Peter and I have consciously devoted our shared life to learning from, listening to, and generally coming into right relationship with this land.  This is not an abstract or only material practice—it is not just about efficient light bulbs or solar hot water panels on the roof but also about cultivating intimacy with and everyday reverence for the beings who share this place with us.  All of our ancestors’ lives once depended upon this kind of intimacy with their home places.   Industrial society has ruptured those relationships and allowed many of us to forget—in our ordinary, rational daily minds at least—that such profound intimacy ever existed, let alone remember what it felt like.  But our bodies, inherited from the ancestors, do not forget.  

The destruction of appropriate relationships between humans and the other beings of this earth has come at unfathomable cost to both our individual and collective health and sanity.  Indeed the loss of mutuality between humans and the rest of our relations is carrying us to the brink of extinction as a species, and taking many others down with us.  While others may see this differently, I can no longer pretend that this deep knowing is not central to my life and my work.  The land here tells me that if I do not acknowledge our partnership, I will likely not be able to work at all.

I am still listening to my body and to the land here, trying to learn exactly what this partnership asks of me in relation to my healing work.   Clearly such listening is at the foundation of the intimate relationship we are trying to remember—not acting as if we can do whatever we want, whenever and how ever much of it we want based on our exclusively human priorities, but actually sensing into what is needed for the well-being of the whole. 

Learning to listen—and respond appropriately—is, for me, at least, a demanding practice.   It is like putting Humpty Dumpty back together again, re-membering what has long been dismembered.   My human elders taught me little about this (although I am immensely grateful to have had a mother and a grandfather who were deeply connected with and passionate and knowledgeable about the natural world); certainly my education served to erode, not deepen, the profound intimacy with and delight in nature I experienced as a child.  And much of our dominant culture still insists that our world, our universe is “a collection of objects, not a communion of subjects,” as Thomas Berry puts it.  In that worldview, there is only one word to describe you if you listen for the voices of trees, rivers, stones and other animals: crazy.   So the practice of re-membering can be difficult--I mourn deeply for the innumerable skills we have lost--and not only awkward but also frightening.

What a strange reversal--to make the very skills upon which our ancestors’ survival, and thus our existence, depended into proof of insanity!  I am grateful that there are signs everywhere that we humans are beginning to re-member, the global culture of consumption notwithstanding.   Gardens in schools, young people returning to farms in Vermont, white middle class folks heading off into the wilderness for vision quests and going to workshops where their grief and terror over the death of our planet can be spoken from the heart and turned to grist for action.  Seed banking.   Community suppers and local currencies.  People risking their livelihoods and their lives to protect trees.  Wilderness schools for kids and adults.  Movements against GMO’s and shamans in hospital rooms—everywhere you look, it seems, there are signs that we are struggling to re-member.

Will our efforts be enough to save us?  Who knows?  In reality the outcome of any of our actions is always unpredictable.  The idea that we should only do things if we are assured that they will be “productive” in some tangible and short-term sense is a manifestation of our insane economic system, our insane culture.  In our corporate-dominated culture, all of us are supposed to center our lives around activities which produce as much profit as possible in the shortest time possible—anything else is “a bad investment.”  Absent from this schema are, of course, intangibles like pollution, topsoil loss, climate change, deforestation, not to mention time to rest, dream and play, make music, art and love--time to simply enjoy one another and our world.

So for me the reason to practice re-membering, the reason to foreground the sacred relationship between humans and the rest of our relations in my work as well as the rest of my life isn’t that I believe I, or we, will save the world.  The reason to practice re-membering is that it simply feels right.  It brings truth, depth and richness to the present moment—the only moment any of us ever has.