“The Earth is a mother waiting for her children to return, full of stories and rapture and longing.”
“Orbital”, by Samantha Harvey, describes the experiences of six astronauts aboard the International Space Station. It’s a beautiful little book, which reads as a poetic meditation on The Earth, Nature, Life and Space exploration. One of the lines which struck me, early in the book, was the one above.
The idea of Earth as a mother is an ancient one, but one we’ve become distanced from. The truth is we are born on this planet, emerging from millions of years of flows and interactions between energies, molecules and information. We have evolved as a part of Nature, with the planet’s resources of air, water, and nutrients, supporting us, enabling us, and with the Earth’s atmosphere protecting us from harmful solar and cosmic rays. We couldn’t exist without her. Mother Earth. We only exist because of her. Mother Earth.
But our direction of travel over the last few hundred years has been to distance ourselves from her, to objectify her, to treat her as a resource to be plundered, a wildness to be tamed. We talk of Nature as if “it” is something not human, as if “it” is something “out there”, separate from us, apart from us. And I think we’ve lost a lot along the way.
In this sentence, Samantha Harvey describes the mother as “waiting for her children to return”. Shall we return? We should. We really should.
And we’ll find her waiting for us with our “stories and rapture and longing”. That’s what we humans excel at – stories – telling the stories which enable us to make sense of ourselves, of our lives, of others and of our universe.
What kinds of stories are we telling these days? I think we need more stories of “rapture and longing”. I love the French phrase, “l’emerveillement du quotidien”, the wonder of the everyday. That’s where rapture lies….if we slow down, pay attention and allow ourselves to be filled with the wonder and beauty of the everyday. If we pay a particular kind of attention….the attention of longing and loving. Not a longing to possess, to control, to hold onto. But a heart’s longing, a soul’s longing, of deep resonance with “the other”, a harmony, a connection, a loving, caring attention.
Shall we do that now? Shall we return to Mother Earth filled with our stories of rapture and longing? It would take a change of direction….and a healthy one, I believe. But let’s start today.
Heroes Not Zombies 