I had never felt Earth so deeply.
Walking in the beech forests of northern Germany, I felt the sun warming my face through the trees, and the gentle breeze cooling it. These are the wild lands of my ancestors, I thought, as I strolled through the forest. I could almost make out their footprints in the soil beneath mine. As I walked, my mind seemed to slip into Earth, out of the shell of my body and into the wider world. I felt Earth’s rivers flowing in my veins, her wind moving through my lungs, her soil nourishing me, her fire animating my body. I felt my ancestors with me, infusing me with their memories, carrying them forward for me to build on. It was blissful – a belonging I had never known – but somehow quite familiar. I could feel the tendrils of my senses rooting deeper into the soil, beyond the topsoil and the fixed crust down, down, down to Earth’s native fluidity below. I am sensing myself, I realized – a disorienting feeling I could not shake loose. I was between worlds: I was myself – reddish beard, thinking too much – and I was Earth. I was afraid, though, of what I would find and how it might change me. Courage – I wish I could tell you from where it came – drove me deeper, beyond the fluid molten sea the lands dance upon, down to the fiery heart of her. This is the source of my thoughts, I realized. My thoughts are of Earth. I was born from her. Each of her developments gave rise to the next in an arc of unfathomable learning, allowing me to think even this single thought. Every thought, every sense, every longing belongs to her. Apart from her, I am nothing. I knew that then, for the first time.
Abraham Lincoln’s words came to mind, with a wholly new meaning: “We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained, it must not break our bonds of affection.” Desperate to know myself, I had been trying to escape from her, to give myself some distance. In the process, though, I lost what belongs to her. I lost my roots.
That was twenty-six years ago. After that experience, I began to guide people on journeys into the wild, to sink their roots into the soil and listen deeply to Earth. I could not have predicted what would come. Like a pioneer species returning to a clear-cut forest, we sank our roots deep, stabilized the soil, created shade for others in their innocence to safely grow. One day, as we returned from time alone in the forest, one wanderer brought back the image of great trees around Earth sinking their roots into the soil, breaking up the rigid crust and transferring information back and forth between inner Earth and outer sky. We who listened felt a stabilizing in our bodies as our wanderer spoke. We knew: Earth was stabilizing. Our listening deeply worked like roots sinking into and securing loose soil.
We practiced for many years like this: wandering in the few remaining wild places and listening. Our listening grew more refined than we could have imagined. Every journey out became an adventure; every return brought a mythic tale of a living Earth feeling through our hearts and bodies, speaking through our tongues. After some years, we were Earth through and through. We lost the ability to think of ourselves and Earth as wholly separate. Still, we could discern the slight distinction. We began to speak of them as human self and Earth self. We began to have a language for our experiences. “My Earth self feels exhausted and needs a rest,” carried quite a different meaning than the old way of saying, “I feel exhausted and need a rest.” With these new words, we could feel ourselves more fully.
Within a few years, there were many thousands of us wandering and listening. The terms human self and Earth self became part of the cultural vocabulary. Young children would wander, supervised, on wild land, inspiring their innate curiosity for their Earth self. Communities of practice grew over time through the 2020s and 2030s, centered around each watershed. They each experienced their Earth self slightly differently, which was a source of curiosity and inspiration at the quarterly Earth festivals, where many communities would gather together to participate in the turning of the seasons.
In each place, the whole village knew when a child reached puberty it was time for their deep wander, a time of finely honing the practice of listening with, and as, Earth. These youth were guided by those few who had learned to listen earliest and deepest. We needed our youth to learn how to listen, for this was the source of our guidance to navigate the profound changes Earth was enduring. These deep wander communities travelled for several months as a group, learning and practicing together. The peak of their process culminated with each youth spending a full moon cycle alone in a wild place. There was real risk involved. And it was needed, for it was how we remembered who we were and learned what we stood for. The youth were deeply changed by that moon cycle. You could see it in their faces as they returned: somber, bright, and responsible. There was a weight to them that held them to Earth like a wizened old oak tree, rooted where it stands. They brought back stories that guided us through the difficult times, stories that seemed to come right from Earth herself. The tales they told could never be fully translated back to the human world. We all learned their stories as they learned to live them back in the village. Through living their stories, the youth began to steer our Earth through her great changes with hard-won wisdom. Wisdom which, ultimately, belonged to her.
And that’s how it was. That’s how it came to be that we are here, sitting in this circle, listening to this story, living within our Earth self, which is learning to thrive again.
Let this story bless the ones that heard it,
Bless the one that told it,
And bless the ones that are to come.[1]