This book completes another step in the realization of a shared vision quest. Robert and I have been "Brothers of a Great Dream" for more than fifteen years. It is a dream no one owns but all can share - if they have the imagination and faith to rise to its promise, to know that it can and must come true. It is a Great Dream because we intuit that it is also the dream of the spirit that creates our destiny - the spirit of this living world.

Our instincts tell us that this living world is not only the home of life, but is itself a gigantic, self-evolving organism some have called Gaia. She too has embarked upon a four billion year vision quest: to fill herself with conscious life. We humans are an essential player in her Great Dream. In our awakening to her reality, we sense that she too is further awakening. Somehow Gaia herself is coming to fuller consciousness of her embryos of awareness called humans. Such is the true position of humanity - awakening to the full miracle of its most ancient and living parent, this living, conscious Earth.

If we fully accept the fact of her miracle, the fulfillment of her vision quest becomes ours. Our awakening invites us to care for our most ancient and sacred parent by co-creating upon her and with her. We are coming to realize that we can no more ravage and destroy her and survive than a foolish child can ravage and destroy its own mother. She asks us to honor her by honoring each other and the preciousness of life itself. And if we respond to her, we can be certain that she in turn will continue to be generous with us and with our far descendants. We can awake to the startling good news that we can live and thrive within her miraculous being, that we can enjoy a sustainable sanity, peace, and abundance which until now has only been glimpsed by visionaries. This is how her vision quest is fulfilled in our awakening.

I honor this book because I know it was created in the service of her spirit. It reveals and explains one of the vital gifts the parent - Earth - offers its awakening child - humanity.

- Larry Switzer, May 1989.

Robert Henrikson and Larry Switzer, 1993.