I am Her, She is Me: Reclaiming Relationship with Body as Earth

Photo by USGS on Unsplash

As I began the descent into my body, I found dirt, I found feathers, I found fur and root-slime. I found ground up bits of bone and rock, slugs and bugs, mycelium, detritus; worm-holes and worn paths. I didn’t find a Better Than, a Holier Than, a More Acceptable. Instead, each part spoke of a wilding, a Union with the feral and untamed; each piece sang the song of ages past, knowledges lost, wisdoms known and unknown. And in coming closer to myself, I wanted to bring myself closer to others: not just human, but rock, sea, bird, deer, plant, this very land on which I stand and claim relationship. This is the enwholement of embodiment, a reclamation of the Wholeness through being earth made human.

“It’s not just land that is broken, but more importantly, our relationship to land.” -Robin Wall Kimmerer

My relationship to myself and my body was colored heavily by the doctrines of a religionized world, condemning from birth to death. Oh yes, death, the only escape; transcend from the body, gain eternity with god. But that in between part was contractually obligated suffering and othering. Just as Eve was made shameful and cast from paradise, we were given the birthright of bodily shame and needful separation from Earth as sanctifying waters and forgiving meadows that offered of themselves with no expectation of your sacrifice. Your mere existence was sanctified through union with the Earth mother.

Even in my time of cleansing my beliefs about myself from religious doctrines of separateness, I kept finding myself in places where this assertion would be raised again and again. Still transcending the physical. Still alienating oneself from the body. Still demanding suffering. Might I just ask, Religions of the World, what the actual living fuck?

My Christian pastor, during the most documented moments of Standing Rock, when I asked what we need to do to be better stewards of this Creation and why we are leaving this fight in the hands of the already disadvantaged, shook his head and looked helpless, “it’s god’s will.” We have no authority here, he was admitting, and we have no reason to worry about it because we will one day die and be joined in paradise with god. The earth is a cast-off, temporary experience gone awry; the body is a cast-off, temporary and unclean vessel. And we can do nothing about either but to plead for forgiveness and act the way we are told is best.

My Tibetan Buddhist teacher told me, when I had questions around autonomy, that I must grant him authority, being just a mere acolyte, on the assumption that he know what’s right for me, being more learned. And the troubling thing was, most of the teachings supported this behavior, even if his narcissistic behaviors may have been the source of his desire to exert such power. He strangely professed an “advanced” lifestyle of hedonism as spiritually superior, but utilized this rigor of excess to transcend bodily experience, denying pain, hunger, and whatever other signs his liver must have been giving him. No wisdom to be found here, only something to be mastered. Master the body, master the mind, transcend separation. Separate so far you separate into union. I’m sorry, what?

So here we are, suffering a “species loneliness” - as Robin Wall Kimmerer writes in Braiding Sweetgrass,

“Philosophers call this state of isolation and disconnection “species loneliness”—a deep, unnamed sadness stemming from estrangement from the rest of Creation, from the loss of relationship. As our human dominance of the world has grown, we have become more isolated, more lonely when we can no longer call out to our neighbors.”

Photo by Liam Briese on Unsplash

And here’s the thing: our separation from Earth moved hand-in-hand with our separation from ourselves. Ingrained with the western-minded idea that nature is something to be tamed and dominated, we naturally translated that to our bodies. We know we are nature; otherwise this natural evolution from nature dominance to bodily dominance would not have been the sluiceway from divine-made-physical to a thing we other to suppress & control.

We lost a sense of relatedness to our bodies, forfeit as they were to the wills of the hierarchical world of Shoulds, Just So’s, and What is “Right,” “Good,” “Holy.”

So, this is my plea: if you love this Earth, let her love you back. This is one and the same. Your body is Earth and if we are doing work to save this planet as our home, we must, also, do the work to restore our home within our bodies.

The more we refuse to be in relationship to our bodies, the less likely it is we can be in relationship to the Earth and vice versa. If you reclaim relationship to your body, you are naturally able to begin the process of reclaiming relationship to the Earth. What you do to one you naturally do to the other. So if it all feels too big, let’s start with ourselves and see how we naturally progress into allying with the Earth in sacred partnership and bond to love and be loved in return.