You Belong
It was raining softly at the end of our school day. After packing up and zipping jackets, we stepped outside the gate. Dark spots formed on the flagstone, then evaporated just as quickly. The wind howled. As we walked the half-mile to Moose Crossing, our drop-off and pick-up spot, the kids feigned irritation. Rain. So bothersome. So wet. It was, I knew, joy on their lips, but the uninitiated sometimes hear complaint.
At Moose Crossing, there wasn’t a car in sight. The rain hadn’t grown heavy, but the sky was dark and pendulous. Everywhere, gusts of wind picked up patches of dust and hurled them at us, adding a touch of caramel to the blues and greens in the distant mountains. Along the way the dappled collection of raindrops that had landed on the front of my pants, initially visible as solitary drops, slowly expanded into complete and damp darkness. No one was cold.
A small juniper sat across the road in a ditch. Other than that, endless miles of waist-height sage extended in every direction. It’s so easy to see emptiness here. The kids wasted no time parting the boughs.
It’s such a small thing, embarrassing really. A few children and a young man got a little wet, then ducked inside a tree. That’s it. That’s the whole story. From the outside, it’s almost unnoticeable, a hedge of impenetrable unimportance. The eye has difficulty seeing it. It presents itself as one thing, a sphere of inconsequence, a discomfort even, a nothing. But you worm right through those guys, and suddenly you’re inside something entirely new and unexpected.
Look at the ground! It was covered six to eight inches deep with needles in various stages of decay – all the way from last year to half a century ago. Dig into it. It was striated like growth rings, soft like a mattress. What appeared to be a solid tree turned out to be rather spacious inside, sort of hollow, an empty ball of needle-like thorns that are no longer a nothing, but an inside with roof and walls. There are kids in here. It’s not waterproof. It’s a shelter that breathes and protects and moves with each gust of wind.
Raindrops landed outside. Inside, we had berries. They were milky blue, unlike any other blue in the world. Purple really, except there is an invisible yeast that becomes visible in great numbers as a soft white powder on their surfaces. It’s the same thing that’s on grapes and apples. The powdery yeast casts the dark purple berries in a white three-dimensional haze so that there is a depth of color, not one color, but a surface of color that smudges off in your fingertips. If you collect a few hundred of these berries and fill a small crack in the earth, a nowhere sort of place never before visited by human eyes, or perhaps visited by every human eye on the planet, the earth will suddenly ripple with delicate contour, much like your fingerprints, accented by dozens of tiny purple-blue berries all covered in yeasts. The earth is brown.
I once went for a long walk. About an hour from home, the storm clouds that had been swirling around me finally broke and I began to get wet. I picked up my pace in the hope of getting home before I was soaked.
Then I stopped. I dropped the tension in my shoulders and simply let the rain fall onto my body. I took a deep breath. As my chest expanded, my belly filled the wet garment of my shirt and I wondered - why do I hide from this? Who is fleeing whom? I stood still, listening to the multicolored earth.
The storm grew heavy and the once dry mesa swelled with rosy-brown trickles. Water dripped through my hair, down my face, and soaked my shirt and pants to the skin. My underwear was wet. My butt. The backs of my thighs, my feet, shoes, and socks. This is what cold feels like. This is my thirty-eight year old body feeling cold and wet. I’m magnificent, aren’t I?
Half a mile back, the mountain goats I had seen with their excitable new kids were standing in the same rain. Warm blood filled their bellies. Nostrils flared. I can no longer tell if this is boring. I don’t think it’s smart, insightful, or even good. It’s just plain and simple. This is what the earth is like.
The same thing captured me under the tree with the kids. Simplicity. It wasn’t exciting or unhappy. It was just raining. There was a tree, and without any fanfare or hesitation they walked inside. It was so natural to them. These kids, who have spent years now in a school without walls. They know how to read the landscape. They act. Nature isn’t a burden to them. It’s home.
And that’s where I found this story. Scattered amidst the purple and blue berries, mixed into the chocolate and yellow earth, it was right there, plain as day – you belong. I had been looking for a long time, so I wasn’t surprised when I found it.
From a human perspective, it’s understandable to think that we polluted the earth. But from a whole-earth perspective, the apes have no right to tell us what’s wrong. If people are simply a part of the earth, and it’s evident to me that we are, then there’s room for the fact that the earth isn’t innocent.
The earth isn’t innocent.
