by Mary M.
She is bigger than all of us and contains all that we are and still she has room for more. Uncounted multitudes come from her and return to her also. All shapes and colors. All sizes too. She is the beginning and the end of our physical form.
She is a planet. She is a place on a map. She is the map.
She is the elephant we blind ones barely see, believing she is the tail we feel or the foot or the trunk.
She is the place we continually attempt to escape from also, yearning to be more than she is, like any child who seeks to outrace his mother.
She is the anchor for our far ranging minds, bringing us home each morning when our feet slip from bed and we touch her again after riding all night through the stars on her broad and generous back.
She is the source of us, and the source of our Salmon brothers and sisters also. Indeed, a book titled Your Inner Fish by Neil Shubin, a paleotologist and professor of anatomy, demonstrates the physiological debt we owe to these water beings–relates that fish fin and bone are not as far removed from human fingers and cranial bones as we might expect. Even the meandering pathways of our nerves demonstrate our Earth mother’s ever resourceful ingenuity, using and using again, and adapting to make the most of what is close at hand.
Earth draws on the same materials to make us all. She makes us from herself.
It is this weaving and adapting that draws us all into relationship, weaves the fish of our outer Earth-sourced rivers into the elements that flow through our inner rivers toward our heart.
Perhaps with this image of the interconnected waters of our outer and inner worlds–and of the fish that float through them whether in elemental form as cells or in the macroscopic colors of fish flesh that delight our eyes–we may see more clearly how much like these brothers and sisters we truly are.
And we may celebrate not just an annual day that gives mainstream companies another chance to shout about their religious conversion to GREEN but a day that weaves us all into the same pattern of interdependent relationship. . .
A day that helps us finally to recognize that we not only are OF Earth but that we ARE Earth–that her waters and her soil and the children of her lands are woven into the very tissues of ourselves and that to extricate them (or our responsibilities for them) from our hearts would be to lose ourselves.
