Blog #22. June 16, 2012

Earth song to our beautiful, beloved, blessed Mother Earth

As I reflect upon my continuing encounters with the earth during my sabbatical, I notice that much of what I would say is inarticulate, a feeling in my belly of fullness, love, and groundedness. To speak of earth is to speak of the mystery of what I am. This flesh, cellular body is my earthen vehicle, made out of the same stuff as the dirt beneath my feet and also much the same materials as stardust. The word for the rich fertile, moldering earth on the forest path beneath my feet that we call humus comes from the same root as human. We, our flesh and every living thing, trees and plants (cellulose)on our planet is carbon based.

One issue that troubles me is the devaluation of the body (and similarly the soma of the earth), and physical matter in our western spiritual tradition. It seems to me that the physical body of the earth is macrocosm and our bodies as little earths, are microcosms of the same stuff. For thousands of years both eastern and western traditions have devalued, in fact demonized the body, sexuality, and earthly, somatic things in comparison to the non material spirit aspects of our being. In many of the eastern traditions, the body is considered inferior, subject to meaningless cravings and distracting desires. Gross matter is labelled Maya, illusion, compared to the reality of the higher realms of spirit. In Buddhism, the body is a source of suffering, transitory, fading away as is everything in our physical world, subject to decay, death, and disintegration, therefore lesser.

In the western Judeo-Christian tradition, things of the earth, the body, the feminine, and sexuality have been seen as evil or devilish, something to be punished whipped and subdued.
The body and it’s needs and desires were thought to be sinful and interfere with spiritual growth. Both East and West often flagellated, deprived, starved, and sought asceticism and somatic crucifixion as an avenue to spiritual growth and realization, enlightenment. Sexuality and the body were a source of shame and rejection. But, I have come to believe that this is not the truth of creation. After each day of creation, God declared that earth and it’s animals and humans “were good”. He created our bodies as sacred vehicles and as temples of the Holy Spirit.

His perfect model of humanity was Jesus Christ, a fully embodied man of flesh and bone, who was tempted in every way that we are, yet without sin or separation from God. Yes, his body suffered and was crucified because He refused to retract that He was both God and human, one with the Father. He gave His body and blood as blessed sacraments to us, and to symbolize the mystery of bread and wine, proceeds from the body of the earth, as his Body and Blood. He did not reject, in fact He hung out with the fishermen, carpenters, sick and maimed and lepers and women, blessing them as beloved of the Father. With his body and blood He reconciled the condemnations of the past and made creation sacred again. The magnificent miracle is that as God, He was incarnated, enfleshed on and of the earth. Jesus’ reconciling work again breaks down our egoic “either/or categories and presents a way for us to be “both/and”, body and spirit in fullness, celebrating the handiwork of God in our miraculous body. Certainly, we can create material idols and become focused on earthly things instead of things of the spirit. A tremendous amount of human cruelty and murder and other transgressions have been promulgated in the name of the spirit also. Either bodily needs and desires or spiritual judgements and condemnations can create harm when out of balance Orem outside of love. It seems to me that we now have the opportunity to truly follow Christ and live as complete, incarnate embodied human beings filled with soul and spirit, calling nothing that God has made lesser or evil. Let us discard the wrongful condemnations of the earth and her forms in human shape, and accept the redemption of matter as God’s sacred creation. “and it was good”.

My sabbatical began in Ireland where the Celtic tradition is that their land is alive, peopled by goddesses and the sidhe. And Ireland is clearly feminine. I drove through the countryside seeking and finding ancient earthen works, standing stones, stone circles and court tombs, sacred hilltops and valleys, sacred rivers. I visited Uisneach, considered to be the umbilicus, the navel of the Celtic world where the goddess, Eiru, is said to have entered the otherworld, in the earth. In every indigenous culture and many modern countries today, the earth is a beloved mother to its people. The motherland, mother earth, mother nature.

Now, as I have lived in Crete this past month, I experience the passionate Greeks’ love and connection to their land and its produce. In Greek myth, the goddess Ceres was the goddess of the fields, who yielded her abundance in due season. The goddess Diana was the goddess of the forest, patroness of midwives, and cared for the animals. Hera was the goddess of the hearth and home, as well as wife to Zeus, the king of the gods of Greece. We all arrive through our own mother, and we are nurtured at the breast and protected by the mother in our home and the “great mother” earth, herself. Even the name mother derived from Latin “mater”, also gives us the word, “matter”, the stuff from which all life arises and is born.