Do you know what stromatolites are? They formed billions of years ago, when the earth was still very young. Some of the earliest forms of life, they are basically pools of bacteria that, in that incongruous way of the planet, formed crusty boogers in the eyes and ears of the sea. For billions of years these bacteria, by far the longest period of life on earth, ate rocks and sunlight and passed gas. That’s the polite phrase my dad used for fart, and it’s why the planet has an atmosphere.
It took another billion years for other creatures to turn that atmosphere into one that you and I can breathe, but those stromatolites were critical. I can live for several weeks without eating, several days without drinking, but I can’t live for more than a couple minutes without exchanging breath with those ancient creatures. Just sitting in tide pools and stuff. This was before there were fish, or organisms that had spines, brains, or even two cells. Billions of years. Most of them died.
You belong. That’s the story. The rest of it goes like this: the earth is whole. If you play the record backwards, it sounds like this: the earth isn’t broken. That’s the way a lot of us need to hear it these days, because we’ve become accustomed to hearing that it is. But if you play it forward you get: the earth is whole. Stromatolites belong. You belong.
I live in a social world where many people are concerned about the future of the planet for a mix of environmental and political reasons. I too like the planet, and question some of its politics, but I don’t subscribe to the astringency common in a lot of human circles. The Occupy Movement was a good example. I resonated with some of its values, but I took immediate exception to the 99% versus 1% language. That is the old story, which is that there are good and bad people, and it’s us versus them. This is uninteresting, stark, and distracting. I’m interested in the new story, which is you belong. The earth is whole. We’re 100%.
The old story creates extra trouble by dividing people, first amongst themselves, then against the earth. No matter what side of the division you’re on, there’s bad guys on the other side. This was a useful fiction for a very long time. But it’s done. And we’re moving on.
Human nature is such that if you tell me that I’m evil or wrong, then I have the tendency to disagree (or agree!) and now we have a conflict. We get absorbed in the conflict, and the essential issue is often thrust to the sidelines. So let’s put aside that us versus them language for a bit. The new story I’m interested in includes the 1%, or whoever we think the bad guys are, because we (the 100%) can’t afford to have bad guys out there. You belong.
The old story also pits us against the earth. Most of us are beginning to reject the outright dominion associated with the Old Testament, but many are still focused on fixing the problem dominion created. What’s the problem? The earth.
I might put it this way – if we’re trying to fix something, then it must be broken or wrong. I’m not willing to look at the earth that way anymore, or share that pitiful message with children. People live here. Stromatolites can still be found! No one saw this coming. Not the trees, not god, not the people. We’re all just here, doing this. Having problems. There’s nothing wrong with that. This is what it takes to be alive, to get rained on, to feel cold. People are born. Apocalypses come and go. It’s the vision that fails, never the earth.
What’s happening to the planet is real. It’s important, and we should pay attention. But it’s not our fault, and it isn’t broken. Humans aren’t the problem. But if you tell them they are, then they will be. This is what happens to the earth when it fills itself with living creatures. Some of them become self-conscious.
This does not mean that we’re blameless, just that we don’t have dominion over the earth, so we don’t have any standing with which to fix it. In the legal system it’s called jurisdiction. We do not have jurisdiction over the earth. It’s not ours to own, nor to adjudicate. Why? Because it’s not separate. The earth is whole. You belong.
Here’s what we do have: choice. That’s the final chapter of my story. You belong. The earth is not broken. You have a choice. I’m going to write and rewrite this story till I have it right. I hope somebody else beats me to it, or does it better.
Death is a motivating force for me. I have been wrestling with my death for years. I want to be at peace with it, not because I go to heaven but because I recognize that I end. I might be fooling myself, but I believe I’ve gained that peace. As long as I’m alive, I feel an obligation to share the goodwill I’ve been gifted with, but when I die it will be no great loss. There’s lots of us out here.
As the father of a seven-year-old, I now face a more difficult question. I love her so deeply that I have tears as I write this. She’s the one I’m writing this for. Her friends. My students. Their kids. And their kids’ kids. I’m asking myself to face her death, their death, and not just in the future. Right. Now. What if my seven-year-old daughter died right now? That grieves me well beyond the idea of the loss of my own life.
I don’t make a practice of dwelling on this. I’m not a masochist. But I face it occasionally because I like what’s real. It’s important to me, and I don’t wish to story away the reality that I die, and my daughter does too. I don’t wish to add to the difficulty by fearing it, resisting it, just like I don’t wish to add to the discomfort of rain by running from it.
When I face discomfort, I find that I am magnificent. I want my daughter to live a long and fruitful life. It’s likely she will. But young people die. It’s just the truth of life. A sparrow is far more likely to die before fledgling than at any time after.
