I love this planet. I love trees. I love animals – big and small. I love everything that nature has to offer, breathing oceans, the flickering night sky, birds singing up in the tree line.
As a child, I roamed in the bush, and I spent many an hour talking to animals, playing with the leaves and flowers of plants, making drawings in the soil and the trees. It was a sanctuary. Nature is a sanctuary. It is a warm embrace. And I adore her.
Something interesting has happened over the decades. I went from this child who was one with nature to somebody who believed that this planet should be saved by me. It sounds very noble. It sounds very precious.
To understand the gap between the child who was one with nature and the woman who needed to save it, I started to face the gap to truly understand how and when this shift in perspective happened.
I had a typical upbringing, like most privileged middle-class people, where I had caring parents, I could go to a school, into an education system. But in my case, I was also part of a very strict system that conditioned us and prepared us to be part of an already functioning society that wanted all its new members, all its new little children, to be prepared to enter that established system. That of capitalism, commercialism, and tameability.
As I was being tamed from that barefoot child who ran around in nature, who sat under trees and spoke to the animals, I soon was forced to wear shoes. Taught to be submissive. To shape me into someone submissive, they needed to get the wildness out of me, and to tame me.
I was reprimanded. I was put in my place. And I was repeatedly told that I was out of line. Those wild ideas, that mindset of freedom, were placed in the category of wrongness.
I constantly felt that I was in trouble. When I was my authentic self, it was pointed out that I crossed the line, that I have upset the community, the elders, the parents, the teachers.
A technique that worked really well. Because I started to associate being authentic with getting into trouble, I slowly made my needs secondary to what society and the system needed from me.
And it’s, in a way, not nefarious. It’s just the way our society is managing itself to move as a group.
But because I always carried the weight that there was something misaligned with me, I decided that, well, if there’s something wrong with me, and if I don’t feel like I belong, that means it’s something I should be able to fix, right? Something that I can change myself. Here the journey started by chronically fixing myself.
Since I had this broken lens of myself, I started to see others as wrong as well. They seem to be broken. They seem like they need fixing as well.
Soon I was trying to fix myself by fixing others. And there can be many gradients of this, from being controlling all the way to becoming codependent. I started to identify myself as a problem solver, a fixer.
I started interacting with people because I saw their potential, but between who they are now and their potential is their so-called brokenness – that naturally needed my fixing.
And soon I was in this deep trap where everything is wrong, and everybody needs to be controlled, and everything needs to be fixed. Nothing feels right because deep down I just don’t feel right.
I felt out of place. Who I truly am and who society told me I should be, is not the same person. They’re two different people. So I tried to consolidate those two people who are inside of me. That is when I became aware of the glaring gap in most everything. Including my home as an earthling. Next I wanted to fix the Earth.
Two things: First when I speak about the sense of fixing the earth I am not speaking of conservation efforts done in the name of restoration. I am addressing the identity shaped around saving and rescuing. Secondly: I am also not saying there is nothing to be restored. We’re doing a terrible job of living in harmony with our environment. Currently humanity is not auspicious for the planet. We are extracting her, bullying her, and using her. And then we proclaim, oh, we need to fix her. She’s broken.
So when did things change for me? When I finally saw Her. I saw Her as a Deity as divine. I started a habit of leaving my house early mornings and watching the sunrise – something that gave me solace. I watched how the Sun embraced the Earth with warmth and love despite our activity, day after day. Every morning I saw the Sun loving her. One day something happened and my consciousness slipped into the gaze of the sun and I looked back at the Earth from His viewpoint. All I saw was this incredibly life-giving, nurturing Mother that loves all, day after day, despite our actions. Despite the fact that she has the power to eradicate all of humanity in a split second, she does not. I saw something more than a body, a planet, I saw the Mother – with a capital M. I saw what they call Maa Bhūmi.
Maa Bhūmi is not sick, nor is she a broken thing to be fixed. She’s the patient mother who holds us in a warm embrace, hoping and guiding and educating us to slowly learn better ways. We are her infants, in our terrible twos. Her children are having tantrums, demanding everything, all the time, entitled to suckle her breast. We are the little children that want to save our mother after we threw a tantrum and destroyed the nursery.
In that moment being part of the sun’s gaze, I realized that I never saw Her wholeness. All I could see was brokenness in myself and in others.
I was part of the tendency where humanity sees the dirty nursery after the tantrum and instead of cleaning it up and saying we can do better, we turned our gaze to our Mother and said – you are broken.
I could see that when I wanted to save the planet and wanted to make the world a better place it felt very noble and honorable, it felt virtuous. I recognized that it was coming from the same place that created the problem – that if I am in trouble, She is in trouble, if I am broken, She is broken. If she is fixable, that means there is hope for me. If I can save her I have evidence that I am safeable.
It comes from the same place of objectifying and extracting myself to please people, as to objectify and extract the planet to please our whims. I could see how my perspective distanced me from our Mother.
My body is Her body. All the elements in Her are in me. When I could face myself I finally could see Her. I could see Maa Bhūmi in me. I had been projecting all that inauthenticity that fragmented me onto Her. Also being made of Her does not give me unlimited entitlement over Her.
When I stood under the Sun that morning and my perspective changed, in that moment my relationship with Mother Earth reoriented.
Maa Bhūmi is not broken, even as her rivers are polluted, her forests are cleared, and her living communities suffer. Wholeness does not mean not being vulnerable, it does not mean that ecological injuries are ultimately insignificant. Wholeness is when a sacred nature cannot be reduced to the injuries caused by others. The last thing I remembered of that sunny morning was a revelation from the crescent moon. She was fading in the corner of the sky and only the sliver of light was visible, yet I sensed her whole round body.
Maa Bhūmi will never die. She might one day reincarnate away from this planet, but I have a feeling that She will be here long after your body and mine have decayed back into Her elements.
One day even She will forget about this short dark chapter where we acted like snotty infants.
If we truly want to change how we interact with this Goddess we call home, we have to stop perpetuating our perception of brokenness.
The message was clear from the Sun: Stop the fixing mode, of yourself, and everybody around you, the earth, trying to keep everything controlled.
For me to shift my relationship with Mother Earth I had to allow myself access to all my parts, even the forgotten untamed ones, to be authentic again, and to regain my voice lost in the collective waters. I am whole, I only felt broken when I was manufactured into something that was not me anymore.
Here is the good news – Authenticity is not an identity. To be authentic we do not need to make it into a project of improving. Authenticity is watching your heart while engaging with what is arising in the moment, including conditioning, fear, anger, and the desire to control. Not escaping one’s psychological history, but participating consciously as that history reveals itself.
For me it means that the child who felt broken, the woman who wanted to save Earth for the wrong reason, and the person speaking now need not be regarded as separate authentic and inauthentic selves. They are all part of the unfolding and returning back to the Mother.
The work of repairing the damage we’ve caused can arise from genuine care, without coming from a saviour complex. There is action, responsibility, and participation without the psychological need to be the one who fixes everything. I want to acknowledge the many people out in the world already doing the work and attending it with genuine care and authenticity.
May our relationship with Mother Earth be that of seeing her wholeness and her Grace towards humanity.
It is time to stop being the crying child to our Mother and become her ally.
Jai Maa.
