How do you feel when you hear this title? Returning to the Earth of Our Belonging. Returning. Earth. Belonging. The word returning suggests a place or space or state we have been before. A terrain of familiarity. Returning suggests that place or state was positive—perhaps one of richness, fulfillment, safety even—the proverbial Garden of Eden. One doesn’t often return to a place of trauma or strife, so the very verb of it suggests a built-in longing. To Return.
The word Earth—this 3rd rock from the sun, is a place where a very thin envelope of protective gases surrounds and enables the existence of life. A life force in the form of complex biospheres of interdependent organisms. Home.
The last word Belonging. To be in a place of one’s longing. This suggests the presence of kinship, of relationship, where the heart engages with other hearts.
Stringing a sentence together from each of these three interpretations, perhaps what I mean when I say returning to the Earth of our belonging is about re-membering our interconnection with all life, in a way that makes our hearts swell. Renowned psychologist Erich Fromm coined the term Biophelia: the ancient memory that lives in our bones—a quiet longing to belong to Earth; a sacred bond that awakens our senses and nurtures our souls.
Harvard biologist Edward O. Wilson popularized this concept in his 1984 book Biophilia. Wilson proposes that humans’ attraction to nature is genetically predetermined and the result of evolution.
Our appreciation for flowers, for example, is because flowers signal that fruit (a rich source of food for early humans) will be arriving soon. Our fondness for baby lambs, goats, owls, and eaglets suggests that affiliating with other beings, and protecting the most vulnerable among them, provided early people with some sort of evolutionary advantage.
Have we lost this ancient biophilic memory? In her book The Enchanted Life: unlocking the magic of the everyday, mythologist and author, Sharon Blackie writes about humans’ detachment from the rest of the natural world. “Plato argued 2500 years ago that humans alone possess reason and intellect, and because of this we are not only different from, but superior to, every other creature that exists. There we have it: in one fell swoop we are severed from the rest of life on this planet.” Whether or are aware of it or not, the cells in our bodies know. We are homesick. We long for the teachings, the guidance, the super-natural allies—found in nature.
Here’s a little quiz: Ask yourself: Do I know whether the moon is waxing or waning today? Can I greet the bird whose song I hear by name, without having seen them? Near my home, do I know which trees leaf out first, second, and third, or lose their leaves first, second and third? Do I view it as a waste of time to have a sit-spot outdoors where I do nothing—burn no calories, conquer no mountain, turn over no soil—where I simply allow the wildness to come to me?
I have no judgment about whether you feel you “passed” this mini-quiz or not. I’m a slow learner. It took me four decades before I attuned myself to the rhythms of the moon, the seasons and Earth’s beings.
Robin Wall Kimmerer, author of Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants, writes, “When we deny kinship with other species, we become blind to the world as a gift. When we choose human exceptionalism, we turn our backs on the reciprocal joys of loving kinship. Instead, we endure the burden of estrangement from the ones who give us everything we need. The price of this estrangement seeps its way into our behaviors—overconsumption, self-absorption, obsession with power and violence—filling the space where relationship might be.”
Author and acclaimed scholar of myth, Martin Shaw, writes in Courting the Wild Twin, “Restoration. It’s not too late to long for it, fight for it, defend it.” And he suggests that when we restore our sacred partnership with the rest of the natural world, as a consequence:
“In the fields the barley grows a little straighter
In the river the salmon leaps a little higher
In the sky the stars glint a little brighter”
Shaw suggests two essential ways to re-member where the life force dwells and the heart engages. The first: to “give ourselves utterly to the turbulent luminosity of the universe…To gaze,” He writes, “This condition of wonder[ment] is still absolutely intact in us. Amongst the loaded shopping …[carts] of Walmart … the fluorescent tech hubs, flicker-screens and finger-beckoning apps, it’s still there. This raw, imaginative, holy thing.” I urge us to go out and meet this holy thing just as we are, possessing a quiet mind, open heart, silent tongue and a hollow vessel. Learn your bird songs, your wildflowers, your cycles of the moon, and feel how it enriches your life.
A second invitation is to slow down to nature’s pace. I read once that humans live at a frenetic speed compared to the rest of the living world, and by doing so, we forfeit the wise and wondrous input from this living world. By aligning with the rhythm of Earth, we become what Rudolf Steiner calls, “soul-quiet,” and “spirit-calm.”
Martin Shaw agrees, “Be skeptical of the quick route. It’s truly what’s got us into a thousand unruly messes.”
The first time I tried to be still in nature, it took me 60 minutes for my mind to finally settle. It’s a practice, this slowing down. Once I began to allow space for it in my life, I turned to these quiet moments outdoors as a meditation, and even inspiration and guide.
For example, a few years ago, I was knee-deep in writing my coming-of-age novel, A Moon in All Things, set in 1820s Ireland. In it, the protagonist, Morrigan Lane, receives a startling message from the mysterious Otherworld, where she is urged to begin an inner journey and outer quest to reclaim the old wisdom ways of her Great-Grandmother.
In thinking about the plot, I wondered if part of her quest required discovering some ancient healing tools. In a dreamy state, I envisioned Morrigan would need to discover four separate healing tools. But my friend, herself a writer, asked me, “are you sure it’s four? Three is a powerful number, especially in Irish cosmology, and its often used in fairy tales – three little pigs, goldilocks and the three bears, a genie from a bottle with three wishes. I pondered. I wasn’t sure. But the need to “get it right” was strong within me.
