an ecology of miracles
interspecies love as medicine for the Earth
Dear Readers,
Together we are braiding a living tapestry of interwoven love stories, between ourselves and coyote, between moon and river, soil and star, insect and plant, pine tree and chickadee, all arising from the vast fertile expanse of the human heart. May we all remember the power of our own human love, a force so great it is clearly here to heal this aching world.
Hello loving two-leggeds out there,
How does it feel to be a human being right now? What it is like to experience the world through the body of this particular species? I ask because lately, I have felt myself only part human. Two months ago my dog Gaia passed away, and I have sensed a part of me went with her — carried into the invisible spool of light that everything is woven from.
Death itself is the dark web that makes our world. The starry network of microorganisms beneath our feet, turning graves into birthing grounds with an unstoppable force of love. Death asks us to die to our own resistance to mattering, to surrender any conviction that we are here on some sort of insular, self-serving mission. When a loved one dies, suddenly we know what it feels like to love something we cannot see. To love it just as strongly, and often with even more force, than we were able to love them in physical form. Isn’t this the great mystery?
Even the word human begins to loosen its grip in the face of death. Everything becomes porous, stirred up, and strangely undefinable, as we unravel who we thought we were in order to participate in a new more-than-human, fully alive, ever-widening world lineage.
when I lean over the chasm of myself
it seems
my God is dark
and like a web:
a hundred roots
silently drinking.
this is the ferment I grow out of.
(Rainer Maria Rilke,
trans. Joanna Macy & Anita Barrows)
In being with Gaia through the last days of her life, I became closely aware of the thread that tied the two of our hearts together. I could literally feel this thread pulling my heart toward hers the closer she got to death — as though part of me was preparing to make the journey with her.
When someone we love dies, they carry our love with them into the formless, like a thread of spider silk. This thread does not ever break. As lonely and as disorienting as grief is, death actually makes us belong to the world more. Those of us left behind find ourselves connected to a strange new realm of unspeakable mystery, reorientation, and the stunning humility that is born from devastation. Heartbreak has always been the great teacher of falling apart in order to expand.
interspecies love as medicine for the Earth
One of the strangest parts about losing an animal companion is the assumption by other humans that it is somehow far less devastating than the death of a human. Many humans even feel offended by the suggestion that an animal life could be as valuable as their own. I experienced this phenomenon personally in Gaia’s passing, in some cases receiving condolences that felt shockingly casual. This is through no fault of the individual human, rather it is the result of a dire ecocultural fracturing amongst our kind.
I witnessed a widespread human forgetting of our birthright to engage in passionate, heartbreaking, life-altering interspecies love stories. We have so rigidly segregated our love to exclude those who are different from us, both human and otherwise. The reality is that we need the love and guidance of the other species to help us remember how to love ourselves and our own people. This truth feels like one important key to the current relational predicament between humans, the land, and the estimated 8.7 million+ other species (and uncounted and unidentified myriad of other conscious forces) who share this planet with us. Yes, we are just one of those species. Just one.
collective mattering
“There is no heirarchy in the realm of death.” One morning after Gaia passed away, these words echoed through me in the winter garden. I was flattened by grief, and it was a death festival out there in the garden, a tangled mess of seed heads and decomposing plant stalks. I felt how in death and grief, all is leveled to common ground, revealed as mattering equally. Sooner or later, we will all return to these shared origins, where all hierarchies and empires dissolve into dust. In the meantime, we have a lot of dreaming to do. And a lot of listening to trees and rocks.
as ten thousand things
rise and fall,
rise and fall,just witness
their return
to the root.(Lao Tzu, the Tao Te Ching)
The truth is that Gaia’s death broke my heart more than any human death ever has. She loved me with a ferocity and a freedom that feels nearly extinct to humanity. Animals are masters of love. They have not forgotten their place in Earth’s living web of kinship, and by connecting with them we begin to heal the self-exiled human heart. The innate mission of all other species is to balance the wild order of things, taking only what they need, and never holding back their love for this life. These are the lifeways, and love-ways, humans are starving for.
only if you love something
will you inconvenience yourself
to work on its behalf.
