From Your Minister

Quest Monthly Magazine

I have described in earlier columns the deep and abiding joy I felt when I began to read Robin Wall Kimmerer’s book, Braiding Sweetgrass. Both a scientist and an enrolled member of the Potawatomi Citizen Nation, she describes her relationship with the earth as one of mutuality, generativity and respect. She articulates better than any other writer I’ve ever encountered my experience of deep peace when I am in my garden, where I feel most at one with nature.

However, I should also tell you that I hit a point in the book where I could no longer easily accompany her; where my upbringing as a dualistic white westerner became an obstacle to allowing her to accompany me anymore. In a chapter called, “Epiphany in the Beans,” she describes coming to a profound and fundamental realization:

Maybe it was the smell of ripe tomatoes, or the oriole singing, or that certain slant of light on a yellow afternoon and the beans hanging thick around me. It just came to me in a wash of happiness that made me laugh out loud…. I knew it with a certainty as warm and clear as the September sunshine. The land loves us back. She loves us with beans and tomatoes…by a shower of gifts and a rain of lessons. She provides for us and teaches us to provide for ourselves. That’s what good mothers do…. Suddenly there was no intellectualizing, no rationalizing, just the pure sensation of baskets full of mother love. The ultimate reciprocity, loving and being loved in return.

I have been wrestling with this idea since I first encountered it. Does the earth love me? Do I really know that? I think it would feel wonderful to know this kind of love, but my mind keeps twisting. “Isn’t it kind of anthropromorphic?” I asked a friend, who says she knows in her very cells that the earth loves her. (In other words, “Isn’t that attributing human traits to something that is not human?”) My friend drew herself up and said, quietly but with clear and focused anger, “I absolutely hate that question. Do you see the arrogance of that question? That question presumes that humans are the ones who know how to love, that love begins with us. That we invented love. How dare we presume that?”

That stopped me, and set me to ruminating more. My friend is right. I stand firmly in my committed belief that love is the strongest force in the universe, and that human ability to love is a gift we are given, not something we invented. I don’t care if people call its source God or life or just affirm love without worrying about its source. So why am I so stopped by fear when I consider publicly naming Earth as the biggest source of love I know? Why do I worry about ridicule, about being thought simple, for believing this when I have so much tangible evidence, starting with my very breath and body, of the earth as a source of love?

Ultimately, unable to stand my own mental contortions on the subject, I decided to approach the question in a different way. Kimmerer suggested this, after she found graduate students who hit the same wall of rationality and freezing that I did when confronting the question. She asked them: “What do you suppose would happen if people believed this crazy notion that the earth loves us back?”

She describes what happened when she framed the question this way: “The floodgates opened. They all wanted to talk at once. We were suddenly off the deep end, heading for world peace and perfect harmony. One student summed it up, ‘You wouldn’t harm what gives you love.’”

So, I can hypothetically imagine what it would be to believe the earth loves me, loves all of us earthlings. Still, I want to go deeper with this. My friend who knows the earth loves her spent several months in deep meditation, simply feeling that love. I am shy about this, but I want to know that kind of love. In these winter months, when gardening is not a daily experience for me, I am instead committed to exploring whether I can feel the love of the earth. Kimmerer, again: “Knowing you love the earth changes you, activates you to defend and protect and celebrate.” (Yes. This I know in my bones.) But then she continues: “But when you feel that the earth loves you in return, that feeling transforms the relationship from a one way street into a sacred bond.… It is medicine for broken land and empty hearts.” I want to know that sacred bond enough to struggle for it, if need be. Even more than I need the approval of my scientist father and rational readers here, who I imagine shaking their heads disdainfully now.

I can say I love you, easily and without hesitation, to the life that unfolds before me in my garden. I love the earth as I plant and weed and tend and harvest and tuck in for the winter. Now I need to take time to be quiet, to receive love. Winter in Minnesota and other northern climates is a good time for listening to the earth. Without the distraction of all that activity, with the garden in a time of deep rest and hibernation, perhaps I will find something deeper in myself, a pathway I haven’t felt before, that can receive the earth’s love. In the meantime, I’ll bring out beans and corn and tomato sauce from the freezer, and remember the earth’s generosity that allowed them to grow.