Letters to the Earth

Into the city.

Now, with all our beauty, all our grief, all our shame, all our pain.

For all that we hold dear, for all that we love, for all that we are .

Now, it’s time we walk as one.

Sally Jane Hole

As a teen, I wore a T-shirt quoting Chief Seattle. ‘The Earth is our mother,’ it said. ‘Man did not weave the web of life; he is merely a strand in it. Whatever he does to the web, he does to himself.’ Looking back, I can see how I turned away from the depth and clarity of that insight. I listened to other stories of my time – stories so commonplace that I did not even see them as stories.

I listened to the story that if I wasn’t pragmatic I would come to regret my choices. I worried that if I chose to live according to my truth then I might become poor or marginalised, and come to see such truth as a youthful naivety. I worried that I’d be too radical and so have no significant impact. These were powerful stories that carried me into a well-meaning, hard-working career.

Now looking back at these early choices, I can see that beneath it all there was something more primal. I was scared I’d lose someone that I loved. Not someone specific, but someone I hadn’t even met yet. Someone that I thought I’d need to impress: with status, charisma, confidence, wealth, style and skills. Such things would need to be worked for, within our dominant culture and economy. I was lying to myself and to others because I was scared that I wouldn’t be able to belong on my own terms.

Those insecurities meant I pushed away the implications of knowing that our society is based on a lie of the separation between humans, nature and spirit. For decades I compromised with that greatest of lies, and in so doing I was complicit with the ongoing destruction and oppression of you.

It took the terrifying data on climate change to shake me out of those delusions. Awakening to the likely collapse of society triggered a collapse in my sense of self-worth. My stomach churned and heaved with the horror of realising how much I’d been imprisoned by fear. Falling to my hands and knees, my forehead on the soil, I cried and asked you, ‘Please forgive me.’

Your response was immediate.

I began to sense that because you are one life, you have no issue with death. We may feel guilt about destruction, yet the thousands of species going extinct are not a suffering for you. In that, perhaps I may find redemption from this pain.

‘We are part of the earth and it is part of us,’ wrote Chief Seattle. I am an aspect of you, a potentiality of you. As you produced me and everything that we are, when I experience that unity, I know we are all forgiven.

Thank you. As awareness of our climate emergency grows, you have begun to provide us with a global near-death experience. We can wake up to our mortality and our fear of it. Some of us will come to see the stories built upon that fear over the past millennia. With climate chaos, you invite us to return to you. You offer us an extinction redemption.

I’m sorry. Please forgive me. Thank you. I love you.

Jem Bendell

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