Today is Earth day, and I am overwhelmed.
I went for a walk this morning. I brushed my fingers through the leaves — teared up with joy and sorrow. Later, a friend sent an article about Earth’s healing with human quarantine, and tears welled up again.
I do not want to go back. I don’t want to be under quarantine either, but I am exhausted by disconnection harming us and our beautiful planet. I want to know how to sustain the clarity and healing of this time. How can I? What is my prayer?
Yesterday I went for a run along the river. She called to me, so I got in — submerged myself, and she washed me clean. Clean of sweat, fear, misery, anxiety, confusion. Everything made clear.
It’s the way I feel when I’m nuzzled by a horse, or kissed by a dog or a baby or a friend or a lover. Or when a smile is returned by a stranger. We are made of the same thing — offspring of the same essence. This brilliant, boiling rock, held up by a huge expanse of sky, surrounded by bright balls of gaseous light, energized by an enormous fiery star. What miracles we are!
How marvelous to be part of this great world. How did I ever not see? How can more of us be free?
Brilliant people share the message. Women awakening to our nature. As we awaken, so does human connection to the fertile soil from which we came. The feminine, wild nature of our mothers, grandmothers, and great-grandmothers, living in us, yearning for activation, for reunion with our origin Mother.
Who are we if not Earthlings? I don’t want Mars. I don’t want ever-present WiFi. I want Earth to remain untamed, out of our control. We’ve proven ourselves unworthy stewards for now — we don’t get to expand this unsustainable domain.
It may be an unpopular opinion, but I hope Earth always checks us before we change her for good. Like a loving but stern mother, it is my belief she will.
I am not naive to believe that I won’t receive her discipline. I don’t have a compost bin, I’ve thrown recyclables in the trash when a recycle bin isn’t near, and in general, I am a participant in unsustainable consumerism. Yes, it is my dream to live on a piece of land with a sustainable, loving, connected community — but I haven’t yet made that reality; for now I am culpable.
But I also believe that like a loving mother, she has patience and compassion. She knows I am not perfect, but she feels my love, she feels me trying. She knows my intention is to honor her, and to celebrate the journey that opens my eyes.
From a childhood spent indoors, disconnected from my pull to nature, through a path of 30 years — searching. I’ve learned that I feel free when my feet connect to dirt, or when my body is submerged in waters of her womb, or when my words cannot describe the majesty of her monuments, molded by centuries that shaped, decayed, renewed, and restructured, but did not break her.
I am not afraid to die, but I am afraid not to live. When I think of my body returning to Earth, I pray to be nutrition for the soil, an offering to the cycle that gave me consciousness in this plane of life. I do not believe anything ever leaves or dies where we cannot still feel it. We are a product of Earth’s constant, sometimes volatile, sometimes docile — regeneration. What a blessing, to be an Earthling.
I see her patterns — the four directions. I feel connected to the women and men who came before me; but strongly to the women. Women, mothers of our Mother, Earth — balanced between Air, Fire, Earth and Water. Who am I, but that?
Regeneration is happening. Renewal. At every turn, we can be saved. In the year 2020, the directions call us. To recalibrate our way back to our mother, where we belong — our Earth.
Courtney McKinney 