Readings to accompany this post:
“A Practical Harmony” by Wendell Berry and “Honoring the Spirits of the Land” by Leah Penniman
Living in Indiana means getting used to wind. There’s nothing to stop it, so it seems that wind flows back and forth from each corner of the state without ever losing its momentum. If you close your eyes in the forest, the wind blowing through the leaves sounds a lot like ocean waves. Nothing manages to make me feel smaller than wind and waves. A butterfly flutters its wings and a tree branch falls on my car as a wave peaks its way out of the ocean. I don’t know if it’s a coincidence that the wind and the waves seem to mimic one another, or if that is just the sound of something bigger than us.
On every inch of this planet, people have found ways to interpret the earth’s functions. A lot of these explanations come in the form of faith. Despite coming from different religious backgrounds, Penniman and Berry’s observations of their faiths’ connection to the earth are similar. Just as the wind and waves echo one another, it seems religious practices do as well.
Berry quotes the Book of Job when he says “speak to the earth, and it shall teach thee.” When we think of faith, it’s not always paralleled with our treatment of the earth. I tend to think of dusty church pews and sleepy Sunday mornings spent trying not to doze off (at least not noticeably). Penniman’s experiences with faith come from her experiences with being “Jewish, Unitarian Universalist, Haitian Vodouisant, an initiate of Oya, and worshiper of Ifa.” Penniman quotes Baba Malik Yakini when she says, “The Earth is not just the third rock from the sun. The Earth is alive. To be whole, we need to be connected with that spiritual energy.” These are different paths of faith still speaking very similar messages: This earth is more than something for us to stand on. It is something worthy of worship, something to go to for guidance and reflection.
We seem to be stuck at a standstill here. If so many religious and spiritual practices speak of this treatment of the earth, why is this not the message we focus on? Penniman speaks on the idea of sacrifice, saying that “the essence of prayer and sacrifice is the acknowledgement of the being-ness of the nonhuman energies in our world.” I think we forget that the word “beings” does not always need to be prefaced by “human.” Instead, there are beings outside of us. There is wind and waves. Air, something invisible, causing such monstrous, incredible things.
So where do we go with this? Why is it worthwhile to think of the earth’s role in multiple religious practices? It is not beyond our means to say that this earth provides for us, keeps us alive, keeps us sheltered and nourished. If we’re inclined to place our faith in something bigger than us (as most humans are), why not place it in the waves, the wind, the life source that makes way for trees and flowers of every color?
If you asked me what this faith would look like, I would have to say it looks a lot like reciprocity. If we acknowledge the earth as something magical, something outside of what is human, something that provides for us, I think we must then ask ourselves what we are doing for it. If faith asks from us sacrifice, devotion, and our attention, how does this translate to our experiences on the earth? How do we worship something so inexplicably giving, something tirelessly aiding us even when we remain clueless? I think a worship like that has no choice but to hurt because to worship an entity like that is to see the hands that feed us and still be inclined to cut them off. I think what we can do is work to allow the earth to place as much faith in us as we do in her. Just as we expect fruits to continue growing, and animals to keep living, maybe the earth can come to expect us to have her best interests at heart. Maybe we can trust ourselves to look out for one another and find something resembling balance.