Touching the Earth
Truly to touch the Earth is to feel its wild, exuberant longing
A slightly shorter version of this article first appeared in the Jersey Evening Post on Thursday 9 November 2017
Truly to touch the Earth is to feel its wild, exuberant longing. How do we touch the Earth? Literally to pick up some local soil or compost and run it through your fingers may help, but equally it may result in nothing more than grubby fingers with no life-changing revelation. First we must understand that we are Earth and Earth is within us. When we move we feel the Earth move inside our body. Thich Nhat Hanh advised us to be aware of the contact between our feet and the Earth, to ‘walk as if you are kissing the Earth with your feet.’
When we dance, this is even more true because the music, the rhythm, and the joy of the dance help quiet our minds. Dancing as if no one is watching, we can reach that singular state where there is nothing but the movement and the beat, where our minds are focussed yet calm, still amid headlong activity. All our cares have flown away; in fact we dance as if no one is dancing.
The dancing is dancing; the music is dancing.
Every other living thing is also Earth incarnate: pieces of animated Earth moving around on two legs, four legs, six, wings or fins. We all eat the plants of the soil and waters, and sometimes each other. There is no other ‘stuff’ here on this planet, it’s what we are and it is all that we are.
Yet we can see, and when we think or remember, we somehow know that we are thinking or remembering. That’s the magic bit: consciousness. No one knows what it is, where it comes from, or indeed what it’s capable of. Anyone who has loved a pet knows that consciousness is as alive in them as it is in us. Anyone who’s been looked at by a gorilla at Jersey Zoo knows that wild animals are as alive and conscious as any of us. Where does it stop? Mice? Insects? Trees? Plants? Bedrock? Seawater? Dust? Electrons? We simply don’t know what is the smallest element of consciousness, nor the largest.
Are they all infused with life’s wild, exuberant longing? Do they all love to dance? I think it’s safest to assume that they are, and that they do. Having touched the Earth in this way, it’s very hard seriously to expect to be so privileged, so entitled to our lazy twenty-first century comforts. Especially when they are provided for us daily at the expense of the service and even the destruction of others, of vital fellow beings from the microscopic to the human and beyond.
