What the Earth Asks of Us

Enjoy this 10-minute read or let me read it to you via the audio recording at the top of the post on my website.

Several weeks ago, Asher Lyman led me through an embodied experience of what he referred to as the chaos of leaving the body. If we are conscious through the process of dying, we can become flooded with many intense emotions ranging from “ecstatic devotional bliss to the pain of being eviscerated.” We can hallucinate. We can feel suddenly energized. In this primordial space, it doesn’t matter what we believe. Philosophy breaks down and we become wild again.

According to Asher, it isn’t just our bodies that return to the earth after our death. Our soma, our energetic body, also returns to the earth because it is an extension of the earth’s energetic body, like the mushroom fruit of a mycelial network. The more we practice being in our energetic core and allowing it to return to the earth, the better prepared we are experientially for our death. He instructed us to lie on our backs, observe our bodies not from above, but from the pit of our pelvis, and breathe ourselves down into the earth through our back body. As I let myself go, I had moments of subtle panic alternating with moments of deep relaxation and a profound sense of homecoming. I recalled how calm and lucid I felt on that rainy December night amid the chaos of my car spinning in slow motion and smashing into the highway wall. My body was in panic. My soul was at peace.

It took me several days to realize that this practice was the beginning of a period of personal creative renaissance. Not only was my energy alive, but I found myself having one conversation after another with a wide range of friends about darkness. We spoke openly about the end of the world on an environmental level. We shared about the inescapable process of inner collapse due to on-going outer pressures. We spoke about the humbling relationship with the chaos of chronic illness. This synergy grounded and delighted me, and culminated in a new friend from my shamanic community straight up telling me: “you need to bring darkness back into your work.”

I shy away from doing that because our world shies away from it. If I want to dedicate my life to working with others, all the marketing gurus tell me to focus on how I can help people feel better. So I try to put a spin on what I offer so it sounds like a path to greater comfort, confidence, creativity, happiness. Because isn’t that what we all want? The problem is that’s not in integrity with my personal experience. I had a spiritual community hook me with the promise of happiness before I realized what I really want is meaning. I will take a meaningful life of suffering over a meaningless life of pleasure any day because honesty, sobriety, and presence matter far more to me than feeling good. And if you are sober, paying attention, and honest in the world today, you are faced with the fact that things are falling apart and despite all the utopian ideas, it’s not looking likely that we’ll turn the tide.

I think one of the reasons we don’t want to admit this to ourselves, let alone talk about it openly is that we’re afraid. We’re afraid we’re going to lose our shit. We’re afraid this means our lives are pointless. We’re afraid of being consumed by guilt and shame over our participation. We can’t bear to face what this means for everything we love: the forests, the oceans, the animals, our children. But for me, this is where I think talking about death is key. We cannot face our impending collapse if we cannot talk about death. And we cannot deal with living in a disintegrating world if we cannot collaborate with what is happening.

The good news is that we are surrounded by experts who know how to do this. Nature knows how to die. Seasons turn. Trees compost. Prey go limp in the jaws of the predator. Our bodies know how to die. It’s we who resist and compound our distress and the distress of everything around us.

Our world is dying. And when I listen closely, I don’t hear it asking to be saved. I hear it asking for us to participate. To stop trying to bend everything to our will as if it were all here to serve us, as if we know what’s best. I hear it begging for us to rebel against everything our culture has taught us and stop raging against the dying of the light, to go gently into that good night. Can we surrender, let go of the reins, and let Nature regenerate itself? We cannot restore what we have destroyed. We have to trust the planet to transform our civilizations the way we trust the earth to accept our bodies when they are no longer needed.

If you think I have any idea what that looks like in practice, you’re light years ahead of me. Right now, this practice is starting in the hometown of my body and psyche, the place that matters most because it’s the place where I have the most influence. How do I collaborate with Nature? I start by learning to trust that everything, everything in me belongs and has a right to be there. Nothing is wrong or bad or out of place. I am an ecosystem. I have to understand why every part matters before I can even think about mucking around with myself, and because I’m infinite, I will always be more of a servant than a master. Just as we humans were always meant to care-take and revel in the infinity of the cosmos, not rule over it.

Collaborating with nature also means respecting and even expecting the element of chaos. There are predictable cycles of change, which can be challenging enough, and then there’s complete chaos where nothing makes sense and nothing can be anticipated. It’s the mad dash of the turtles into the sea with jackals prowling and gulls diving. We make it or not based on a dice roll of skill and luck. To believe otherwise is a doomed attempt to tame the wild, which will always take us unawares. We survive not because we are strong, or virtuous, or God prefers us. We survive because we happened to survive, and through the act of survival we find strength and wisdom. Spirituality doesn’t protect us. It simply keeps us company.

That brings me to the best way I can articulate what I have to offer the world: context and company. I cannot offer healing, immunity, or happiness. But I can offer a timeless perspective for what is happening to us, what is happening to you. If you tell me your story, I can tell you how it fits into the story of life, of humanity, of the cosmos. Then you will know that you will never end because you never began. You will know that there is no failure because there is no final outcome. Meaning comes not from accomplishment but from alignment and direction, from movement, from culminating and, yes, from disintegrating. Life simply invites our participation.

I can also offer you company. You are not the only one to feel afraid, out of control, lost, helpless. Just because you are sold a hundred cures and told a thousand affirmations doesn’t mean the melancholy and despair you feel isn’t real. Things are changing. Everything is changing and will be decomposed before it sprouts again. This isn’t about saving ourselves or saving the planet. This is about looking around and witnessing the glorious, terrifying mess of what’s happening together: grieving, dancing, raging, singing, surrendering together. Because that’s what humans do. And if there’s anything, anything we can contribute to the regeneration of the world, it’s going to come from that place, I’m certain – from a humbled place on our knees on the earth completely, totally defeated. That’s what Nature is asking from us. To give up. To step aside.

I can spend days, weeks, even months trying my hardest to solve the problem, to figure out what to do, what to say, where to go, who to be with. And it always brings me to the same place. The sobs come and I hear my voice, distant as if from another planet, crying out, “I don’t know what to do. I give up. I can’t do this.” And then, like a miracle, the stillness comes. The primordial peace of feeling my body sinking into the earth. I suddenly sense a presence. Maybe the trees, the ancestors, the distant stars, the earth itself. I feel the air on my skin, the breath in my lungs. I breathe deep. I walk back into my life without any answers, but with an abiding sense that I don’t need them.

Nancy