Unlike my own death, which is no great loss, I sensed for many years that my daughter’s death would be a great loss. To me, to her, to the planet. It would be a failure of sorts, a not-quite-made-it. Something about it would be wrong. Inescapable. That’s why I sat with it so much. The emotional anguish made it clear that it was important. As I brought the subject to the light of consciousness, I began to see that I would not have lost something. I would have gained all those years with this precious being. It wouldn’t be wrong in any way. It would be right. Years of right, followed by an ending. A human isn’t destined to be thirty-five or seventy-eight. A seven-year-old is a wonder. So is an infant. Life is fulfilled in the very moment of being alive.
This is the attitude with which I wish to approach death. This is the attitude with which I wish to approach life. It’s not a word game. It’s deadly serious. It is, I believe, one of the shifts we need in order to correct our orientation to Earth. We need to face reality, to feel the cold rain (or the lack of it), yet we must escape the problematization of it all. The stigma.
Such an attitude will not take away the pain. I will cry my face off if my daughter dies. I will tear my hair and the walls of my house. I’m not going out quietly. But I won’t allow anyone to see it as a loss, least of all me. I will not tolerate the beautiful value of her life to be regarded in sum as a loss. It’s something we’ve gained. We gained that life. Then it ended.
And the words matter.
These are the creatures that are coming in 1,000,000 years. Not 50. Not 100. A million. And there will be billions of them, maybe starfish and sparrows too. We’ll all be in as much pain as we are today. There will be scars all over the planet, but we will recognize them as what they are – the mountains, valleys, and compost that got us here in the first place. We will stand together in the rain. We’ll belong.
The planet’s creatures will spontaneously stop wasting resources and fighting needlessly. Resources will still get wasted, and creatures will still fight for them, but most of us will see the futility of fighting for excess. People will stop buying coffee makers, not because they’ve been labelled consumerist rats, but because they feel welcomed and loved by their peers. That’s the change we have to make. We have to belong. The sympathy we share with one another will transcend the judgment that stand in its place today, not because of any new-age jujitsu, but because it’s starkly effective. Efficiency will win out, in a strange and beautiful mix of social compassion and statistical models. Yay, math!
As this gentle message of inclusion evolves and expands, we will all see that the real value of life is sharing it. It will be as plain as day. It already is. As we shed the need to hide from the rain, we will also shed the need to hide from our feelings of insecurity. People will no longer value a large bank account over a neighborhood of love and connection.
And the 99% won’t want the money back! That’s the error we’re still perpetrating upon ourselves. Nothing was stolen. Instead, the 99% will recognize the impoverishment, not the wealth, of the upper classes and seek them out. Not to storm the castle with pitchforks and torches, but to bring the impoverished and isolated wealthy folks a measure of the real currency of life – compassion – so they feel happy and safe.
Right now, they feel hated. That is the de facto language of class struggle. They feel judged, isolated, and hateful. Hateful people are dangerous. They are the real threat, one of the things we need to safeguard against. Safe and happy people have little need to start wars or hoard the planet’s resources. But if we keep trying to take all the stuff back from the billionaires they will continue receiving the message that the stuff is what is what we want. If we ourselves want it, why in god’s name would they ever put it down? They will need thicker and taller walls.
And we won’t even be people! We’ll be different creatures altogether. Those are the folks we’re living for right now. We’re like stromatolites puffing out little pockets of awareness so that we can build an atmosphere of compassion for the future of the planet. For life. The stromatolites aren’t dead, because we’re breathing with them right now. Neither will we die, because we are constantly recycling ourselves into waste products from which new living things arise.
If in the healing of our planet we fill that atmosphere with the excoriation now alive in political and environmental circles – what will our descendants have won?
You belong. The earth is whole. You have a choice.
It’s such a small story. Embarrassing really. It’s weak right now, because our attention is drawn to bigger, brighter, more aggravating news. But there is a foundation here that is stronger than the story currently crumbling in most theaters. It is going to take a long time to tend it, to belch and pee it into splendor. Far longer than my lifetime, or any child alive today.
I woke from my reverie to the sound of car tires on wet asphalt. Peering through the branches of the juniper, I was reminded once more of this living, breathing shelter. Those precious blue berries. Children’s fingertips in soil. Rain on skin.
From the outside we were almost unnoticeable, a hedge of little importance. The eye has difficulty seeing us. We present ourselves as one thing, a sphere of inconsequence, a discomfort even, a nothing. But you worm right through us, and suddenly you’re inside something entirely new and unexpected. There are kids in here. It’s not waterproof. It’s a shelter that breathes and protects and moves with each gust of wind.