Why It Matters to See Yourself as the Fuzzy Little Ape-Like Earth Child That You Are

Come, my fellow caged creature, and allow me to remind you of something pretty bloody vital

You and me are warm-blooded, two-legged animals with no tail (booo?) and some fluffy patches. We like to eat, lie in the sun, frolic, play, nuzzle, nap, feed our babies, groom ourselves, dance, care for our communities, maybe climb the odd tree.

(I mean, isn't our feverish obsession with climbing the ladder of our careers actually an unmet need for climbing trees? The same impulse, but manifesting within individualist capitalist societies? I will say: yes.)

But instead, we are living inside a bunch of walls on all sides. Rare is the time to frolic and nuzzle. We stare stiffly at light-emitting rectangles all day, and our environments, cookware, clothes, children’s toys …all the things… are filled with tiny bits of plastic that get into our brains.

Gosh I wish I wasn’t writing this

Take feeding ourselves: the most primal of life-sustaining impulses.

How do we, the warm-blooded, two-legged animals with no tail (booo?) and some fluffy patches, get our food?

We ‘forage’ for food by getting in two-ton metal contraptions that eat the fossilised bones of ancient beings to take us down long, congested roads to giant, temperature-controlled buildings with lights so bright they’ll burn what’s left out of our poor retinas, where most people inside have a corpse-like expression and move with a sorrowful shuffle.

There, we exchange digital tokens (that we earned by staring at the aforementioned rectangles) for what some call, ambitiously, “food”, but much of which is (unless we’re very wealthy) almost unavoidably laced with known toxins, chemicals and pesticides,

And that’s just one tiny part of our absurdly unnatural existence. I could go on, but I want to get to the good bits and not linger too long on the parts that make me want to howl into a tea-towel, my misery safely muffled from others who might be uncomfortable with a display of actual feelings in a culture that prefers to politely pretend they don’t exist.

(Or, at least insist we process these inconvenient and messy “feelings” quietly and privately so no one gets squirmy. So, please: be good, and keep your howls muffled)

The way we live now is profoundly, unbearably unnatural.

We’re cut off from the source of our water.
From the place our food grows.
From the land we live on and the ecosystems we’re part of.
From the rhythms of the seasons.
From each other.
From ourselves.

(Who even are you anyway, when you're not trying to traverse late-stage techno-feudalist capitalism where merely surviving is a full-time performance?)

And you know there’s a climate emergency, right?
And there’s a mental health emergency, too.

Huh.

We could do meaningful, good, proper things about both. But, for the most part, we don’t. Or can’t. Or won’t.

Why? Because truly caring for our mental health and the Earth depends on a few basic principles: slowing down. Listening. Resting. Honouring limits. Caring for each other. Valuing life itself over… y’know….tearing down habitats and shredding the planet to pieces to produce inane crap for people to buy to fill the gnawing hole left by the disconnection I already talked about above?

But unfortunately, those same principles: of care, listening, rest, etc, are completely incompatible with the economy. So, we can't prioritise them. So we’ll just have to find solutions to our mental health crisis and our climate emergency in the free market.
Sorry about that.

Er, so far this piece is not matching the title, Siobhán, what's even happening here?

Good catch. You’re so smart. Well, I’m writing to you (yes: you) to invite you (yes: you) to remember something that hasn’t stopped being true... even in all this mess.

Despite the unnaturalness of how we live, despite the rectangles we are somewhat enslaved by, despite the noise, the lights, the exhaustion, despite the tiny bits of plastic in our breast milk and despite the lack of political will to act like life actually matters…

…you are, and always will be, a little piece of Earth herself.

You are Earth. You are nature.

Not metaphorically. Not poetically. Literally.

You and me, are literally nature. We are living expressions of this planet. Children of Earth. Fruits of the tree of life. Etc, etc.

Not separate. Not outside. Not above or elevated or beyond.

We are of her. From her. With her. Always.

The Earth, our Earth: from which we came, the Earth to which we’ll return, the Earth that sustains all life. All begins and ends here.

Ok, ok: we get it. But…so what?

What does it mean to see yourself as a (literal and not poetic) part of Earth?

Short answer: Because it helps you feel nice.

But wait. I don’t want “feeling nice” to be the only reason. We humans can't bear to feel “bad” or feel discomfort of any kind, and that’s not healthy. It means we avoid the relationship-building, the capacity for nuance, the richness of staying in complexity and the skill of withstanding contradiction.

So please stay for the longer answer which is something I speak to from my own experience as a disembodied, disenfranchised capitalist hostage raised in a council estate with not a speck of grass nearby, to ……now, with an embodied, practising, loving, grateful, active recognition of myself as the fuzzy little ape-like Earth child that I am.

So the longer answer for why it matters to see yourself as a (literal and not poetic) part of Earth goes something like this:

There is a sense of belonging, a sense of resonance, a sense of connection available to us when we begin to notice the ways the Earth is not separate from us, but expressing through us.

A kind of belonging based not on status or identity or belief. It is deeper, older, quieter.

Seeing yourself in the Earth, and the Earth in yourself, is more… primal. More fundamental. More natural and inborn than any other way we might try to understand our place in the world.

Your connection with the Earth comes before all other identities, affiliations, or achievements. It is something you need only remember.

Seeing your profound interconnectedness and relationship with the living world offers you extra support. Roots. Grounding.

When we remember we are of the Earth, a deep, primal, living expression of this planet, something strengthens. A steadiness begins to return. There’s a, kind of, sense-making that occurs.

When we see ourselves in the Earth, and the Earth in ourselves, it gives us something to hold on to in our society of dizzying weirdness.

Let’s be honest: we’re being asked to carry on right now as if things are normal. But they are not.

And part of you knows that. A very very very very very very very very big part.

That sense of wrongness is your fuzzy ape-like child-of-earth body registering the dissonance.

That’s not something to fix, like the self-help-wellness-industrial-complex would have us believe. It’s something to listen to.

Seeing yourself in the Earth, and the Earth in yourself, is not just a poetic, frilly, nice-sounding idea.

In my experience of working with people in this realm, (see all about that here if you want to) this shift makes us feel more at home: in our bodies and on our planet.

And feeling something like ‘home’ (in a society that feels very not-like-home at all and feels very frightening, strange, dystopian and weird) can help settle and ground us for the work that lies ahead.

Coming?

p.s. more on this topic here:

Your Bones Are Borrowed From Mountains (& Other Important Reminders Worth Putting Our Phones Down For, Perhaps, For One Darn Minute?)