Crete is a large island surrounded by the sea lapping upon the sandy and stony beaches. Inland, it is mostly mountainous, with deep gorges and twisting hairpin switchback narrow roads that wind on and on. Here and there, along the way, are a multitude of ancient ruins. Paleolithic, Neolithic, Minoan, and Doric towns and cities dot the landscape on the high ground. Roman cities, Byzantine monasteries, Venetian fortresses, and Turkish walls and mosques exist along most major roads and towns. Around her shores, under water, are countless remnants of sunken ships, stone anchors, earthen amphorae, and icons of each succeeding civilization that arose here. The Cretans were always a seafaring people, with early inventions of ship building and navigational instruments. They were a crossroads between Africa, Asia, the Middle East, and Europe for the last 4-5,000 years. Crete figured prominently in many Greek myths, legends, and epic poetry. It is a rocky, rugged, sun drenched land, whose people are reknown for their longevity. The world famous Cretan honey, yoghurt, olives, and wines are unique to this small island. No poisonous snakes or insects dwell here. Even in modern times, Crete is largely self sufficient, exporting large amounts of vegetables, olive oil, and honey. It’s roads are in good repair and the island government has preserved many ancient ruins and archaeological sites, and items in its major museum in Heraklion. It’s mountains still contain uncut or regrown conifer trees. All over the island, the roads are lined for miles with large red and orange flowering bushes.

The Cretan people are known for their honesty, surprising travelers who have left wallets, purses, passports, etc behind, with their gracious return. Only in a few heavily touristed areas, with non native peoples is there risk of theft. The Cretans are hospitable, generous, and steadfast. As in other Mediterranean cultures, they can be often seen shouting at each other vehemently, on and on, back and forth, as they serve one another in restaurants and care for each other’s children. Families with infants and young children are welcomed and helped everywhere. They plant flowers extensively wherever they live, city, town, or countryside.

I recently took another car trip to the northeast side of the island, visiting Sitia, a beautiful harbor town, with a bustling moderate tourist population. The mountains overlooking the blinding reflective sea rise up and up, and up. I visited Mt Toplou monastery, where a multitude of ancient and merely old icons and etchings, painted in the Byzantine manner are displayed. Further up the mountains, a ruined Doric town, Praisos, crowned the the mountain fastness. At the northeast corner, peninsula, Itanos, a Minoan town overlooks the beautiful bay with beaches below. I stopped at the renown beach at Vai for a swim/snorkel where mature palm trees thrive and simulate a Carribean beach. Driving back along the northeast coast, again I found my car laboring up steep twisting inclines, to 4-5000 feet overlooks down to the blinding mirror like sea.

Back at my cottage in Ierepetra, in recent days, the winds have been constantly whistling and howling, night and day, making it difficult to sleep. It stirs up the crystalline waters and makes them both colder and cloudier beneath the surface while rough white caps and breakers create a restless, wild, moving blue horizon.

As I think of my first embodied memory of the earth in childhood, it is a vague image of standing in the back yard of a small rental home, near to a wide field. The grass in the yard was weed filled and straw like but mowed short. It came to the boundary of unmown weeds of the field, standing as high as my chest at the time. I remember my mixed curiosity and fear as I heard a loud rustling movement in the weeds beside where I stood. I so wanted to wade in and find out, but remained in the yard due to clear instructions and pictures of common poisonous snakes resident in the Oklahoma fields and forest lands. Shortly afterward, I saw a neighbor with a large hoe, striking something on the ground. As I peeked over, I saw a huge black snake, with it’s head partially severed, strewn across the ground. It was a King snake, very large but not poisonous. It was the feared poisonous copperhead and several varieties of rattle snake that hid in fields and rocky areas like the one next to my yard.

As a grew into a boy, I loved to run through the fields and wade in the ponds, climb a favorite sycamore tree, sitting on a smooth high branch swaying in the wind. Then, seeing a snake in the pond, swimming with its head above the algae covered water, I learned that water moccasins too are common there.

I loved the lizards and “horny toads, the polywogs and frogs, the box turtles, but not the aggressive snapping turtles that lived in the wet places. These could easily snap your finger off and did snap off the wooden end of a broom that I extended toward a snapper. I kept box turtles as pets many summer sand sometimes a garter snake or ant colony. My older brothers were fishermen and brought home delicious fresh caught bass and crappie and occasional big enough frog for frog legs. The cattle lowed in the pastures all night and slowly moved away when we entered their fields. Bobcats, coyotes, and rabbits were common. Not far from our town a remnant herd of buffalo was protected by the Frank Phillips Woolaroc Ranch.

