Hummingbirds
By Ian Manson
Hummingbirds
In early February 2026 a small group gathered at Waterperry House in Oxfordshire, England, to investigate a simple proposition:
“The ecological crisis is both a physical crisis and a spiritual one. Addressing it requires a new level of consciousness, where we understand that we belong to the larger family of life on Earth.”
The proposition is a quote from a book called ‘Replenishing the Earth’ written by the Nobel Peace Prize laureate Wangari Maathai in which she outlines her experience of finding spiritual values through her practical work with the Green Belt Movement in Kenya and sub-Saharan Africa. The purpose of the gathering was to investigate how we might participate in encouraging and developing this new level of consciousness.
The retreat at Waterperry was held under the auspices of the Economics Faculty of the School of Philosophy and Economic Science. By way of background, the School’s teaching about economics has always emphasised the singular importance of land in economic life as the source of all material wealth. But it has become apparent that land is more than just the material commodity that economists usually think of. It really comprises the whole natural environment, the abundance of life, with amazing powers to bring seeds to birth and support, maintain and absorb the whole cycle of life. All human, plant and animal life is utterly dependent on it. Hence the significance of the ecological crisis and the need to address it in the context of economics.
Maharaja Shri Shantananda Saraswati, the leading exponent of Vedic Philosophy upon whom the School relies, used the analogy of the two wings of a bird, as representing the material and spiritual wings of our existence. He emphasised the need to use both for human existence to flourish pointing out that for those who do exercise both wings, the whole world is indeed a family.
His successor, Maharajah Shri Vasudevanda Saraswati, when asked about economics, pointed out that so much of modern economics for governments and public alike is all about gain. ‘Why is this?’, he asked, ‘Because people do not have a spiritual life, they are unable to walk along the spiritual path’. At the very least, he advised, we must try and do whatever we can. ‘Whatever is unfavourable for us, whatever we don’t feel is good, that we should not do to others. In pursuance of one common purpose, we can make efforts to serve society, to advance society. This will be dharma (good, rightful or lawful living).’
Together these two teachers have propounded and explained the Vedic Philosophy of Advaita, or unity, in which all living things are understood as having a common, conscious spiritual essence which can be experienced inwardly through meditation as a deep peace and quiet bliss or happiness, and outwardly, through action, in the beauty and harmony of the universe and the natural world.
As the most accessible entry to the spiritual world seems to be through peace and stillness, we started with a simple invocation borrowed from the Vedic tradition:
Om. In heaven peace; in the sky peace; on earth peace; on the waters peace; in plants peace; in trees peace; peace in all the powers; in Spirit peace; peace in everything; peace alone peace; may You be that peace for me. Om, peace, peace, peace.
[Sukla Yajur Veda Samhita (36.17)]
This was accompanied by a simple practice of coming to rest and stillness in ourselves that was returned to again and again throughout the event.
In the researches prior to the event, gratitude was also a recurring theme from many different sources as exemplified in this short prayer adapted from a thanksgiving prayer of the Haudenosaunee People of North America:
We gather our minds together to give greetings and thanks to:
The people with whom we walk; Our mother the Earth;
The waters, fish, plant life, berries, food plants, medicinal herbs, trees; the beautiful animal life, birds and their songs; the four winds, the thunder and lighting, the sun and the moon and the stars.
We gather our minds to greet and thank the great Teachers who have come to help throughout the ages and to the Creator, or Great Spirit for all the gifts of creation.
Let us pledge reciprocity with the living world in gratitude:
And now our minds are one.
Taken together, finding peace in ourselves and in the world around us, and feeling and expressing gratitude for all the gifts of creation, helped to bring home this understanding that we all belong to the larger family of life on Earth and to show how it is possible to use both wings
Wangari Maathai worked with thousands of people to build and establish the Green Belt Movement in Kenya and Sub-Saharan Africa. Her starting place was very practical. She set about teaching and showing people how to restore the natural human habitat that had sustained populations across Africa for countless generations until it was lost to plantation farming for cash crops in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The aim was to restore the forests by planting and nurturing trees and learning to live with and from the habitats they engendered.
Through this work she and the Green Belt Movement together began to recognise and formulate “certain intangible core values” that encapsulate the “subtle, nonmaterialistic aspects of the organisation”. They became the common ground from which the people worked. They were:
- Love for the environment;
- Gratitude and respect for Earth’s resources;
- Self-empowerment and self-betterment;
- The spirit of service and volunteerism.
