One with Our Life-Giving Earth

Photo by Wendy Morris on Unsplash

I’m finishing work on a new picture book manuscript.  The title, Our Life-Giving Earth.  The topic, climate change.  I took on the topic with two convictions.  Convictions that have underlain everything I have ever written, but when I took up this topic, they grew more important and more challenging.

I must be honest. 

I must be positive.

Honest is easy.  For me, anyway.  Honesty is so second nature to me as to be one of my flaws.  I’m only learning at this late stage of life how to gentle my honesty when gentleness would be more effective, not to mention more kind.

But positive?  About this disaster not just looming but impacting all of life on Earth today?  Is it possible to say anything positive on such a topic without foregoing honesty?

Much of my research, the science, the hard, hard facts, nearly brought me to tears.  How, I asked, again and again, could I present my young readers with such a terrible reality?  What was the point?  To say, “So sorry, kids.  We messed up.  But here’s your world anyway.  Now you fix it.”

I even asked whether I could take on this topic for a young audience, really take it on, without inflicting damage. 

I sought out books that offered positive solutions, but I kept encountering the same blithe message: “All we have to do is to get rid of capitalism!”

That made me swear!  Yes, the concept of infinite growth based on limited resources lies at the very base of the climate chaos we are enduring.  But isn’t it beyond naïve to propose upending our entire economic system while offering nothing in its place?

Finally, I came across a statement I could take hold of.  “There is no difference between climate-change deniers and those who have given up hope.”

That felt real. Offering hope, not passive hope but challenging hope, isn’t simply a kindness, a way of keeping all of us from being buried in despair.  It is a necessity.  To make any difference at all, we must believe that our convictions, our actions matter!

At last, I could take up the terrible weight of the science and begin writing.

I started with the birth of our planet and the many changes she has been through.  I introduced life.  I moved through the Five Great Extinctions, five changes in climate that nearly erased that precious life.  I brought Homo sapiens onto the scene, the ape who knows.  I talked about how we used our big brains to embrace the gift of fire. 

Then I traced the history of that human-controlled fire, a history that brings us to today, to the edge of the Sixth Great Extinction. 

All of it science. All of it honest.

The first critique from my editor was just one sentence, maybe two.  Too much weight on Earth’s early changes overbalanced my message about our changing climate.  I went back to work and cut by two-thirds. 

A much more detailed critique of the new manuscript prompted another third to fall away.  But that edit also included a small comment in the margin next to my conclusion. 

“A real downer,” my editor said. 

The honesty had been the easy part.  But despite my good intentions, I hadn’t yet found that positive place within myself, so, of course, it hadn’t made it to the page.  In fact, what I was still feeling, day after day as I plunged into my topic, was unmitigated despair.

A despair that so inhabited me it turned into a mantra during one early morning meditation. 

“I am dying,” the voice inside my head chanted, “in a world that is dying.”

I hadn’t asked for such a message, but it stayed with me until I could feel it utterly, until I could recognize the space at the end of each escaping breath as the tiny dying it is.  I let that truth fill me until another mantra arrived, equally unsought.

“I am alive,” the same voice announced, “in a world that is alive!”

And instantly, those words were equally true.  

A truth I could rejoice in.  Alive!  At least for the moment, I am alive!  This blessed planet is alive!

Later in that same meditation a final mantra filled me, a phrase I had captured weeks before from my spiritual reading.  A message I had been holding close without yet knowing how to live it.

“Rest in reality,” the voice now said, “knowing that all is well.”

All is well?  Really?  That had been my first reaction.  And yet now it was so.  I knew it to be so from that place within myself where I hold this suffering world.  Because holding life, its exuberance and its struggle, may not be enough, but it is certainly a profound beginning.

I offer no excuses for our human blindness, our greed.  My own included.  Or for the fact that we have come to be an invasive species, destroying by our mere existence.  I am convinced, nonetheless, that we, you and I, are sacred.  That all of life is sacred. 

And I believe in our capacity to learn, to know, to live this holy truth. 

To know that we are “ . . . one with the giant sequoia

and the spiraling leaves of moss.

With the invisible water bears

making their homes in that moss.

With shining minnows,

wind-riding hawks,

the resolute march of ants.

With every dandelion,

with every rose.

One with our life-giving Earth.”

At last, honest hope!