Laura Bennett

Let’s begin by settling into our bodies, into the present moment. I know we already did this a bit at the beginning of the ritual but it’s always relevant, and I want to put it in the context of the Earth. 

Breathing in, breathing out. 

I become aware of the whole sangha breathing as one body. I become aware of the cushion or chair supporting my weight, I become aware of the floor beneath me, I become aware of the ground, the soil, the earth itself holding me up right now, unconditionally, without being asked, without asking for anything in return. 

Namu Amida Butsu.

Earth Day was about a week and a half ago, and I had the privilege of being on a retreat in northern Colorado during that time and it was so grounding to connect more deeply with myself, and my practice, and the Earth for a few days. Around Earth Day every year, I find myself sitting with the question of why do we need a special day to remember the Earth? Shouldn’t every day be Earth day in a way? We seem to forget the obvious yet seemingly invisible fact that we are not separate from the Earth. We live inside it, it lives inside us. Every inbreath is a gift from the trees and every outbreath is a gift back. The iron in our blood was forged in ancient stars; the water moving through our bodies fell as rain long before any of us were born.

So if that’s true, if we already belong to the earth in this deep, intimate way, then why do we forget? And how do we remember?

Today, I want to explore what Buddhism and some of my favorite teachers have to say about this ancient belonging to the earth. And I want us all to think about how remembering our connection to the earth might also be healing for our connection to one another.

Interbeing with Earth

One teacher who offers a really clear way of seeing this is Thich Nhat Hanh. He has a word for this belonging (to the earth and to one another) that I’m referring to: Interbeing. He taught, as did the Buddha, that nothing exists independently. That everything is made of everything else. My favorite teaching of this is when he used the image of a cloud in a sheet of paper–he taught that if you look deeply into a piece of paper, you can see the cloud that brought the rain that watered the tree; you can see the logger, the logger’s breakfast, the wheat that became the bread of his breakfast, and on and on. so, the paper contains the entire cosmos; it exists in dependence upon everything else. 

In his book Love Letter to the Earth, Thich Nhat Hanh wrote: 

“The Earth is not just the environment we live in.

The Earth is us.

Looking at your hand,

You can see the presence of your mother, your father,

Your ancestors, and the earth itself.”

Sit with that for a moment. Your hand, which you’ve probably looked at thousands of times, contains the earth. The minerals in your bones came from soil; the oxygen your lungs are using right now is being produced, at this moment, by trees and phytoplankton in the ocean.

Thich Nhat Hanh also offered us a meditation he called “Looking deeply at the earth.” He encouraged us to eat a meal in silence and consider: where did this food come from? Who grew it? What soil held these roots? What hands brought this food to me?

Of course, we’ll never know specifically all of the people and ingredients that contributed to the blessing of the food that nourishes our bodies, but we can begin to open our eyes to how it’s not necessarily about the specifics, but about the fact that the entire cosmos are interrelated with this process. This practice, for me, brings a deep sense of gratitude for all the factors and beings that contribute to nourishing and sustaining me in direct and indirect ways. 

And on the other hand, when we forget interbeing, we start to treat the earth as a resource to be used. We start to treat other people that way too. Separation is the root of both ecological harm and human unkindness. Remembering interbeing and acting from and with connection is the antidote. 

This all also reminds of a story from the life of the Buddha. It is said that on the night of his awakening, as he sat under the Bodhi tree, he was challenged by Mara (the force of doubt and delusion) who questioned his right to awaken. Mara demandingly asked: “Who is your witness?”

And instead of arguing or defending himself, the Buddha simply reached down and touched the earth. In that moment, he called the earth to witness his awakening; his countless lifetimes of practice, his belonging, his right to be exactly where he was. And the earth responded. The earth itself affirmed him.

I’ve always loved this story because the Buddha didn’t look outside of the natural world for validation. He didn’t appeal to an abstract authority. He turned to the earth.

And in a way, this is what we’re practicing when we remember interbeing. The same earth the Buddha touched is beneath us right now. The same ground is holding us, supporting us, witnessing us.

So when we feel disconnected, or uncertain, or like we don’t quite belong, we can also, in our own way, touch the earth (literally or metaphorically) and remember: we are already held. We are already part of this. The earth is our witness.

When we really begin to feel our interbeing with the earth, it changes how we understand what’s happening in the world right now.

The Great Turning

And this is where another teacher, Joanna Macy, has been incredibly important for me. 

She is someone who is a role model and beloved teacher and Bodhisattva for me. She was a Buddhist scholar and environmental activist who spent a large portion of her life asking the question: how do we stay present to a world in crisis without going numb or despairing?

This has been and continues to be a crucially important question for our world.

Joanna Macy helped me to realize that we can choose the story we live from and she offered the story of The Great Turning as a story to frame the world and realize our place in it. The Great Turning is a shift from an industrial growth society that is destroying life, toward a life-sustaining civilization. In her talks and books, she is clear that The Great Turning isn’t just a political project, but it is a spiritual project that begins with feeling into our despair and grief for what we are doing to our world and really, to ourselves and to one another. 

She writes that our greatest danger is not the ecological crisis itself, but our collective inability to feel it. We numb ourselves and distract ourselves with busyness, screens, and consumption because the grief feels too large. Importantly, though, Joanna Macy reminds us that our grief for the earth is itself a form of love. You can’t grieve what you don’t love. And when we let ourselves feel that love for a forest, a river, for birds, for mountains, for trees, we wake up and become capable of acting on behalf of our world.

