Unanswered Questions
By Christine Jacobi
I was a freshman in college on April 22, 1970, for the first celebration of Earth Day. So much has transpired during those 55 years. Change is the only constant feature. The link between my personal Dharma practice and the natural world strengthens with each passing year. Without that link, I have no Dharma practice at all.
The ‘felt sense’ of being in nature has a dramatic impact on my Dharma practice. Though the sentiment is a bit different, I think of the words to Annie’s Song by John Denver:
You fill up my senses, like a night in a forest, like the mountains in springtime, like a walk in the rain, like a storm on the desert, like a sleepy blue ocean. You fill up my senses. Come fill me again.
Still, our relationship with nature is hard to define. We live in a consumer culture and human beings are at the top of the ‘food chain’. We often use Earth’s natural resources with little regard for Earth’s needs. Are human beings really in charge, or are we just fooling ourselves?
Indigenous people assigned ‘personhood’ to the Earth, Sun, Moon, Rivers, Lakes, and a variety of living creatures.
This resonates deeply with me. Intellectually, ‘personhood’ suggests sentience, which is an ability to sense and respond to the sensations of seeing, hearing, feeling, tasting, or smelling. Creatively, I feel this might all occur outside the scope of traditional eyes, ears, skin, mouth, or nose. Philosophically, this expanded understanding of ‘personhood’ suggests that humans are just one part of life on Earth and that all beings (including the land, air, water and creatures) have rights that should be protected.
It’s not difficult to imagine Earth as an individual person, fine-tuned to maintain a precise orbit, heating and cooling herself with weather, supporting a wide variety of living creatures to tend to her needs. We think we understand what Earth is. But do we? How could we grasp the reality of living over 4.5 billion years in a solar system so large it is measured in the number of light years it takes to cross it?
The earth maintains her position in space so steadfastly, one has to wonder where the brains of Earth might be. Certainly the human brain could not manage all the intricate functions of Earth. Are Earth’s emotions centered in her magnetic core? Does Earth speak and hear with vibrational signals? Are Earth’s rivers, lakes and oceans her circulatory system? Are forests Earth’s lungs? Does Earth digest through the process of decomposition? Is our atmosphere the hand of Earth?
The earth laughs in flowers. R.W. Emerson
If we set aside semantics for a moment, imagine what Earth would be like if we simply treated her as a person. We would respect her right to thrive. We would keep her waters and air clean. We would honor the impressive role trees and plants play in converting carbon dioxide into oxygen. We would plant and harvest crops without poisoning Earth. We would stop drilling into Earth and blasting mountain tops right off her surface.
Our view of Earth as our servant may be one of our grandest delusions.
More realistically, we are guests in a symbiotic relationship with Earth. Reciprocity is the hallmark of a symbiotic relationship … we would take only what we need and return the favor by helping our host, Earth, thrive. We would want Earth as an ally and friend. We would help Earth heal.
When Thich Nhat Hanh was asked what we must do to save Earth, he replied. “What we most need to do, is to hear within us the sound of the earth crying.”
I wonder if that was a rhetorical response or a deep acknowledgement of Earth as a person?