Longing for Belonging to Earth
Yesterday morning I had the great pleasure of taking part in the first class of my husband Paul’s second and final practicum for this training to become a mindfulness meditation teacher. He needed a theme for the four sessions and I suggested belonging.
So many people feel so disconnected these days due to myriad reasons but the most obvious one being due to restrictions from COVID-19. Paul chose that his first class be focused on the theme of belonging to our body. His exploration was masterful and evidenced the learning he has done over the past two years of intensive training. For this I am most grateful.
He began the teaching with a James Joyce Dubliners’ quote:
”Mr. Duffy lived a short distance from his body.”
This quote is favoured by the mindfulness community for opening up discussion of the body as the root of awareness, because another and more perhaps easily relatable word for mindfulness, is embodied awareness. And since the Mr. Duffy in James Joyce’s tale famously resided outside of embodied awareness—our truest belonging to self and Earth dwells within our conscious reclamation of that awareness through choosing to pause and experience the world by means of non-judgmental, sensory perception of the present moment.
And what better place to experience the enlivening of the senses than in the great outdoors!
The JJ quote made me think of a discussion I had with our son Lucas on the trail the other afternoon regarding wildness and belonging to Earth. We humans seem to go about our days as though we live a short distance—or maybe it could be said—a long distance-- from any real awareness of our connection to Earth.
Recognizing this sense of separation as a sort of spiritual or psychological wounded-ness is paramount to ending our destructiveness of Earth and letting true healing take place.
Realizing that behaviours rooted in that sense of separation cause wounded-ness within our own hearts as well as that of the living Earth, is what calls me out of my house and onto trails for walking and pushes my hands into soil to grow plants--keeping me close to nature.
It is also what compels me to attempt to make our lifestyle more environmentally friendly.
But it isn't always easy and doesn't always happen.
And so I try to understand it all.
The longing to belong to Earth as though I no longer belong is a strange one when Earth and this pulsing universe, are exactly where we all belong, both physically and in metaphor. Why then, this longing? Is it rooted in some strange cognitive dissonance in which I have a deep and painful awareness of not living in accord with what the Earth truly demands of me?
I can see my own disconnect and this is where I think the longing for a return to wildness fits in.
This is what I tried to articulate to our son Lucas when we were out sitting in the woods the other afternoon. Crouched low on a slightly wet and rather spindly, fallen spruce tree, we were pausing in the woods mid trail walk, for a recharge. Sitting there we noticed several Bluejays who had been very vocal about something just moments before, seemed to follow us silently, one at a time, to where we had perched ourselves.
Were they as curious about us as we were them? Can’t say.
Nevertheless, I did comment to Lucas about feeling something akin to envy when I look at wild creatures and witness them going about their days trying to live their lives and meet their needs as efficiently as possible. I tried to explain that I find their utter and obvious interdependence with the natural environment as something I desire to be in closer communion with.
Their failure to do so means their death in a very immediate way.
Ours does too—but in a more protracted manner and therefore less transparent and is often blamed on class and means. Homelessness and food poverty are glaring examples of human needs not being met in even the most basic manner.
And still my strange mind wonders about the why's and how's of so much of this world’s immense suffering and how it relates to our lack of any real cultural connection to Earth.
Through a combination of the complex processes of industrialization, urbanization and intellectualizing, we fell out of a sense of belonging to Earth and in the process lost our very sense of air, water and land as sacred beings upon which we depend and out of which we are fashioned. In our quest to dominate, subjugate and name, we have forgotten how to pay attention to the ways of Earth and are living the consequences of our forgetting.
Wild creatures fiercely obey the command of the world they live in and when their numbers get too high for one reason or another, that is met with little fanfare. Possibly with massive die offs but very little fanfare even on the parts of those human's who notice.
This is something remarkably different from our human approach to meeting needs.
(Perhaps even this statement smacks of my privilege as a middle aged, middle income, white Canadian with a warm bed and food in my cupboards.)
In a situation of wild versus human rights, whose rights typically supersede whose? If the right to belong to Earth is an inherent birth right, how can we better share resources such as habitat to ensure that not only human needs are being considered in the equation.
We have clearly demonstrated that we cannot outwit the cycles and forces the natural world undulates and at times, seethes with. The harder we try the more we destroy in the very process of bettering things. And still we attempt to set ourselves apart from those whose intellects we diminish. Whose knowing, through our lack of knowing, we do not understand. We do all this because we have forgotten that we are bound by the very same undulating, at times seething forces too. Despite our technology and our buildings-we are not separate from these forces but we forget and deny this connected aspect of our being.
And I am a participant in this all.
I do not meet my needs for survival as the Bluejay does. Excepting when the Bluejay comes to my yard for store bought seed we’ve put out. Or those times when we can eat a portion of our meals from food we’ve grown ourselves.
And despite having a keen awareness that life is so hard for so many wild and human creatures in this world, always the longing to belong once again to that wildness that demands so much of our energy just to exist, persists in me despite my utter inability to fully act upon it.
How far we have wandered from the place of the Bluejay’s wildness to the place where I sit in all the creature comforts one could imagine. (Once again-- I acknowledge my privilege.)
And yet I cannot find contentment here. Try as I might to find it through the practice of gratitude-- my greatest peace is so often found in the woods.
Still, we could not stay sitting there in the woods the other afternoon for any length of time. We never can, in comfort. Conditioned as we humans are, we soon found our bottoms, sore, numbing and wet from soggy, rotten wood; uncomfortable. And so we made our way back to the main trail and headed for the comforts of home.
We stood because it just didn't feel good anymore--a paraphrasing which was better expressed by my three year old nephew on a walk on the glorious trails at Macphail Woods yesterday.
At first when sitting on the log couch at Macphail yesterday, “I love this couch Mawie” until he realized that sitting there was not so comfortable. Then, “ That couch does not feel so good now, Mawie.”
He calls my sister Mawie instead of mommy and like his brother he knows the names of many things we sighted when we walked. But more importantly, he feels a kinship to the woods and a special affection for baby trees.
Neither boy wanted to continue walking when they realized we had turned and were heading back towards to road. They feel a sense of belonging when in nature and wanted to plunk themselves down and stay right where they were.
My three children feel this too and this gives me hope.
On the one hand, there is the knowledge of how desperately and devastatingly so many have forgotten our truest belonging is to this blessed Earth. And on the other hand, the knowledge of how beautiful it is when we fall back into a sense of Earth as our truest home and act out of that sense of belonging to Earth.
We cannot ever fully separate ourselves from either its stranglehold or its embrace. We too are animals whose flesh is no more or less alive and prone to decay than that of the Bluejays we encountered the other afternoon. Our aliveness is not of greater value to Earth than the trees which are uprooted and clear cut for development and for our own use. The folly of our collective forgetting haunts our every breath. The potential for awakening to our Earth belonging is as close as this very moment.
Be well,
Wishing you kinship with Earth.
Thanks for reading.
Jill