In one of my favorite books, World as Lover, World as Self, Joanna Macy says this:

“The most remarkable feature of this historical moment on Earth

is not that we are on the way to destroying the world —

we’ve actually been on the way for quite a while.

It is that we are beginning to wake up,

as from a millennia-long sleep,

to a whole new relationship with our world.”

End quote

As a Buddhist practitioner herself, Macy uses this language of ‘waking up’ intentionally. It is a reminder that ecological awareness is part of the awakening we refer to when we refer to the Buddha as the Awakened One. To see clearly, without illusion or ignorance, includes seeing our place in the web of life, it includes seeing our interbeing. 

One of the practices she offers is one called “Gratitude for the earth” and it involves simply sitting and letting yourself feel what you love. Not what you should protect because it’s the right thing to do, but what you actually love. For me, what arises in this practice are things like the way light and wind moves through leaves on trees, the smell right before it rains, the impermanent, unique beauty of a sunset. Connecting with what we love and are grateful for shifts our attention beyond ourselves and to all that supports us. It’s a motivating force, it’s the ground from which action grows. It also, for me, brings a mindset of abundance, a trust in all that is and the courage to continue. It leads me to realize I am rooted within a deeper, wider ecological self. 

What the Earth Asks of Us in Ordinary Life

Now–I want to be practical for a moment, because I think dharma teachings can sometimes float up into the beautiful and poetic and leave us wondering what we can actually do, practically, on any given day?

Importantly, I don’t think our interbeing with the earth asks us to be perfect. It doesn’t require us to compost everything or never take a flight. Rather, I think what it asks is simultaneously simple yet demanding: it asks us to pay attention, which can be hard day in and day out.

Thich Nhat Hanh taught that mindfulness isn’t just a meditation practice; it’s a way of moving through the world. When we wash the dishes, we can really be there in the moment with the dishes. When we walk to the car, we can feel the ground beneath our feet. When we eat, we can notice one ingredient and allow ourselves to trace it back — connecting it to the soil, water, sun, and people that grew it and brought it to us. This is interbeing practice in ordinary life. It doesn’t take extra time necessarily, it just takes a different quality of attention.

And when we do this, we also naturally slow down the treadmill of consumption a little. Not through willpower or guilt, but because we’ve remembered what we actually have; we are present to what is right in front of us. The earth, right now, is giving us everything. When we feel that, really feel it, we want less, we hold more lightly, we become a little more compassionate, a little more grateful, a little more generous.

Interbeing with Each Other

What I find most beautiful about interbeing is that it doesn’t stop at the edge of the human. When we truly feel our belonging to the earth, we start to feel our belonging to each other differently too.

We begin to see that if I am made of the same water as you, the same air, the same ancient stardust, then my separation from you is also an illusion.The barriers we build between races, between nations, between generations are real in their consequences, but they aren’t real at the level of the earth. The earth doesn’t know about our borders; we’ve constructed them.

Thich Nhat Hanh wrote that when he breathed in and out consciously, he felt he was breathing with the whole sangha, the whole earth. The breath is communal. The air you are breathing right now has been breathed by billions of living beings before you. It will be breathed by billions after you. This moment, right now, we are all breathing together in this room. We share the same air, no matter who you are, no matter where you’re from, no matter what you believe. 

When I think about the conflicts I have with other people, or the judgments I make about other people, they feel less important when I remember our interbeing; the teaching of interbeing allows me to soften the harsh or negative feelings that arise in relation to other people. These conflicts and feelings become more balanced in the light of our interdependence, when I am aware that each and every person is also made of earth, also loves something, also breathes the same air. The ground of being is shared and dependently arising.

Joanna Macy speaks of the ecological self, which is the idea that our sense of who we are can expand beyond the skin-encapsulated ego to include the community, the ecosystem, the earth. She says this doesn’t erase the personal self, it just includes it in something larger. And in that larger belonging, our suffering and our joy become more porous–less “mine” and more “ours.”

I want to close with Mary Oliver, who is a kind of dharma teacher in her own right. She spent her life paying attention to the natural world with a mindful and meditative quality of presence and her poetry embodies a sense of our interbeing with the natural world.

She wrote a poem called “The Summer Day,” some of you may have heard it, and it ends with one of the most famous questions in poetry. She asks:

“Tell me, what is it you plan to do

with your one wild and precious life?”

I used to read that question as a kind of challenge, a call to be ambitious. But as I have become more familiar with her work and with my own life and practice, I read it differently now. She wrote that question after watching a grasshopper clean her face in the grass, after spending the whole day doing nothing, as she puts it, but “kneeling in the grass” and “being idle and blessed.” The question isn’t about achievement. It’s an invitation to pay attention to this, right here–your one wild and precious life, which is also the earth’s wild and precious life.

As we begin this May, with spring in bloom, with the earth doing what it always does, which is to give everything without holding back, maybe our practice can simply be to receive that gift consciously. To walk outside and notice, to eat a meal slowly and with gratitude, to look at the person next to us and remember: same earth, same water, same breath.

The earth doesn’t need our guilt. It needs our attention. And from attention grows love. And from love (as every teacher in every tradition will tell you) everything else becomes possible.

Namu Amida Butsu

Now, I turn the time over to you. What do you love about the earth that you want to connect with more often?