Friday Ramble - Earth

Earth is a good word for a Friday ramble in the midst of this season when we are working away in our gardens and tending the little sprouts of the harvest yet to come. The word dates from well before 950 CE, and it comes to us through the good offices of the Middle English erthe, the Old English eorthe; the Germanic Erde, Old Norse jǫrth, Danosh jord and the Gothic airtha, all springing from the Ancient Saxon eard meaning soil, home, or dwelling. All are possibly related to the Latin aro, meaning to plough or turn over.

What are we thinking of when we say "earth" anyway? Is it the dark and fragrant soil beneath our feet, garden plots, wooded hills, city parks, farmers' fields and arroyos? Is it berries, branches, seeds and sleeping roots? Is it the granite bones of the planet and its fiery heart far below?

It's all that and much much more. Our fragile skin and blood and bones, the rivers of our veins, the ground beneath our feet, the synapses and sinews of the planet on which we stand, the rocks and trees and other beings with whom we share our home - even the air we are breathing in and out - all are connected and part of an elemental process, a vast web. Arrogant humans form an infinitesimally small and thoughtless component of that web, but we are always forgetting. Hunkered down in our hubris, we think of ourselves as separate and above the earth, as its masters and owning the right to litter and clutter and torment and destroy.

It doesn't have to be that way. Yearning for wholeness, we can turn and look back on the long journey we have taken to come this far, and at some point we come to know that we are not separate at all. We are part of Mother Earth as She is part of us. To borrow the words of wise woman and deep ecologist, Joanna Macy, "We are our world knowing itself".

Within our wild knowing are gems beyond price, first and foremost trust and the certainty that we are all together here and at home on the earth. In the words of Barbara Kingsolver: "In the places that call me out, I know I'll recover my wordless childhood trust in the largeness of life and its willingness to take me in.

Trusting in the rightness of our presence here, we can stand with our feet in the soil and our heads in the sky and know in our roots that we belong here as much as ginkgo leaves and sandpipers do. Dirt and clouds - what a life!