Earth-mothering

Respect, Reciprocation, and the Honorable Harvest

Photo by USGS on Unsplash

I stoop, hands easing back leaves to reach the treasures beneath. Summer squash, beans, and cucumbers aplenty. Harvesting is a sensory experience, and one not always pleasant. Squash and cucumbers protect themselves with tiny prickles that irritate my skin. My choice to plant the Three Sisters—squash, beans, and corn—together this year, as it was and still is done by some of the indigenous farmers of this land, means wading through a jungle of enormous, toothy vegetation to reach the beans that never quite reached their full potential, having been quickly outstripped by the zucchini, pattypan, and pumpkin plants. I think I must have done something wrong. Perhaps I planted them too closely together, or perhaps the seeds were not meant to be sown at the same time, to give the corn a head start so the beans could have a chance to climb them instead of getting overwhelmed by squash. Whatever the reason, bean picking has become a painful game of hide-and-seek, but the effort and scratches are worth it. In a garden nothing is wasted. Any fruit I miss will be returned to the soil, enriching it for the following year’s crop. Some will even regrow from the seeds sown thus. Few nurturing acts are as deeply gratifying to me as gardening. It is so easy to see (and taste!) results. If something does not work as you hoped, like the Three Sisters planting, well, there’s always next year. The plants come and go with the seasons, but the soil remains. We work in partnership: I feed the earth and she feeds me in turn. I have always found it beautiful that the Judaeo-Christian creation story chooses to show God creating humans from the very earth itself and then breathing life into the bodies so made. We are formed of clay and spirit, the temporary and the eternal dwelling together in symbiosis. What a glorious picture.

I like the idea of having been born of the earth. The most meaningful benediction that I have ever heard (actually a funeral prayer) comes from a people, the Shienarans, created by Robert Jordan, author of my favorite book series, The Wheel of Time. The Shienarans bury their dead naked, unprotected from the earth. It is called, “the last embrace of the mother.” Over the dead are spoken these words:

May you shelter in the palm of the Creator’s hand, and may the last embrace of the Mother welcome you home¹.

From the first embrace within the body of our mother, to the final embrace within the body of the earth, our Mother, we are held. In the garden, walking my property to see what flowers are blooming at the moment, or picking pine needles for tea when the earth is sleeping under snow, I feel held when I am touching my Mother. Indigenous historian and author, Joseph Marshall III, writes extensively about the Lakota connection to the land. In the final years of their life, he writes, many Lakota elders would go barefoot as much as possible, wanting to touch the land. To be placed into to the land after death was not a frightening thing, but a returning. The earth was revered as Grandmother: benevolent as long as you were respectful of her ways and heeded her teachings, dangerous to those who did not. In his book, To You We Shall Return, a call to respect the earth and our connection with it, Joseph Marshall begins with a traditional Lakota prayer:

Grandmother, you who listen and hear all, you from whom all good things come...It is your embrace we feel when we return to you...²

Similarly, in her book, Braiding Sweetgrass³, author and environmental biologist, Robin Wall Kimmerer, describes how, in the rapidly disappearing language of her people, the Potawatomi, everything alive is described in an active way. A hill is not simply a hill, but being a hill. A tree is being a tree. A garden? It is being a garden. All aspects of the natural world are described in a way that is personal and connected. Just as you would not refer to your grandmother as “it,” neither do you, in the language of the Potawatomi, refer to anything living as merely a “thing.” The only impersonal “things” are those made by humans, non-living creations. Isn’t that lovely? Indigenous peoples seem to have a foundational understanding of the earth as a living personality, a giver of life upon whom we depend, that those of us from cultures less connected to the earth often completely miss. As both Joseph Marshall and Dr. Kimmerer point out in their books, the Judaeo-Christian theology of man’s appointed dominion over the earth has done innumerable harm, not only to the earth herself, but to our ability to connect to the land in a positive way. Dr. Kimmerer, who is also a Distinguished Teaching Professor of Environmental Biology in Syracuse, NY, states that, when asked to identify positive and negative ways that humans interact with the environment, her students are quick to point out many ways in which people harm the earth, but rarely can think of any ways in which people benefit the earth, even simple practices like recycling, composting, and adding hummus to garden soil. We live as though we are parasites, and too often think of ourselves that way, without recognizing our potential for symbiosis. What could be more tragic than that?