These values, which she calls ‘spiritual’ values, taken together with “a commitment to embody justice, equity, responsibility and accountability” freed people to be of service without much regard for the common motivations of money, fame or personal advancement that drive much of modern life. They were recognised as being an expression of universal values and principles based on the human capacity “to appreciate love, beauty, creativity and innovation or to mourn the lack thereof.
We turned next to Vedic wisdom as expressed by Ranchor Prime in his book, Vedic Ecology, Practical Wisdom for Surviving the 21st Century. The theme running through the whole exposition is encapsulated in the first verse of the classic Vedic text, the Eesha Upanishad rendered in English as:
“Everything that lives belongs to the Lord. Therefore take only what you need, that is set aside for you. Do not take anything else, for you know to whom it belongs.”
Prime describes the Hindu view that the whole world is a forest that has three basic qualities:
“One is srivan, the forest that provides your prosperity. Then there is tapovan, where you contemplate as the sages did and seek after truth. The third is mahavan – the great natural forest where all species of life find shelter.”
Prime then goes on to describe the reverence in which trees and forests were traditionally held in India; the “common understanding that trees must be protected so that soil will be fertile for agriculture”, and the contemporary loss of that understanding. From this perspective all of life is woven together as a single web in which all the partes depend on each other. He writes:
“Each of us therefore has a role to play in maintaining the health and happiness of the world, beginning with our own bodies and immediate environment. What is done by the smallest part has its effect on the whole, and whatever affects the whole touches all its parts. In today’s world with our global networks of trade and communications, we cannot avoid this interdependence and its consequences for us all.”
Prime too formulated some spiritual principles based on Hindu, or Vedic, understanding and practice:
- The tradition of sacrifice: which means taking as little as possible and always considering what is left for others – for God, for nature, for the poor and for future generations;
- The tradition of giving: which is about the replenishment of society through giving of ourselves by whatever means our talents and abilities allow without demanding or expecting a return;
- The tradition of self-control: which replenishes the soul through meditation, fasting and similar disciplines.
He stresses the importance of inner and outer peace:
“Hindus say “Om. Shanti, shanti, shanti” (peace, peace, peace) before every prayer. The first ‘shanti’ means peace with nature, ecological peace; the second means peace in society, between human beings, communities, nations and peoples; the third means shanti within oneself, spiritual peace. Ecological peace, social peace and spiritual peace – for Hindus, environment embraces all three.”
For us at Waterperry, the practice of coming to rest and being at peace, combined with the practical matters of attending to the needs of the house and catering for the Group certainly helped to bring us together with a common sense of purpose very quickly.
Our next inspiration was Father Thomas Berry who has been described as
“one of the twentieth century’s most prescient and profound thinkers. As a cultural historian he sought a broader perspective on humanity’s relationship to the Earth on order to respond to the ecological and social challenges of our times.”
His real concern was for the twenty-first century and his mature understanding was set out in his book, ‘The Great Work: our way into the future’, published in 1999. As he saw it “The great work now, as we move into the new millennium, is to carry out the transition from a period of human devastation of the Earth to a period when humans would be present to the planet in a mutually beneficial manner.”
One key insight was that:
“We cannot own the Earth or any part of the Earth in any absolute manner. We own property in accord with the well-being of the property and for the benefit of the larger community as well as ourselves….” This meant that “The entire question of possession and use of the Earth, either by individuals or by establishments, needs to be considered in a more profound manner than Western society has ever done previously”.
Father Thomas argued that this required a wholesale re-thinking and re-structuring of major areas of modern life, including in particular law, economics, education and religion. His observation was that modern law and economics had evolved to be entirely human-centred with the result that anything to do with the Earth, its ownership and its use always took second place to human demands and immediate gain whatever the longer-term consequences might be. He called for a new, Earth-centred jurisprudence which recognised the natural world as possessed of rights that can be protected by human laws governing the conduct of human beings. Economics needed to follow suit by regarding its function as meeting essential needs, not every possible human desire, while minimising the impact of human activity so as to discover a mutually enhancing interaction between the natural world and its human component. This would be led and supported by education and religious traditions emphasising the sacredness of the Earth either in its own right or as an expression of God or the Great Spirit.
“We are a pervasive presence.” he wrote. “By definition we are that reality in whom the entire Earth comes to a special mode of reflective consciousness. We are ourselves a mystical quality of the Earth, a unifying principle, an integration of the various polarities of the material and spiritual, the physical and the psychic, the natural and the artistic, the intuitive and the scientific. We are the unity in which all these inhere and achieve a special mode of functioning. In this way the human acts as a pervading logos. If the human is the microcosmos, the cosmos is the macroanthropos. We are each a cosmic person, the Mahapurusha, the Great Person of Hindu India, expressed in the universe itself.”
