Path of Recovery," and the second step, "Restored to Sanity."