Tag: Earth

Earth: Our Planet, Our Home

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Bit by bit we are learning more and more about how fragile the Earth is, despite its enormous size in relation to anything that inhabits it. Twice recently I’ve been reminded of this in ways that are quite dissimilar.

Two weeks ago, I spent eight days at a writers’ retreat at Wellspring House. Preston and Ann Browning operate this wonderful place and, as I left at the end of my stay, Preston gave me a copy of his essay, “Struggling for the Soul of One’s Country: American Pathologies and the Response of Faith“. It’s a writing that is so well done, so truthful, so unnerving, that I invite you to do yourself (and the generations that follow) a favor, and stop to read it now. You will be enlightened, no doubt, about the tenuousness of our planet.

When I returned home and unpacked, of course I was anxious to walk around the pond after a week’s absence. To my dismay, over a fifth of the pond’s bordering shrubs had been cut to the ground. I cried. It was utterly disorienting. Stacked neatly in two large piles were the wilting brances, berries just ripening, dying. Along one side of the pond, I measured a 77 pace stretch (approximately 230 feet long) that had been razed, except for four blueberry bushes. At one end of the pond two thirds of a section of shrub had been cleared, exposing more than half a bed of reeds in which a Great Blue Heron often takes cover.
I live in a condo complex where there is abundant and beautiful common space, the pond included. I asked a neighbor if she knew why this growth had been cleared. Her thought was that those who had lived here since the complex was first built 20 years ago wanted to see the pond as they had when they first bought their property. Apparently, from their windows they had been able to see the water’s surface. I had to respect this thought, though I wondered how these neighbors could have gone ahead and made this change without consultating all owners – including those of us who bought our homes when the pond had verdant shores.

My greatest concern is to the ecosystem that exists at the pond. In one act, to remove at least a fifth of the growth, I imagine to be a shock to the system. Visual esthetics aside, at this point in time, there existed a balance, a dependency, of one life to another.

I could support trimming, or clearing, thoughtfully spaced and done in a manner that is mindful of the habitat. But the imprudent leveling of tracts of shoreline shrub is upsetting to me as I am certain it is upsetting to the balance of nature at the pond. And it makes me wonder how Earth will survive if the current dominant species, at the grass roots level (literally), is not more knowledgeable and respectful of its treatment of all forms of life on the planet.

Again, I invite you to read the paper by Preston Browning. The people of this planet, especially those of the nations of greatest means, can no longer treat its host (or each other and other life forms) with self-serving disregard.

"Man’s Heart Away From Nature"

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One day mid-winter, when the snow was fresh, tracks were apparent around and across the pond. I was struck by the idea that in other times and still, in other places, the presence of animal tracks meant and means a great deal – especially to the hunter providing for a family. To me, they were interesting patterns and thought provoking trails.

For instance, I wondered what charm school taught this four-legged creature to gingerly place one foot in perfect alignment with the other. A runway model is hard pressed to get her footing so precisely set. (And is it a pair, a couple, that started along this exact path?)

And what accounts for the circuitous route these animals took from the pond’s shore to the island? While each step is exactly set, why is the overall path so wandering – across a wasteland. Can there possibly be a scent in the frigid ice and snow that this animal is following? Is it delirious with hunger?

And of course I wondered, were these the tracks of a deer, a coyote, a fox? That I don’t know this, led to the thought – how far we have separated ourselves from our mother, Earth.

And what sweet little thing made the tracks shown below? And what is its likelihood for survival this season?

I keep a collection of books near my bedside. They are there to inspire when my mind is hungry at the end of a day, or to soothe when sleep is slow to come as my brain is in a spin.

A few nights ago, I chose from this selection of books the ever inspiring to me, Touch the Earth, by T. C. McLuhan. This book was published in 1971 and is a compilation of Native American quotes, and the circumstances under which the words were spoken. Here’s the content of the page I opened to, by chance. They were spoken by Chief Luther Standing Bear who was born in 1868.

“The Lakota was a true naturist – a lover of nature. He loved the earth and all things of the earth, the attachment growing with age. The old people came to literally love the soil and they sat or reclined on the ground with a feeling of being close to a mothering power. It was good for the skin to touch the earth and the old people liked to remove their moccasins and walk with bare feet on the sacred earth. Their tipis were built upon the earth and their altars were made of earth. The birds that flew in the air came to rest upon the earth and it was the final abiding place of all things that lived and grew. The soil was soothing, strengthening, cleansing and healing.

That is why the old Indian still sits upon the earth instead of propping himself up and away from its life-giving forces. For him, to sit or lie upon the ground is to be able to think more deeply and to feel more keenly; he can see more clearly into the mysteries of life and come closer in kinship to other lives about him…

Kinship with all creatures of the earth, sky and water was a real and active principle. For the animal and bird world there existed a brotherly feeling that kept the Lakota safe among them and so close did some of the Lakotas come to their feathered and furred friends that in true brotherhood they spoke a common tongue.

The old Lakota was wise. He knew that man’s heart away from nature becomes hard; he knew that lack of respect for growing, living things soon led to lack of respect for humans too. So he kept his youth close to its softening influence.”