I also read and learned about the native Americans. Oklahoma means Land of the Red Man. I learned of the exploits and culture of the plain tribes and the infamous Trail of Tears, in which whole populations of eastern USA tribes were decimated and made to walk for hundreds of miles away from their homeland to reservations in Oklahoma. The “five civilized tribes”, including the Cherokee, Creek, Chickasaw, Choctaw, and Seminole were expelled from their ancestral lands, and mostly exterminated by the white expanding frontier.

The low hills, lakes, and oak forests were wonderful for hikes and camping as a boy scout, though mosquitos and especially “chiggers” in the spring could cover me with itching bites after a camping trip. On summer nights the cicadas clung to the trees and filled the night with a sawing, buzzing background of sound. There were some summers when they were everywhere, a plague like the biblical locusts of Egypt when the pharaoh refused Moses demand to “let my people go.” Annually, a plague of crunchy June bugs, hard shelled, brown beetles filled the streets and created a mess on the car windshields, pelting me as I rode my bicycle on my paper route. Grasshoppers were always common too, but occasional summers were over run with them. I played with grasshoppers and watched them in my hand as they moved their mouth parts side to side and expectorated a brown icky substance that made me want to let them go.

I loved to swim in the lakes and rivers, and wade in the creeks, catching crawdads and minnows for bait. Each year, I shoveled topsoil on the lawn and garden plantings. The smell of the rich earth and its ability to make things grow charmed me, so that I did not mind the task. Weeding in the garden, startled by large (harmless) spiders, however was my least favorite chore. In high school track, spring training always brought “road work”. As soon as the snow had melted and ice turned to puddles, I would be out alone or with a friend, running for miles the section roads and oil roads, out in the wide fields and low hills. It was frequent, in those days, to see the metallic beast, like a giant grasshopper, oil pumps, bending and straightening interminably far from civilization. The ground around them would be hardened and oil stained, with a pipeline leading away into the distance.

As a boy, I collected rocks and was interested in fossils and dinosaurs, archaeology and the visible remains of ancient cultures. The layers of the earth, carbon dating, and petrified wood fascinated me. My father had studied geology in college and his work as a petroleum engineer made him deeply familiar with the earth’s crust and it’s geologic history. He knew all the rocks and minerals and could identify fossils and layers of earth from millions of years ago.

But it was not until I was 17 years old that I travelled with my explorer troop to Colorado, that I knew what the earth could be. Vast mountain ranges, breathless peaks and dense overgrown valleys provided me an awesome encounter with the mother earth Rocky Mountains. That same year, I had been given the opportunity to go to a Junior Classical League (Latin Club) convention in Tucson, Arizona. The vast sun baked desert, with its oddly adapted flora and sparse fauna, climbed up to rugged dry mountains in the far distance to the south. Another such trip to Bowling Green, Kentucky introduced me to eastern forests and aged Appalachian green eroded mountains and deep, hard to reach valleys.

I loved geography and earth science, visualizing the fiery core of the earth, it’s molten iron magma, volcanos, and the thin layer of crust upon which all life has developed. Caves, books and images about early human evolution, Neanderthal man, Cro Magnon man, cave dwellers, and sci fi, such as “Journey to the Center of the Earth” enthralled me.

In college, I studied life sciences, zoology, entomology, botany, learning about the classification and phyla, genus, and species of the animal and plant kingdoms. Learning about oceanography and the amazing life beneath the sea, especially the deep ocean trenches, bizarre abyssal creatures led to my love of snorkeling and later scuba diving.

So many images fill my mind as I remember the wonderful continuing relationship that I have enjoyed with the earth. The Anatolian plateau, the mediterranean coast, the deserts of the middle east and the Nile River, in the midst of the north African desert of Egypt roll across my inner screen. I treasure images of trips to the rain forests of Olympic National Park, Moab, Utah, Monument Valley, Arches, the jungles of Thailand, filled with ruins of past civilizations and Buddhist temples. The Andes Mountains of Peru with Machu Pichu and their Incan remnants, even today, high snow capped mountains over 18,000 feet are named for women, goddesses.

