Re-claiming the Sacredness of Earth

Just finished reading two of Richard Powers’ books, The Overstory and The Echo Maker.  I feel cracked open and gutted.  I yearn for the trees, for nature, for some sort of connection I’ve forgotten about. Ecology is “the study of home,” and I’ve forgotten where my home is.  I knew it once, without knowing I knew it.  Nature is my truest experience of God.  I’ve forgotten to live according to that knowledge. I‘ve forgotten to "love this beautiful land,” the phrase Chief Seattle uttered that once brought me to tears. 

 

My intellect inserts itself, questioning my certainty and longing.  I choose to resist it for this moment, to believe what I believe at the place deepest in my gut: that we are all connected, part of one vast living thing. That the world is mythic, and the psyche operates in symbols and drives stronger than reason. To put my faith in intellect alone is a mistake.  The aboriginal people of the world had it right: the sacredness of earth, the immanence of the gods.  And we mocked them, called them childlike and uncivilized.  

Without earth, we are going to die.  It’s that simple.  Without understanding that we and nature are one fabric—and we the newest members of this 4 billion years of creation—we are already dead.  We are sinners, egotistical in our belief that we are special, that we are in control. Forgetting we are a single finger on the body of God.

We’re destroying our home/we’ve destroyed our home.  We have to stop/we will be stopped.  That’s the knife’s edge we’re teetering on, pretending not to see.