As we look at our world today, we see only too clearly that integrated sexuality is the exception rather than the rule. People who touch their wholeness, who appreciate their own integrity and their union with everything else, do not ravage their own bodies or the body of the earth. Yet this is what we commonly find.

The word rape has been justly applied to our dealings with the land. We have stripped our forests and fields, robbed our soil of its fertility through wasteful overuse and poisoning with chemical substances, and erected hard, cold structures anywhere and everywhere at will.

Personal impotency will often show itself in cruel power tactics toward those whom we perceive to be weaker than ourselves. We often seek our own affirmation at the expense of another. In our attempts to experience a sense of our personal power, we have set out to dominate and control nature. Instead of marrying the earth, or establishing an ongoing love relationship with her, we have used her to suit our pleasure, denying her cries for help, disregarding her needs for tenderness and caring.

In war we do the same to a race or nation of people. The enemy becomes an it" - objectified as evil. Were we to look into their eyes, we could not kill them. So the strategy of war demands that the enemy remain faceless, nameless, different from us. War can't work if we remember that we're all one family, that we breathe the same air, that we share the same energy.

During the 1960s and 1970s we often heard: "Make love, not war." The juxtaposition of these two activities expresses a powerful truth. You won't kill if you really love. To love your enemy is to cease to view them, or "it," as enemy. To love is to desire that others fulfill their highest potential. To love is to leave others free to determine their own lives. It is to revere and celebrate their bodies, their minds, their souls. If we experience the free, unimpeded movement of our sexual energy within, not only shall we not make war without, we shall also not make the ornaments of war, or monuments to our greed, or playgrounds of waste, nor shall we furnish for ourselves apartments in a city of death. Rather, we will kiss the earth, and touch the sky, and clothe our planet in beauty. We will truly love ourselves, and in so doing, revere our primal lover - the earth.

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