Earthing the earthling self

Found in location

Hello to you and to the place where your feet are planted today.

I live on Wangal Country, close to the southern shore of the Parramatta River, once known as Burramattagal, the place of Eel Dreaming. For at least 20,000 years before colonisation, the Wangal and Gadigal peoples lived a settled life around here, caring for Country through ceremonies, passing on ecological knowledge through story, song and dance, and sustainably fishing, hunting and harvesting bush tucker. In their culture Country is everything, the ground of all being and existence. This knowing  is in the ancestry and DNA of all humans on Earth. Only in recent times has the dominant Western culture disconnected human being from the living world, opening our minds to all kinds of fantasies and disorders. Here is a report of my own work in progress of finding my way back home.   

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I have just come inside from a morning spent in my balcony garden. It’s a mess. Painters have just left. In these last days they have tromped over my large raised garden bed taking out everything except the shrubs and a succulent ground cover that would survive Armageddon. All my pots are huddled in the centre of the balcony, straggly and bereft. But I couldn’t be happier because now I can do a major renewal of my garden, tending, repotting and shifting plants too where they want to be rather than fitting them into the crevices of what’s already there. I am looking forward to hours of absorption, listening as best I can to my plants desires so I can create an ecosystem which welcomes insects, birds, skinks and the occasional frogs.  

There is always soil under my fingertips.  No matter how much I wash my hands, some dirt always lingers, revealing my gardening addiction to the world. I know I should wear gloves when I plunge my hands into the earth but the grubbiness is part of the pleasure. I love how microbes, mycorrhizae and fungi turn my hands into their playground as I frolic in theirs. Perhaps some of them will make it into my gut biome so I, like my soil,  can be full of diversity and resilience.

Recently, I  attended a cultural training  with First Nations Elders and community leaders, Dr Mary Graham (Adjunct Associate Professor, University of Queensland and Kombu-merri person), Ross Williams (Director of Future Dreaming and Bindal/Juru person). It was heart and mind opening in so many ways. One of the things that has stayed strongly with me is Dr Mary Graham’s subversion of Rene Descartes’  dictum of ‘I think, therefore I am” with her one of  “I am located,  therefore I am”. Think about it,  then sense it, where are you ? how is this a part of you? – physically? emotionally? spiritually?  There is a world of difference between thinking ourselves into existence and being birthed into who we are by where we live on earth.

My balcony garden isn’t the only place I get my hands and knees grubby. I have an allotment in the community garden across the park where I grow vegetables. Planting hands and feet in my veggie allotment I know where I am located, within this particular  nest of the living world. My connection here is primal and intimate. When I allow myself the spaciousness to listen, sense, and simply be, my mind opens and agendas drop. Clean cool air riffles over me, kookaburras call from the towering gum to my south, the smell of damp earth settles me. Who I am here is more expanded, naked and alive than the self I am in my house, the streets or the café, although they are all places I can be lively in.  Here my hands lead, finding  their own sweet rhythm digging for the Jerusalem artichokes, sifting out nut grass, planting lettuce seedlings, harvesting leaves from the Tuscan kale, spreading sugarcane mulch. When I head home across the park, my hands are filthy, my soul revitalised and relativised.

Human life is a lot less lonely and a lot more sacred when we locate ourselves  within the living world. But this relatedness is not without shocks and spills for those of us who have grown up within a modern Western worldview with its belief that humans are exceptional and superior to all other life forms. If you have consciously or unconsciously believed that you exist through the life of the mind, the realities of how we are woven through the fabric of our world can be literally beyond thought. So many ways of knowing are denied by modern Western consciousness including intuition, somatic intelligence, dream awareness, time transcendence and kinship with all beings. That’s a lot of who we are blanked out, unseen, unheard and unsaid.