{ Barbara Kingsolver }
resurrecting our Gaian intelligence
I love humans so much. We are magnificently complex, wildly creative, hilarious, loving and intelligent beings. But unfortunately, we have also declared ourselves to be vastly more intelligent than literally every other species on the planet — except for those who are most similar to us, in which case we admit that they do have a level of cognitive merit. How can we feel like we truly belong from this posture of superiority?
The issue is that our definition of intelligence is based solely on what our own human intelligence looks like — anything different is automatically considered “less” intelligent. But as interspecies communicator Penelope Smith explains, we are all spirit animating a particular physical form. Our individual version of intelligence is expressed through whichever physicality we inhabit. I am expressing intelligence in the way that my human body allows me to. A songbird, in her exquisite winged body, expresses her intelligence in the ways her avian form knows well: in intricate song, in expert nest-building, in laser-beam insect hunting and her reading of migratory star maps.
Humans are measuring universal intelligence against the physical capabilities of our own species. As Penelope Smith says, if you or I had been born into a bird’s body, instead of designing and decorating our house, we would instead know how exactly to build a nest out of twigs, leaves and fur. It is by no means a matter of greater or lesser intelligence: it is simply a difference in physical form.
A basic definition of intelligence is the ability to observe our environment, and to then adapt based on our observations. But humans have largely stopped paying attention to the way the ecosystem of our body interacts with the ecosystem of our surroundings. In Penelope Smith’s discourse on interspecies intelligence, she says that a true sign of intelligence is a willingness to study the ways of others who are different than you, and to allow yourself to change in response.
Oh how I love this word, willingness. Willingness as an emblem of human intelligence, a willingness to be open to the wisdom of the Others. Are we willing? To listen? To be wrong? To let a bird teach us things? To fall madly in love with a tree? Are we willing to imagine an entirely different way? This is the intelligence the Earth dreams through us. It is the soft blazing yes at the core of your heart.
an ecological kinship
In a recent class, our teacher Judy said that the best barometer for our human work is to examine the outcome. In what ways is our work, our way of being in the world, creating a ripple of benefit to others? To truly be part of an ecological community means that your actions have a beneficial effect for not only yourself and your family, but for a myriad of other beings who share your ecosystem. This is of course where humans have diverted from the path of ecological belonging. Some of our ways are even causing great harm to landscapes, and the permanent extinction of other species.
It makes complete sense to me that we are walking around heartbroken — because in our bones, we remember exactly how much we love this planet. And human love, yours and mine, is one of the most powerful forces on planet Earth. We are all carriers of this gift.
I think the real task of human kinship is to restore the voices to as many different other-than-human beings as we possibly can. This will first require us to re-learn an intricacy of listening and sensitive presence that can only be taught to us by the other-than-human beings. This is the great work of our time, and though full of heartbreak and despair, it is also a wild delight to become an apprentice to this world’s beauty.
Perhaps the most loving, restorative, and radical act of human ecological participation is this: a willingness to simply be curious about the ways of the Others. To use our magical human imaginations to kindle love stories of interbeingness. It is so much easier than we think: say good morning to the Sun, and be curious about what happens next. Let birdsong echo through your bones. Sit with your cat in silence, just being. Listen to the wind, and really let it speak. Study the movements of squirrel and snail, and notice what it evokes in your own body. Visit with the stone people. When a child points at something in nature, stop everything and look at the miracle.
Become a witness to the unfathomable diversities that surround you, the worlds within worlds within worlds.
Your attention is the thread that weaves the moonlight to the midnight lake.
Your love is what brings this starry world to life.
may the spring winds
whisper secrets into your heart
that make your toes curl
with delight.
love in every wild language,
Kate
"Your attention is the thread that weaves the moonlight to the midnight lake.
Your love is what brings this starry world to life." Deep sigh of resonance
Oh Kate, thank you for always weaving the essence of our humanity with the miracle of all life in your gentle yet profound ways.
Not to be dramatic, but I cried reading this. The way we experience the world has so much overlap and I don’t even know how to respond because there’s a just million threads I want to weave between us. Maybe I could just sum it up as: yes, yes, yes, yes.