I Don't Do Earth Day
Although I see the value in ritual, remembrance, celebration, and setting intention, and wouldn’t discourage anyone from practicing them, I feel much the same way about Earth Day as I do about other specific dates designated by us hu-mons to acknowledge what we call ‘social issues’ (which are essentially of our own making): We wouldn’t need it in the first place if we didn’t have such a screwy collective relationship with Life, and Love.
For me, most of the ‘social issues’ we have are caused by a disruption in how we relate to something or someone that we have designated as ‘The Other.’
So the idea of acknowledging the ‘Earth’ or ‘Nature’ or ‘The Climate’ as something other than what I Am is counterintuitive, for me.
The chant we sing in Circle says it best
(try sounding it to yourself with a clap or drumbeat):
Earth my body
Water my blood
Air my breath and
Fire my Spirit.
I am continuous with the elements in these mountain rocks; I am 60+ percent the water of the river, just over there. My words, songs, and life come from this gorgeous, brisk air.
For many reasons best left for another time, I haven’t felt like the houses I’ve lived in these past 8 years are a ‘home’. Throughout the same time period, I have felt increasingly deep distress about the so-called nation state of Canada. But the land—specifically in Western Canada—has always welcomed me.
Yet to say so implies a separation that is not real.
Earth my Body.
Cartesian thought, modern human interpretations of Christianity (not the same thing as Christ’s teachings), and other thought forms or ideologies have taught us to separate ‘ourselves’ from ‘our bodies,’ and we have applied the same collective thinking to our Earth Body.
The Body is wrong, dirty, has parts to be hidden and ignored and despised. It is not ‘good enough.’ We need to fix it, ‘save’ it. Our human thought forms, technology and control are superior. We seek power over the body, rather than discovering Our Body’s innate magic or delighting in praise of it, which is praise of All That Is.
Ironically—yet utterly predictably—corporations have honed in on this separation, and leveraged it to convince us to buy more of their ‘sustainable’ stuff, by sending us promotions and assurances of their morality, on so-called Earth Day.
Our ideological separation from Body has also left us vulnerable to the guilt perpetuated by well-intentioned—yet incredibly limited—actions demanded by organizations (and family, and ‘friends’) that tell us how we as individuals must eat a certain diet, do certain things with the cans and bottles thus generated, and buy a whole new car containing limited and dangerous rare elements (with a year plus wait, at this moment in history) so as not to burn carbon-based fuels.
It has become the individual hu-mon’s responsibility to fix what is not fixable by individuals, and to feel guilty or even ashamed, every time I fall short. And furthermore, to point fingers at each other for falling short, as though me yelling at you for putting a can in the wrong bin will solve the problem. As though you are separate from me. As though you are morally superior because you have perfect can practices, even though your house is twice the size of mine, or my car takes twice as much gas as hers, or this one’s vegan diet flown in from around the world is doing less damage than the other one’s whatever-is-local-including-meat. Endless, silly, arguments, in which we enhance the ideology of separation, and perpetuate self-abuse.
Meanwhile, as we are thus distracted with self-harm, the vast majority of the pollution on the planet is generated by a few companies and industries, and most of the resources extracted from our Earth Body to be turned into that strange abstraction called Money don’t fully benefit the many human beings involved. It is clear that they mostly go to a few.
The absurdity of this becomes obvious, if there is not Earth and All Her Creatures and All The Things, but simply One Body.
Would we give all of the resources to a brain, leaving nothing left to support the muscles, bones, ligaments, fluids that hold it? Does it matter if all of the cells in your left arm are temporarily powerful and thriving, if the blood that will feed it is soon poisoned beyond recognition, the lungs can no longer provide it with adequate oxygen, and the muscles of your right arm are already atrophying from lack of food?
But I can’t even blame those apparently rich and powerful little human earth cells, sucking on the resources.
Because at the core of it, I feel they, too, are malnourished. They have simply turned away from Life and Love. Just like I have, now and again.
If I don’t know that I am ALWAYS giving and receiving; that our Earth Body, Ourselves is a miracle of the deepest magic; that this magic shows us the processes by which we can organize our lives together if we but let it; that our greatest gift is to live in praise of Life. . . if I don’t know these things in my Earth-body and Water-Blood, what would I have left, but the illusion of power and control?
And for those of us who are tempted to think, “I’m not like that, I’m trying to Save The Earth,”: a word of caution.
As a wise friend once said: the Earth doesn’t need saving. Gaia will be just fine. She will evolve and change as she does. But whether she evolves and changes in such a way that these tiny little earth cells called homo sapiens will continue to exist on her is the question we might want to consider. Are those cells—am I—essential to her continued existence, for continued life, in some form? In the great Body of Gaia, what role does this strange, miraculous, stringy lump of elements I walk around wearing hold?
This April 22, I’m not interested in whether my friends are turning out the lights and shutting down devices; eating vegan, or local, or forage; have the monetary privilege to drive a new electric car and tell me all about it; are growing all their own food because they own land to do it; are paying to offset their carbon emissions for a trip to tropical locales; bought a sustainably-made widget; are newly-subscribed to whatever ideology makes separation and fear feel more tolerable.
All of that might be honourable or well-intentioned, but it’s not what interests me.
What interests me is: how do I relate, as one tiny little cell on this giant Earth Body? How do I deepen into the song of praise that is my body, my blood, my breath, my love, my Life?