Separation and Connection
Step 1: Becoming Aware of My Separation.
As I began my journey of Breathing with Trees I started to better undersand the ways that the trees and plants worked together. I learned how the hunter-gatherers worked so well with each other and with the trees and plants.
But then I discovered an additional challenge. As my understanding about nature slowly widened, I began to recognize an impediment to my awakening that was left over from my civilization training — that of feeling superior to the Earth, as seeing the Earth mostly as a resource for me and my peace of mind. The writings of Thich Nhat Hanh awakened me to this: “A lot of our fear, hatred, anger, and feelings of separation and alienation come from the idea that we are separate from the planet. We see ourselves as the center of the universe and are concerned primarily with our own personal survival. If we care about the planet, we do so for our own sake. We want the air to be clean enough for us to breathe. We want the water to be clear enough so that we have something to drink.” (Love Letter to the Earth, 2012)
I began to see that this separation and alienation also has been keeping me from acting on the problems of climate change. If we are to help the planet recover from climate change and save our descendants, Thich Nhat Hanh has said that our relationship with the Earth must go through a dramatic change: “There’s a revolution that needs to happen and it starts from inside each one of us. We need to wake up and fall in love with the Earth.” (remarks at the Paris Climate Summit, 2015) He stresses that when our relationship with the Earth changes, we will begin to find ourselves weeping for the suffering of the Earth. And this will bring us into the needed action required to stop climate change.
To feel the pain of the Earth on an emotional level is a tough challenge for me. As I have walked separately on top of the Earth throughout my life, I haven’t seen much down there to love. I haven’t seen what is going on in the Earth’s soil that is affecting me other than to help farmers feed me.
Throughout my life, this separation from the Earth became more and more ingrained in me. Mostly, when I walked, it was on a sidewalk. I became even further removed whenever I traveled on the street’s pavement on my bike or in a car. Whenever I needed to go on a long trip, I went up into the sky on an airplane, where the ground was barely visible.
Our forebearers, the hunter-gatherers, didn’t have all these separations. They spent their time wallking barefoot on the Earth. Thankfully, some of the empathy connections they developed as a result are still in my body. As Priscilla Trinh tells the story, modern hunter-gatherers still to this day do not view themselves as separate from the world around them. Instead, they have a reciprocal relationship with the Earth. She quotes Davi Kopenawa of the Yanomami tribe as saying: “The environment is not separate from ourselves; we are inside it, and it is inside us. We make it, and it makes us.” (“Hunter-gatherers and the dawn of agriculture”, Alliance)
Priscilla Trinh says that if she is reincarnated, she would like to be a weeping willow or a mango tree. Her wishes showed me how far apart I am from this way of seeing things.
Step 2. Beginning to See through my Separation
Reading Thich Nhat Hanh, Priscilla Trinh, and Davi Kopenawa’s words, I thought more about my separation from the Earth. I began to see that this separation should come as no surprise to me. The hunter-gatherers were out in nature with the Earth all the time. Meanwhile, I have been indoors almost all my life. I get my food from the groceery store, while they find their food by plucking it directly off the plants and trees and by finding it under rocks in the stream.
The scientists are now telling us that just about everything that is happening on the Earth is hidden from our senses. New scientific studies reveal that healthy topsoil is fully alive with all different kinds of other life forms. Zoologist and natural historial George Monbiot teaches us:
“Beneath our feet is an ecosystem so astonishing that it tests the limits of our imagination. It’s as diverse as a rainforest or a coral reef. . . . We depend on it for 99 percent of our food, yet we scarcely know it. Under one square meter of undisturbed ground in the Earth’s mid-latitudes there might live several hundred thousand small animals. Rough 90 percent of the species to which they belong have yet to be named. One gram of this soil — less than a teaspoonful — contains around a kilometer of fungal filaments.” (“The secret world beneath our feet is mind-blowing and the key to the planet’s future”, The Guardian, 2022)
Wow! I found this to be fascinating. But as helpful as it was to know this, it was still very hard for me to fall in love with the Earth and to weep for it — until I learned about and absorbed another Thich Nhat Hanh teaching: “In our minds, we think that birth means we start from nothing and become something. . . [but] you did not come from nothing. That is impossible. . . Birth is a form of continuation.” (quoted by Barry Boyce, In the Face of Fear, 2009) He points out that I am a descendant not only from my mother and father, but also from the trees and plants of Mother Earth that have given my parents the food and water that they needed to produce me. As I grew up, the food and drink that I took in from the trees and plants also made me one of their descendants. So, the trees and plants of Mother Earth are another set of my close relatives, and their ancestors are also inside me.
In addition, when it is said that I will die, the deeper truth is that I will live on. As my decaying body breaks down into carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen, it will feed the soil’s living and non-living elements and go into the clouds, the rain, and the new plants and trees that are now blossoming because of my helping to enrich the soil. In this way, I will live on to become the parent of another set of Mother Earth’s trees and plants. So, instead of my being separated from Mother Earth, I am an integral part of her, who temporarily manifests as a human being and then goes back to help other parts of Mother Earth manifest as separate beings. Thus, I am much more closely related to the fungi, plants and trees than I previously thought. I am even interconnected with the Earth’s soil and rocks.
Now, while I’m walking in the woods with my dog, I’m also walking with all my other ancestors that are inside me. This includes everyone that gave me life: my mom and dad, my grandparents, and the hunter-gatherers. I’m also walking with all of nature, including Mother Earth, who gave me the food and drink that have built up my brain, bones and body. As a result, there is really no “me;” I am really a “we.” This awareness has lessened my individualism, and it keeps me mindful of my interconnection with all life.
Notice though that at this stage, I was still mostly comprehending this at the rational, thinking level. However, as Thich Nhat Hanh has said, if we are to help the planet recover from climate change and save our descendants, we also need to connect emotionally with the problem. This deeper level of connection to the Earth will produce a stronger drive to help humanity survive this challenge.
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In the next blog, I will share how I began to connect emotionally with the Earth and with all life, and how meditation facilitated that connection.
