The Earth has always been my first true love. She breaks my heart open with each sunrise, sunset, and bird song. I find comfort resting my body in her living soil and day dreaming while gazing at her clouds (1). This romance lured me from the Big Island of Hawai’i rescuing the Hawksbill Sea Turtle (2) to southern California studying the impact of residential development on native songbirds.
Like any relationship, my infatuation with the Earth has had its ups and downs. While studying the rufous-crowned sparrow in San Diego County, I encountered a massive swarm of Africanized honey bees, also known as the “killer bee,” near the border with Mexico on the same day where I inadvertently stumbled upon a coyote camp of migrants who were fast asleep. In both instances, I became quiet and still, slowly backing away. And nature took care of me. She has always responded to my adoration with an equal and accelerated Ka-Pow! of support and love.
That’s not to say that the seemingly cruel aspects of nature elude me. The endless sessions with poison ivy while studying old growth chaparral and its response to wildfire in Alpine, California, and the parasitic ticks that eventually made my legs numb while studying the satin bowerbird in Australia (3) cultivated my humility and reverence. The Earth has always had my back while I revel in both her creation and destruction with gratitude and awe. As a master recycler, Earth transforms organic matter into new life in a dance of regeneration.
Through my work as an ornithologist, I have cultivated a practice of deep listening to the Earth’s songbirds, grasses, trees, and streams. When focusing on the tiny movements of songbirds for hours at a time, I could eventually see the space in matter. The shrubs and trees around me would literally transform into a van Gogh painting and come alive before my eyes revealing the space between all particles of matter. It was almost as if the countless hours of silent bird watching, waiting for a secret to emerge - a small piece of nesting material or a covert landing in a nearby bush - awakened in me the nature of life itself.
Now through breathwork meditation, I have found a mechanism to dialogue and exchange with the Earth. And so I hear and feel her even more intensely. She responds to our attention, our gratitude, and our presence. She welcomes this exchange and seems to thrive through us and with us as we explore the depths of her being. We have an opportunity to enter this exchange at any moment, tapping into the Earth’s power and her presence. This reciprocity is available at any moment to all of us. We just need to ask.
The Practice of Earth Exchange
As a species, we have lost our sacred exchange with the Earth. We see her as something to use and commodify. This has led to environmental destruction and suffering as we catapult ourselves into the planet’s sixth mass extinction (4).
When we take the Earth’s resources without offering our gratitude and love in return, we become disconnected from the universal energy she holds. And we become off balance. One way to bring balance back to both ourselves and the Earth is to remind ourselves to practice this exchange. This can look like gratitude and presence while bathing in her forests (5), or breathing light into her body through our own breath. She responds with much more than an equal and opposite force when we step forward into her with consciousness.
Through Sacred Earth Ceremonies (6) we can enter into this exchange with the Earth and thank her for all she provides to us. This exchange can be a form of radical environmental activism. In addition to standing up to protect the places we love and being a guardian for the Earth, we can also breathe with her and heal our collective wounds.
As we become whole, the planet becomes whole. It is our destiny.
FOOTNOTES
(1) Inspired by Rumi, a 13th century mystical Sufi poet:
Every question I ask is about you,
Every step I take is toward you.
I slept well last night
but woke up drunk.
I must have dreamt about you.
-Rumi
(2) National Park Service Hawai'i Volcanoes' Hawksbill Turtle Recovery Project
(3) University of Maryland’s Satin Bowerbird Project
(4) World Wildlife Fund, What is the sixth mass extinction and what can we do about it?
(5) “Because even to walk in a forest and bask in the beauty and the space and the energy—what the trees gracefully give—and to feel better, to feel that you can breathe, to take that and not offer in response is the same as the extreme forms of taking that we see all around us, at least on a foundational fundamental level. Because it is the same. She gives and we take; and we do not offer in exchange, in response. Because the nature of existence, the nature of this Earth, is built on cycles, cycles of reciprocity and cycles of exchange.”
A Talk by Emmanuel Vaughan-Lee, The Radical Intimacy of Spiritual Ecology (January 16, 2025)
(6) The first Sacred Earth Ceremony is planned for Earth Day, April 12, 2025 near Tierra Amarilla, NM. Sign-up here.