Reclaiming awareness of instinctual and relational ways of knowing reveals rich complexities in ourselves and our world. It changes the story. In Right Story, Wrong Story, Aboriginal scholar Tyson Yunkaporta  (who I quoted in my first post) defines ‘right story’ as “the metaphors and relations and narratives of interconnected communities, living in complex context of knowledge and economy, aligned with the patterns of land and creation”. Right story, he adds, “never comes from individuals, but from groups living in right relation with each other and with the land”. It’s a story of “we not I” says Ross Williams more simply, urging us all to “look deeper into nature and then you’ll understand everything better.”.  

Understanding why glaciers are melting, jellyfish are multiplying and hurricanes are strengthening is astonishing, disturbing and enlightening. The complexities of the world’s interconnections are endless. To take it all in and care about it, I have to entirely rework the notion of who I think I am and what the nature of life is. Its an ongoing process of learning, observing, sensing and feeling. I am getting to know my smallness, numbness and ignorance at the same time as I am discovering I am part of everything.

My growing ecological awareness delivers many delights, even while I grieve, rage and despair at what is being lost and endangered. It’s liberating to unravel goals, beliefs and values set by individualistic, earth-denying agendas: “ Find success! Be better than others! be noticed! Prove you are right!” What a relief to lay all this down. Carl Jung called this process of surrendering egocentric perspectives for an awareness of being part of a larger whole, the relativisation of the ego. A nature-lover from childhood, Jung not only understood but experienced how our human psyche is embedded in the life and matter of the world. In his autobiography Memories, Dreams and Reflections he wrote:

 At times I feel as if I am spread out over the landscape and inside things, and am myself living in every tree, in the splashing of the waves, in the clouds and the animals that come and go, in the procession of the seasons. There is nothing ... with which I am not linked.

The work of becoming ourselves and forging our own values while holding an awareness of the universal nature of life, was called individuation by Jung. As he described it, individuation meant becoming true to one’s self in a way that “does not shut out from the world, but gathers the world to oneself”.  This maturing process births a more authentic, complex and flexible sense of self, located in relationship to all of life.

Identifying ourselves, in the words of Thomas Hübl, as living not “on the planet but as the planet” is an ongoing process. For me, it’s mostly a slow and meandering walk, peppered with switchbacks and chaotic interuptions. Sometimes I have moments of intense ecological awareness and connection, chatting to birds and trees, at other times I am disconnected and trapped in my own self-centred bubble. Much of the time, I zigzag between these two modes of consciousness. What else can I expect? These are chrysalis times when many of us live in a transitional zone between worn out forms and barely recognisable new ones. But locating myself within an ecological world is increasingly becoming part of who I am in delightful, humbling and surprising ways. Once I assumed my most significant relationships would always be with humans, not beaches, trees, rocks, cats, kookaburras and termites. Yet it’s often when I am most conscious of being in relationship with the more than human world that I feel most mysel.  What about you?

Some years ago, the eco-philosopher Thomas Berry lamented “We are talking only to ourselves. We are not talking to the rivers, we are not listening to the wind and stars. We have broken the great conversation.”  Then a conversation breaks down, misunderstandings and disconnections accumulate. It becomes acceptable to dam and drain rivers, spray chemicals on fields, turn ravines into rubbish dumps and sacrifice mangroves for marinas. Living within this wounded world diminishes and dislocates ourselves even further. Berry cautioned

Without the soaring birds, the great forests, the sounds and coloration of the insects, the free-flowing streams, the flowering fields, the sight of clouds by day and the stars at night, we become impoverished in all that makes us human.

To heal our world and ourselves, we need to resume our conversations with the places and beings that make and sustains us.

 Towards the end of her life, Mary Oliver  wrote “The first, the wildest and the wisest thing I know: that the soul exists and its built entirely out of attentiveness.” I love how simple this is, so do-able and so necessary.  I sit here in my office two stories above the ground, tapping keys with my right hand, running my lefthand fingers over the grain of wood on my desk , a chill in my upper arms, a glimpse of the twisting naked limbs of  the Chinese Tallow out one window, drooping palm fronds glistening in sunshine after rain out the other, the chirps of the noisy miner living up to its name resonates through the neighbourhood. Where you are you right now? What conversation awaits your attention ?