Like each of the other elements, the element of earth has entered our vocabulary as a metaphor. We praise someone as “down to earth”, “has his feet on the ground”, “earthy”, “grounded”. We recognize a particular value and personal quality when we think of farmers, gardeners, potters, carpenters, metal workers, masons, spelunkers, mountain climbers, hikers, backpackers, forest rangers, naturalists. We idealize the “barefoot boy” in poetry and many of us realize that going barefoot provides a special open connection to the earth. There has been coined a modern risk factor for kids, called “nature deficit disorder”. We are all vulnerable to the artificial and technological replacements for direct contact with the dirt, the trees, and sky. A critical mental and physical health practice requires regular exposure and preferably exercise out doors in nature. Nature is a healing balm, it’s rhythms and cycles reparative of our modern buffered, urban, technological lives. Fresh air and plants, and the sky and the ground are all primary remedial aspects for our mental, spiritual, as well as physical health. Key prescription: walk, in nature.

Study of the life sciences, zoology, botany, earth sciences, medicine, cell biology, meteorology, oceanography, forestry, ecology may lead to awakening to the earth mother. Have you walked in a sequoia redwood forest and felt like you are in a cathedral? Have you smelled bread baking and felt awe and gratitude for the provision of earth, the bread of life? Have you wondered at the vast diversity of animal and plant life, or the mystery of the human body, the intricacy of a spiders web, the wildness of the Bengals tiger, the alienness of the cobra, or the warmth and love of your dog? Do you look, really look, at the birds in flight, the bees and their complex communication, the ant colony, the caterpillar and the butterfly? Do you sniff and feel into the honeysuckle, hibiscus, rose, grass, and the trees? Try placing your hands a few inches from the bark of a large cedar tree and tune in to the subtle energy that you notice in your hands. Experiment with looking and smelling a rose from your belly and your feet grounded in connection to the earth. Practice smelling and viewing the honeysuckle from your heart as opposed to your classifying, labeling mind. See if you can sense the spirit of the tree and your connection, oneness with it. Feel your feet as if they were roots planted deeply and anchoring you to the ground, just like the tree and it’s roots.

Our spiritual tradition in the west, Judeo-Christian and Muslim scriptures begin with Genesis 1:28, after God created Adam and Eve, “God blessed them and said, “be fruitful and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it: and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth.”

For millennia, this passage, taken out of context, has been a justification for western exploitation, domination, and ravagement of the earth. Only in recent decades have some of the denominations, translators, and scholars begun to look at the tragic mis- understanding of this brief passage in the mythic story of creation. This part of Genesis does not presume to be factual or scientifically true despite the Fundamentalist literalism of a clearly mythic creation story, much like those of many earlier religions. Also, this was presumably written by Moses who, while inspired by God, did not strive for accuracy of scientific fact, but rather truth in the poetic, metaphoric, and spiritual sense.

The context also considered the earth essentially empty of humans, so that multiplication of humans would be required to have dominion over the earth. This passage also comes immediately after the statement that God created Adam and Eve after His own image to subdue the earth and reign over all it’s creatures. God’s sovereignty over creation demonstrated stewardship and a creative life-giving process, not one of total control, exploitation, and destruction. In recent decades, some of the Christian scholars and authors have begun to look again at the old, original translation and bring forth the notion of stewardship and creative enlivenment that God commanded as He issued instructions to the first humans, who were to represent God’s own image of dominion. Also, at the moment of human creation, the idea of limits and overpopulation was not a consideration. Do we really believe that God meant humans to continue multiplication and technological exploitation of the planet until mass extinctions of species, famine, drought, and wars over basic means of life and destruction of the sacred earth, (that He declared “it was good,”) without limits?

In Psalm 19, the Old Testament, King David writes:

The heavens declare the glory of God
the skies proclaim the work of his hands.
Day after day, they pour forth speech;
night after night they reveal knowledge.
They have no speech, they use no words;
no sound is heard from them.
Yet their voice goes out into all the world.
In the heavens God has pitched a tent
for the sun.
It is like a bridegroom coming out of his chamber,
like a champion rejoicing to run his course.
It rises at one end of the heavens
and makes its circuit to the other;
nothing is deprived of its warmth.”

Psalm 65 – The Earth’s Joy

It is good to give thanks,
for the boundless mercy
which renews us and makes us whole.
Happy are those who know this
and open themselves to the Light.
and sing—-

You make the sunrise and the sunset shout for joy,
You are the earth’s fertility.
Your law governs her cycles of snow, run-off, flood, and rain.
You crown the year with abundance
The wild lands, waters with dew.
The wild hills deck themselves with green.
The meadows adorn themselves with flocks,
The valleys gown themselves with grain.
They dance together.
They join the song.”

