Loving Our Animate Earth: Listening to the Land
Each morning I bless my water. I fill a large glass cup, stir it to activate the structure of the water, emulating the spiral movement of a spring or stream. I add some lime, squeezing the water that has moved through tree into fruit collecting minerals along the way that will nourish my body after a night of sleep. I add some salt. Preferably local and wild. Crystals hold memory, that’s why we use them in computers and cell phones. And salt crystals hold the memory and wisdom of the water they came from.
Water holds the memory of all time.
I stir this magical concoction and bless it. I thank it for the journey it took to get to my body. Water that fell to earth from cloud, sifted through rock ancestors and soil biology into an aquifer where it waited and rested. Water that then took a manmade journey through pipes and plumbing to magically emerge from the tap in my home. What a miracle. Blessed water that comprises some 60% of my bodily form. Thank you water. Thank you.
This simple act of acknowledging our beloved animate Earth in her majesty and miracle is a grounding pillar of my day. Something I do everywhere I go and it has changed my life from the inside out. I am in awe of how far we have come from such reverence in the small acts of living. As humans close to our mother Earth we once all felt her heartbeat, understood her patterns, lived by her messages and her constant stream of information. We have become illiterate to this original language, our mother tongue. The severance of our legibility to earth-speak has impoverished our experience of life. This is the reclamation of our times.
Modernity tricks us into believing in a narrow vision of technology. One that holds technology to be that which is manmade, as if anything on Earth didn’t always already come from her. In the understanding of animate Earth, breath is a technology, water is information and soil is a computational matrix that breeds magic. Imagine the profundity of a technology that absorbs a readily available resource from the sky, integrates it with a biomatrix of nutrients sourced from billions of living beings operating in a profound, coordinated harmonious concerto of informational flow and then grows an edible product that transfers life giving nutrients into a tasty, sweet, delicious experience that we call – fruit. And the tree, soil, water, mycelium and bacteria do all of this, all the time, for no cost, without any need for recognition. They just do it because love is itself an animating force. Did you know that Earth loves you? She does. She tells me every day. And I love her so deeply in return. Our reciprocity cultivates radical joy. We have been working far too hard. It’s time we got out of our own way and rested a whole lot more.
This reciprocal love affair with Earth is free and available to everyone. The ways in which you have been separated from her are our own design. The product of centuries of madness that taught us that we must be afraid of the dark and terrified of wild things. In truth, we are the wild things. The ones rapacious and greedy. Insatiable in our need to consume as if consuming more is somehow nourishing, as if it somehow makes us safe. The truth is, the more we consume the more lost we become as we deepen into disconnect from the joy of simplicity and gratitude. It is the ultimate paradox of this modern culture that the more we consume, the more we feel empty and purposeless. The more we consume, the larger and less healthy we become. We become less safe and less happy when we consume more. Can you feel it? You know this to be true. It’s not your fault that you bought what modernity was selling. Our complicity is not blame but it is responsibility.
In Hawai’i we have a word – kuleana – that means both blessed right and blessed responsibility. The Earth has blessed us with the ability to think about ourselves. To contemplate our being-ness. It is our kuleana to use this capacity to create more peace, more joy, more connection.
Even if our world is dying, our last breath, our last movement, our last word can be one of peace. Simple and profound peace with what is.
The bananas growing in my yard remind me of the power of patience. I see them green, hanging and growing, slowly fattening up for weeks and I wait. Knowing that their nurturing is for me, it is for my kids and that they give this with no expectation of return. I also know that when I eat them with reverence, the pathway of loving kindness that brought them into being from rain to soil to fresh air to biological nutrients will nourish and strengthen my body more than a banana that was grown on a plantation with chemical pesticides and poisons. Trucked with fossil fuels to a store and sold on a shelf that forgot what true abundance tastes like. We work far too hard in fear and a mindset of scarcity. It is time to remember how to rest and restore. How to celebrate and revere the fecundity that is all around us.
We have made this world as it is today and we can unmake it just as easily. We are that creative and that powerful. This modern mess is ours to clean and recreate. The animate Earth is ready and waiting for us to remember. It can begin with something as simple and readily available as blessing your water before you drink it. It can begin with gratitude for the microbes in your gut that digest your food. It can begin with sun on your face. No one is left out of this unconditional loving. No one is ever alone.
A Hawaiian elder, Kumu Ramsay Taum, recently spoke to me of the four families we have. The first being our birth family from whom we learn many lessons, painful and beautiful. The second, our chosen family, from whom we build the life we wish to live. The third our family we are never without – the Earth herself and all her creations. The fourth, our inner family, our higher self or sacred spirit, our physical self and our subconscious. It is this third family, animate Earth, that ensures that we are never alone. We are always in the company of billions upon billions of beings. All from the same mother. All vibrating from a frequency of loving. Sense into them. See them.
My prayer and promise to you is this:
The radical generosity and fierce compassion of Earth and all her creations can become the guiding force of your life.
Start somewhere that feels so small you can’t not do it and just begin. Beginning has power and magic in it. Bless your water, thank your food and contemplate their journey to your body. Watch the sun setting or rising. Cheer for the courageous grass growing through concrete and remember that life is but a fleeting dream. Begin to notice and celebrate the cacophony of miracles that surround you and deepen into the knowing that joy is our most natural state of being.