REKINDLING A CHILDHOOD LOVE

Valentine’s Day is a perfect opportunity to reflect upon the important relationships in our lives. And one of the most important, if not the most important, is our relationship to the Earth.

This is my Valentine to the Earth. I hope it will inspire you to reflect on your relationship with her, and write your own.

My Dearest Earth:

Looking back, I can see how I tried to separate from you when I was a teenager. I didn’t see you any more. Preoccupied with boys, with how I looked, my raging hormones, you receded from my life.  

You, the one who supported me in my childhood, the one whose arms I lay in on warm days inhaling your moist and musty fragrance, the tangy scent of new grass, the feel of rough bark against my flesh when I climbed trees ––all forgotten.

And so the years passed and I felt this deep emptiness grow inside of me, and I didn't understand what it was, but I felt it as a need to change myself, to be different than who I am, to quell my emotions, to shake off my awkwardness, this feeling that I never truly belonged. And I drank, a lot, trying to capture the spirit and aliveness that I had felt so naturally during those long summer days by the beach, those wild romps across fields, clods of mud swelling beneath my eager feet.

One of the greatest blessings of my life was finding you again. It happened swift as a hawk’s dive, that day on the bluffs above the Pacific Ocean, wild and stormy, and me just a few days sober and scared to death. At that instance of merging again, I experienced your salty ocean as part of me, and awakened to a deep remembering of this primary and primal connection that revived every cell of my thirsting being.

Long separations can't be wholly healed in a moment. I know this now. It took me years of learning from and listening to you, of opening myself up to feel empathy for all that was happening to you, to experience that deep connection as a daily truth..

But like the prodigal daughter, you welcomed me home. I walked your paths and I talked to you and I listened to your poetry and I placed my bare feet against your flesh and my back against your bones and I smelled your skin again and felt its touch, its warmth, and how the sun penetrated us both as we lay together, you and I, so that at times I couldn't discern between your skin and my skin and how we each soaked up the sunlight and how it warmed us and energized us.

But I was older now and that innocent, unencumbered relationship of youth wasn’t possible.  I saw the harm that I and others of my kind had done to you, and it broke my heart, and at times it made the relationship more complicated.

But you didn't shame me. This was my burden, comprised of my guilt. You were constant, continuing to offer up your gifts, the beauty and bounty of who you are. In every moment, you reminded me that we cannot survive apart, for we are one body, one breath, one whirling possibility of cosmological  energy.

And so today, I want to say ,“I love you.” And because I love you, I have a responsibility to you, to act and feel and touch and be with you in a way that shows you that I cherish you as you have always cherished me.

Your beloved, Mary