Why Saving the Earth Won’t Save Us

What the Earth is begging and pleading for is for us to recognize is that we need to lean into the Earth to heal ourselves.  She is there lovingly waiting for us to get re-rooted in the world of which we are intrinsically a part of, not apart from. Only when we remember ourselves in ceremony with the world around us can she begin to heal as well for she knows what we have forgotten – we are not separate. 

As I walk along the ancient bristlecone pines, the oldest trees on Earth up high in the Inyo forest, I realize that “community” is so much more than I understood. I see how these great, old, warn yet wise trees are in communion with the Earth, soils, animals, rocks and other elements (dead and alive) which lie in wait to give back from that which they have received so much from. As I turn 50, I seek to redefine what it means to be an elder in community and I see among me how the younger trees “grow up” near the elders, constantly looking towards them not just for how to live, but even more so for how to die in communion of the whole rather than alone, cast aside as washed up and no longer in use. In the forest, that could never happen. The elders are the backbone of the community and only if they are strong and healthy, attuned to the whole around them, can future generations grow up strong and healthy as well. For one inherits the other. 

Up here in the Inyo forests, life and death sleep together, in balance, co-creating the world around them. Simultaneously shaping and being shaped by each other. A sacred reciprocity of taking to support the self and in return giving of the entire self to support the whole. Embodied in a dance of love. 

In this forest, taking for yourself is not selfish when it enables you to fully show up attuned to the whole, able to give of your entire being for the wellbeing of everything around you. In the forest, it is only when the individual takes from the community for only the self that disease and sickness begins to emerge. Only when one slowly withdraws away from the container of the whole does the possibility of a death seeped in depression and isolation emerge, a death very different than dying in community. 

Then the notion of roots came to me as I pull up on a stick. The strength of a tree, its survival, is all determined on the strength and health of its roots as they are its foundation. A tree cannot survive if it no deeply connected, joined as an integral part of the land within which it stands, is held, and is nourished. When a trees roots are withdrawn from the Earth, withdrawn from the community in which it belongs, it begins to die. A tree is not whole if it is not connected to the other. A tree and the world, the ground, and all beings around it dance in a sacred reciprocity of giving and taking for the individual and, in return, for communal survival of all – there is no such existence where any one element can survive without the whole.

I learned to see how life is not linear, there is no death except perhaps that of our ego, a psychological death of the West. Our ancestors understood this well – life is cyclical, there is no death without life and there is no life without death. We live on the wheel of life which is round, cyclical like the seasons, a sacred relationship in harmony with the world around us. When you die in community, you don’t die a final death, rather you give yourself so that you may be held gently in the breast of the collective soul of the community which gave you so much in your life. They carefully and lovingly take you into their soil so that you may be loved and held, as you transition – and like a midwife to mother Earth, they hold you to witness your rebirth.