The Sound of the Earth Crying

I joined, somewhat by chance, the (abridged) Seeds of Radical Renewal course being offered by Emergence Magazine, which begins this week. Participants are asked to respond to weekly prompts and share with the rest of the attendees, if they so desire. I decided I would also share them here (part of the first prompt is below). But I wanted to try something a little out of the ordinary for me and record my response instead of writing it.

My response is in large part from my Disability in the Wild post, so if you’ve read that then most of what I said will be familiar. A transcript of the audio below. The prompt in part:

All of us have a unique origin story of how we’ve arrived here at this point–a reason that has inspired us to take this course. Whether you are deeply familiar with the emerging field of spiritual ecology or just arriving at this work and philosophy, you have your own personal unfolding relationship with this way of being. 

When did you first hear, as Thich Nhat Hanh so eloquently said, “the sound of the earth crying?” What did this shift within you and how is this impacting your work?

transcript

It almost feels a little strange to admit that I love, deeply, this place that I live—this land, this community, this ecosystem. It is a suburb after all, with all of the problems that come with suburbs: the pavement and the concrete and the development and the noise and the pesticides and the monoculture lawns and everything.

It’s not ideal, but it’s home and it’s where I’ve lived almost my entire life. It’s where I was born, it’s where I imagine I will die. And even though it has its problems, there are these pockets of refuge—if you know where to look, they’re there. And I think I’ve learned over the years where those places are, those special places, those places where not a lot of people go, but you can connect with the more-than-human world in ways that are probably very surprising to many other people around. Because again, it is a suburb, and you leave that area and all of a sudden you’re in a major intersection. But those places are there and they exist. 

I’m very protective of those places because I don’t want to see them ruined, I don’t want to see them destroyed, developed. There has been a lot of that. Places that I have once loved that I no longer can stand the sight of because of what has been done to it. And that rage, that anger, that grief that I feel deeply within me is still there. It’s been years now and it’s still there, as fresh as it was the first day I realized what they had done. That’s why I’m protective and secretive about some of these places that I go to, because one wrong person finds out about it and all of a sudden it’s a car wash or another chain restaurant. 

But my first memories of feeling that way, of feeling that rage at injustice, the need to guard and protect what I love and care about from the people who would only care about themselves, and that responsibility, that obligation to care for what I love—those feelings were first present not for this place or this ecosystem or this more-than-human world around me, but they were from the relationship I had with my brother. 

My brother is disabled and needs a lot of care. I have grown up taking care of him, and I still take care of him to this day. That’s my job, that’s what I do on a day-to-day basis is take care of him. And it was here in this relationship that I first heard the, “sound of the earth crying.” Because the more-than-human world, the more-than-human community, also includes people like my brother. Which may sound strange to say, but unless you come from that world of caring for someone who can’t care for themselves, who needs so much, it’s difficult to explain how people like my brother are dehumanized in every way possible. And even more than that, people like my brother aren’t even seen as animals, something less than even that. 

If I’m honest with myself, as a young person I always thought of my brother’s disability as something abnormal—an aberration, anomaly, a mistake, something that occurred, happened by chance, but that could be corrected. I’m starting to understand that this belief was largely cultural and handed to me, inherited by me from family, friends, people around me.

Yet there was also something very natural and normal and unremarkable about his disability. Unremarkable, certainly because I grew up with it, that’s all I’ve ever known.I’ve never known anything different; he couldn’t be any other way. So the idea that he could not be like that never really entered into my mind until it was perhaps placed there, that he needed to be cured of something. And it was natural to me because there was a quality to his temperament, his behavior, that was unconditioned and instinctual. He was wild.

There was immense pressure to reject that part of him, to domesticate him. And it made it very difficult for me as a young person to embrace and accept him and his wildness as he was. It seemed like there was a very strong, clear boundary between the human and the non-human, which is to say between culture and nature. And my brother, because of his disability and his disabling conditions, was seen by certainly everyone I knew as more nature than human. He was a threat in some sense to the human world: he challenged certain assumptions and beliefs, he made people very uncomfortable. So unless he was able to be changed, reformed in some way—domesticated—look more like what everyone thinks a human should like, then he was cast out. He was on the other side of this boundary. And so was I. 

So I always felt this tension, this need to balance these things. Which often ended up feeling like I was just stuck on neither side, but somewhere in the middle. And if I’m really honest with myself, I think that I had this unconscious belief (again perhaps inherited) that nature and wildness was something apart from me, out there, separate from humans. I love to be in nature (I certainly do now, I always have for as long as I can remember) but it was always something that I went to and came back from.

Nature was wild and undomesticated, not humans. And that was a good thing, that was how it was supposed to be. And that boundary needed to be maintained and respected. Humans shouldn’t be allowed to tell nature what to do, to rule over her. But instead nature should be left to do her own thing without interference from humans. 

Now I realize that those inherited beliefs about nature, about how I’m supposed to relate to the natural world, are connected to my inherited beliefs about how I’m supposed to relate to my brother. How we relate to nature, how I relate to nature, is connected to how I relate to people like my brother—it’s connected to how I relate with all people. And in some sense what I mean when I say nature is connected to what I mean when I say disability. 

In her interview Rowen said, she had this great line and I’m just going to quote it directly because it really moved me when I heard it. She said, 

The plants gave up a little of their wildness, and we humans gave up a little of our wildness too; and we came into this covenant, this sacred covenant or this marriage. In some cultures, it’s spoken of as a marriage. We came into this relationship, and part of those agreements were to take care of one another. We were going to be bound in this reciprocal relationship, to care intimately for one another as we move forward.

Rowen White

And that part about giving up my wildness for another, to sacrifice a part of myself for someone else because I care for someone else and I’m bound to them in this relationship—that’s something I understand and feel very deeply. I recognize what she’s saying from the relationship I have with my brother. And I know that maybe sounds a little strange, but the relationship I have with my brother is not like the relationship that everyone else I knew had with their siblings. This is something special and different and it’s hard to describe, but when she said that, we give up a little of our wildness to be part of this sacred covenant—in my case, it’s not a marriage, but a brotherhood—I deeply resonated with that. 

To learn how to live, and relate to, and care for the natural world is something that I’ve learned from living with, relating to, and caring for my brother. I am bound to my brother, just as I’m bound to this place where we have both lived and grown together. It’s taken me, I think, longer than I care to admit to realize that my love and care for my brother is intimately connected, it’s the same as my love and care for this place that we both call home.