One day, I was on a swing tethered beneath a great oak tree on the land where I live, contemplating what the right answer was for my story, 4 objects or 3? October’s slant of light suffused a rocky ledge with a rose-glow, illuminating bits of shiny quartz intruded into the glacial feldspar; Poplar leaves were falling – almost like rain – in the late afternoon breeze.
And then I heard them, the caw of crows coming from behind me in the West. The West: a direction in Irish mythology that signifies mystery and inner-transformation; associated with Samhaim, the Irish festival on October 31st to honor the ancestors.
Looking skyward, I observed three crows circle me overhead for a moment and then continue East. That’s it! I said to myself. Three healing tools is the answer! Then suddenly, one more crow appeared, seemingly following the three. A fourth? No, my storyteller’s intuition told me. It’s not four. It’s not three. It’s 3 + 1.
In the finished manuscript there is a scene in which Morrigan hears a message from The Otherworld – “Three must be retrieved and then one will be received.” 3 + 1.
In the end, it may not matter in terms of the novel’s success or potency whether Morrigan retrieves 3 objects or 4. But I also invite you to consider the possibility that we live in a natural world available for our creative endeavors. Inside my fictional story, it would seem that Crows have brought their particular energy and identity to it. They might want to call themselves ghost writers!
How can we NOT listen to a world alive and waiting to participate with us? And how would that affect the richness of art, poems, songs, and projects?
On a related note, I took a writing course entitled, “Learning the Language of Wild Paradox.” The instructor Lilace Mellin Guignard, author of When Everything Beyond the Walls is Wild invited us to: “Write your way into the beauty of something in nature you consider repulsive using an Ode poem.”
The word “ode” comes from the Greek word aeidein, which means to sing or to chant; an exaltation piece. Reluctantly, I wrote an ode poem to an insect people love to hate. An insect that, all summer long, has tormented me and my fellow woods walkers. I’m writing into the beauty and noble necessity of—mosquito.
Ode to Mosquito
Little high-whine flier, vector
of parasitic disease; your microscopic
skin-pierce catalyzes
shrieks, and a murmuration
of movement from backyard
picnickers: Get thee to the screened porch!
Your eminence in the field of flying
leaves angels bitter and jealous.
Your saliva wields the power
of pestilent daimones that even Oedipus
could not expel from Thebes.
And oh, the wicked wisdom
of a species who endows only
the females with such skin-piercing
entitlement.
How delicious
you taste to Little Brown Bat and Blue
Dasher Dragonfly, Eastern Bluebird and Eastern Phoebe.
Imagine my surprise when I allow
you to feast on my blood without
a resistant slap, and I find no lingering
itch. Your gift in exchange
for mine.
Sometimes using our creative skills to see things differently can be fun and mindset-shifting.
One third and final way to return to the Earth of our belonging is to show reciprocity with the rest of the natural world. Jesus spoke of reciprocity: In the Bible, reciprocity is often reflected in the principle of the Golden Rule—treating others as one wishes to be treated; found in Matthew 7:12: “So whatever you wish that others would do to you, do also to them.” This concept underscores mutual respect, kindness, and the expectation of returning good for good.
Robin Wall-Kimmerer writes, “It is the plants and animals who give us food, without which we would not be. Warmth and medicine and learning are gifts; even the air we breathe is given to us by the breath of trees.” In Kimmerer’s Potawanami culture, an “all my relations” philosophy is understood to be part of the “unconditional love of other being-relatives for one another.”
Here is an example of reciprocity: You may have heard of Maine Big Night, when on the first warm, rainy night in spring, hundreds of volunteers help to safely shepherd amphibians across dark, slick roads. The rainy weather, usually in early April, triggers a mass migration of frogs and salamanders as they emerge from their winter hiding places to journey toward their breeding pools.
Our most vulnerable creatures, subject to habitat loss and toxins because they breathe through their skin, these small but resilient amphibians often need to cross roads. In many towns, it has become a massive community science effort. People dressed in their rain gear, carrying flashlights in the pitch dark, aiding other creatures across a road for no personal gain; for the inner satisfaction that comes from doing good, perhaps believing that that act of reciprocity is noticed by One Greater. The impact of this work is remarkable – over 9,000 amphibians were saved in 2024 alone!
I hope you’ve fallen under a bit of a spell, and perhaps believe too, that there is something beyond the hundred acre wood, something far greater than what we can see in the physical realm; a mysterious web of connection between us and all life that can only be enriched when we give ourselves over to our natural longing to act in reverence and reciprocity with the kin we call bluebird, maple, fieldmouse, and salamander.
Finally, I will share this story: one April day, I was walking the roller trail at the Kennebunkport Conservation Trust, contemplating species extinction, changing weather patterns, and the destruction of the amazon rainforest at rates of 11 football fields each minute[1]. As if the land around me felt my grief, and longed to give me hope, suddenly, the lyrics and melody to a song came: “These are the times we have been made for. Believe we’ve got what it takes. Join the river of unity to restore love and healing to the human race.”
As summer’s blooms move us toward the brief days of autumn and winter, I ask: what is the more that you can bring to the community of life we call Creation? May each of us find our way back to the Earth of our belonging.
###
Jennifer Comeau inspires humans to remember and restore our sacred partnership with the rest of the natural world. A certified Forest Therapy Guide, singer-songwriter, and author-speaker, nature is Jen’s creative muse. Author of the nature-themed children’s book, “The Inside of ME,” the novel with songs, A Moon in All Things, and creator/songwriter of two records of original music, Jen works globally on restoring nature-human interconnection. Jen lives in Southern Maine.