Stories – Earthly Religion

I Did This Too

May 31, 2021
Byron Carrier

I recently submitted an entry to Awakening Starseeds II, a compendium of awakening experiences. I had written another similar piece in the first Awakening Starseeds book, "Be Embodied." (You can find it here at EarthlyReligion, under Writings, under Stories.) I was honored to be asked to return. I'll post it here and add a few comments for this month's entry. I Did This By Byron Bradly Carrier "I did this," says Steve, my professor-of-botany friend. The "I" he unabashedly affirms isn't just him in his…

November 28, 2019
Byron Carrier

(This was my entry into the recently published book, Awakening Starseeds, by Radhaa Publishing. While most of the entries of this international assemblage deal with soul shaking/awakening experiences, mine goes to the bare bones of our matter and what matters.) Barely beyond high school, I came face-to-face with death and birth working for a funeral home that also ran the local ambulance. I dealt with old dead bodies, and on the ambulance, watched some die, saved a few from death, and helped deliver a slippery…

March 11, 2018
Byron Carrier

Gurus My first night in Bombay, sleeping on the woven mat cot, a small lizard dropped on my forehead. “Yeow!” I jumped. “What happened?” I heard from the other room. “A lizard landed on my head!” “Very auspicious,” they said, laughing. In the hot summer of 1971, at age 26, I had left my seminary to tour India with my guru/friend, Dr. Vasavada, and to meet his guru, the Blind Saint of Vrindivan. By the time I got my funeral director’s license in 1967…

March 11, 2018
Byron Carrier

Bodies I saw life and death in bare detail working for a funeral home. The dead body, having festered for four days, reeked. The stench of its rotting flesh filled the embalming room and, unavoidably, my breathing. Fortunately, in such situations, our smell system overloads and goes numb after a half hour. When a person dies, their body dies gradually. At first, the stagnant blood turns blue and the body heats up. Rigor mortis sets in after about four hours, lactic acid locking the muscles. …

March 11, 2018
Byron Carrier

First, some preamble, then the story, a totally true story that wends its way into a metaphor. The unveiling of Ford’s new mystery car, the Edsel, was to have been a momentous occasion. Instead, it was a big embarrassing flop that would mark a change in the car capital of the world – Detroit. All the cars in the world seemed to come from Detroit. During the Second World War, Ford Motors had produced one B-24 an hour out of its massive Rouge River Plant,…

Join the Newsletter!

Please enter your email address below and click submit to join the Earthly Religion newsletter. The newsletter is a periodic collection of recent writings, podcasts and news. We do not share email addresses with anyone.

The dream of an Earthly Religion…

Earthly: our precious natural earth which allows us our bodies, lives, cultures and future.

Religion: from the old root words religare and religio, meaning “to bind back to the root and be whole again.” This does not assume we need to believe in God or the Bible. Rather, we should be well-related with our own bodies, each other, natural life, and natural existence as it actually is. If there is connection with divinity or God, it is in and through our bodies and beings that we relate primarily, not via scriptures, traditions, rituals, or supposed religious authorities. In short, by religion we mean “relating well with reality.”

The emphasis here is on the earthly. It is not an afterlife or an instead-of-life that interests us. Living well here on earth together does.

While we take our religious perspective and work seriously, we don’t want it to be stuffy. Too often, religions can be alien to the human condition rather than affirming of it. They can be demeaning and demoralizing, dull and bossy, ponderously pretentious. We lean more towards the fun and sexy, natural and lively, human and humane, thoughtful and pertinent.

Reality: the obvious and inescapable stuff of physical existence. We intend to enjoy and tend our lives in these bodies, for our time, in our cultures, for our singular and interrelated ecosystem. There may be more, but there is AT LEAST THIS of which we are born, in which we live, and into which we will die.

God or no-God is not the point; Earth is. Both believers and non-believers are welcome here, for we all share a common source, opportunity, and responsibility: life as it is and could be. This ranges from simply improving one’s own life to your helping save and restore Eden’s, not just to “sustain” it, but veering it to thrive as never before. If you value your life, each other’s, and Earth’s – welcome!

Learn more…