In 2012, more and more people are becoming aware of the non sustainable pace of human exploitation and domination of the earth and her inhabitants. The population of humans on earth is now estimated to be 6,840,507,003 and rapidly approaching 7 billion. The supply of fresh water,and of arable land for agriculture continues to shrink and experience pollution. The outpouring of waste into ocean, chemicals, plastics, medication, sewage, and industrial discharge accelerates. The search for new waste management sites in which to bury the exploding tonnage of human garbage, the increasing burning of forests, ancient peat, and hydrocarbons for energy, and industrial pollutants of the precious fresh air of the atmosphere, is a juggernaut of destruction, reeling out of control.

There is gradually an awakening among some educated people of the world to the irreversible damage occurring and accelerating daily around the planet, underground, on the earth, it’s soil, it’s rivers, streams, lakes, and oceans, and it’s atmosphere. Some people are returning to a spirituality of nature, of the Earth as sacred. Study of indigenous people’s culture, customs, and spiritual tradition that regarded the earth as a part of the web of life that sustains us all. Native Americans, Celtic peoples, and African tribes provide a model of reverence and stewardship of the earth that is desperately needed now.

A return to a mythic understanding of Earth as Gaia, the goddess, earth mother, the rivers as her arteries and veins, the mountains and rocks her bones, the trees, her hair, the land as her flesh, and atmosphere as her lungs begins to remind us of the amazing interdependence and complex ecological relationships that serve, preserve, and sustain the organism of her Earth body as a life form, of which we all are a part. My and your body is made of earth and water that requires continuous replenishment in the form of food, water, and air.

Below is an edited version of the remarkable speech attributed to Chief Seattle in 1854, chief of the Suquamish tribe:

“How can you buy or sell the sky? The idea is strange to us. If we do not own the freshness of the air and the sparkle of the water, how can you buy them?
Every part of the earth is sacred to my people . Every shining pine needle, every sandy shore, every mist in the dark woods, every clearing and humming insect is holy in the memory and experience of my people. The sap which courses through the trees carries the memories of the red man.

The white man’s dead forget the country of their birth when they go to walk among the stars. Our dead never forget this beautiful earth, for it is the mother of the red man. We are part of the earth and it is a part of us. The perfumed flowers are our sisters; the deer, the horse, the great eagle, these are our brothers. The rocky crests, the juices in the meadows, the body heat of the pony, and the man— all belong to the same family.

So, when the great Chief in Washington sends word that he wishes to buy our land, he asks much of us. The great chief sends word that he will reserve us a place that we can live comfortably to ourselves. He will be our father and we will be his children.

So, we will consider your offer to buy our land. But it will not be easy. For this land is sacred to us. This shining water that moves in the streams and rivers is not just water but the blood of our ancestors. If we sell you the land, you must remember that it is sacred, and you must teach your children that it is sacred.

You must teach your children that the ground beneath their feet is the ashes of our grandfathers. So that they will respect the land, tell your children that the earth is rich with the lives of our kin. Teach your children that we have taught our children that the earth is their mother. Whatever befalls the earth befalls the sons of earth. If men spit upon the earth, they spit upon themselves.

This we know; the earth does not belong to man; man belongs to the earth. This we know, all things are connected like the blood which unites one family. All things are connected. Man did not weave the web of life – he is merely a strand in it. Whatever he does to the web, he does to himself”.

A key concept I now recognize and cling to is my belonging to the earth, a recognition and remembrance that I am made of earth and utterly depend upon it for life and growth of my body and spirit. What is more, as I attend to my body and to the wondrous beauty and majesty of nature, my spirit soars and I am enlivened and inspired, drawing closer to God through His creation.

As we seek to dominate and overwhelm the earth’s carrying capacity, will we be able to follow Christ who told us to feed the hungry, clothe the naked, and treat God’s created beings as if they were Christ himself?

I know for me, that I need to pay attention to what is before me in God’s creation with reverence and gratitude. I need to practice in each present moment, as a prayer, my physical sense of grounding to the earth, my belonging as one of its creatures and part of the web of life or “the great chain of being” that St Francis loved and instilled in his Franciscan tradition. As I breathe in, I realize that the oxygen, O2, is the out breath of the plants as they inspire our breath waste product of CO2. And the breath that I breathe may be the same recycled molecules of air as that of the first humans, or of Christ. I breathe, ground my feet to the earth, and contemplate the water of life as I drink of it and return it to the water cycle. May my and your heart open and expand to love and embrace our mother, the created earth. Let us be of the “Tikkun Olum” that I wrote about in the previous blog, let us repair the world.