The earth is the source and being of the people, and we are equally the being of the earth. The land is not really a place, separate from ourselves, where we act out the drama of our isolate destinies.
—Paula Gunn Allen, The Sacred Hoop
At the risk of being redundant, I repeat: we are not part of the earth; we are not children of the earth; we are the earth. The first spiritual ecologists, such as Hildegard of Bingen, Julian of Norwich, Teilhard de Chardin, Thomas Berry, and Miriam MacGillis, argued that, because we are spiritual beings inhabiting physical bodies on earth, we are inextricably connected to it. In fact, they insisted, the earth speaks through us, because it has no other allies.
Our hunter-gatherer ancestors knew this instinctively—they had no other frame of reference. Their lives depended on an intimate relationship with soil, plants, animals, water, and all the elements. It did not occur to them that they could ever be other than the earth.
Just as we commune intimately with other human beings who are close to us, we must now commune intimately with the earth. Some people—like John Seed and Edward Abbey—have lived in such day-to-day intimacy with the earth for so many years that they have had great difficulty being indoors even for short periods of time. In fact, they have no concept of being other than the earth.
I’m not suggesting that we all live outdoors, but I believe it is imperative that we practice communion with the earth and continually ask the earth what it wants from us. We do this by spending intentional, contemplative time in nature and consciously communing with the earth community. By speaking to the earth as if to another human being, we develop earth intimacy and the capacity to hear and feel its communication to us. This kind of earth intimacy is guaranteed to radically alter our behavior in relation to the earth and to inform all of the decisions we make, both as individuals and with respect to our communities.
The earth is our being, and we are the being of the earth.