An example of that integration of the polarities of the intuitive and the scientific was our fourth inspiration, Robin Wall Kimmerer and her book, Braiding Sweetgrass, subtitled Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants. Robin is described in the book as “a mother, scientist, decorated professor, and an enrolled member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation” who are First Nation inhabitants of lands that now form some of the northern states of the United States of America. Her combination of indigenous wisdom and scientific knowledge and method provide a unique insight into the intimacy of the human / Earth relationship and the awe and wonder that come from a deep sense of the Earth as a sacred space and universal teacher.
Sweetgrass is valued for its strength and pliability making it ideal for weaving baskets and the like – but it has wider significance as well:
“Sweetgrass belongs to Mother Earth. Sweetgrass pickers collect properly and respectfully, for their own use and the needs of their community. They return a gift to the earth and tend to the well-being of [sweetgrass]. The braids are given as gifts, to honor, to say thank you, to heal and to strengthen….”
The description goes on and leads to this reflection:
“For the greater part of human history, and in places in the world today, common resources were the rule. But some invented a different story, a social construct in which everything is a commodity to be bought and sold. The market economy story has spread like wildfire, with uneven results for human well-being and devastation for the natural world. But it is just a story we have told ourselves and we are free to tell another, to reclaim the old one.”
As a scientist, Robin recognises the value of science and scientific knowledge, but she adds:
“Native scholar Greg Cajete has written that in indigenous ways of knowing, we understand a thing only when we understand it with all four aspects of our being: mind, body, emotion and spirit.” (p47)
One feature of sweetgrass is that it flourishes best not by distributing seeds in the wind, but when roots are harvested and transplanted by hand, thus emphasising the reciprocal relationship between the human and natural world. She writes:
“Cultures of gratitude must also be cultures of reciprocity. Each person, human or no, is bound to every other in a reciprocal relationship, just as all beings have a duty to me, I have a duty to them. If an animal gives its life to me, I am in turn bound to support its life. If I receive a stream’s gift of pure water, then I am responsible for returning a gift in kind. An integral part of a human’s education is to know those duties and how to perform them”
This understanding of reciprocal relations has very practical implications. For example, the North American indigenous approach to collecting, or harvesting, from wild places is based on four principles (p166):
- Never take the first that you find.
- Only take what you need
- Never take more than half
- Respect the plant: treat it as a gift.
Running through all these descriptions is a deep sense of the intelligence and sacredness of the natural world as a creative outward expression of an inner unity, source, existence or life in which all living things participate and which they all have in common. As human beings we seem to have a choice. We can share and participate in this natural intelligent order, or we can ignore it and please ourselves. The first option is to live in harmony with nature by which we can become an enhancing presence in the universe. The second option turns the human presence into a destructive and alien force by which in the end we can only impoverish and destroy ourselves as we destroy the natural world in which all life depends.
There was not time in the two days to reach an agreed collective conclusion about all this, nor to do justice these remarkable thinkers, but some reflection offers this formulation of practical means for activating the spiritual wing of the bird:
First: Re-discover our sense of the sacred though appreciating the beauty and wonder of Nature in the largest sense.
Then participate:
o By cultivating peacefulness in ourselves and gratitude for Nature.
o By growing things – trees, plants, food.
o By restraint – take only what we need for a dignified life.
o By service – engage through voluntary service.
o By understanding – read, study and converse about these things.
o By learning and teaching.
At the end of her book, Wangari Maathai tells the story of the tiny hummingbird forced to flee the forest with all the other creatures by a forest fire. The tiny bird was then seen to collect a drop of water from a nearby lake and fly back and drop it on the fire, and to do this again and again. Asked about this seemingly futile activity the bird simply replied: ‘Well, I’m doing the best I can’.
Ian Mason. (Contact ianm@fses.org)
March 2026
[Copyright Ian Mason / SPES]
Sources:
Replenishing the Earth, Wangari Maathai, Doubleday, 2010
Vedic Ecology, Ranchor Prime, Mandala Publishing, 2002
The Great Work, Thomas Berry, Bell Tower, New York, 1999
Braiding Sweetgrass, Robin Wall Kimmerer, Penguin Books, 2020
Unpublished study material from Leon MacLaren and published Conversations with Maharaja Sri Shantananda Saraswati and Maharaja Sri Vasudevananda Saraswati.