You Are The Planet

The forest, even the park or the garden, any open field, are ideal settings to understand to what extent we are connected to the planet on which we live. This is the first step to experience that there is a different way of relating to the other that is not based on mastery or mere interest but on understanding. When Mao’s China declared war on sparrows and other “pests” that consumed vast amounts of grain, the persecution was so effective that they were quickly exterminated. Following this “victory,” locust plagues formerly controlled by sparrows devastated crops and a terrible famine ensued.

Science and experience continually discover that what was considered useless or harmful (junk DNA, viruses and microorganisms, tonsils or appendix, sparrows or mosquitoes …) has a relevant role for organisms or ecosystems. Whether we understand it or not, everything is subtly linked, and there is possibly no better way to integrate this knowledge than to cultivate a piece of land and learn to live together, to keep pace with and submit to the cycles of the seasons, the climate and the conditions of the place.

Conquer or guard

The garden is a window to the universe, a privileged box to attend the daily and magical representation of life. The circle of trees that surrounds us, always expectant, is an agora to which a radiant sun goes daily that nourishes and warms. The flow of water runs through us ; the same molecule that has watered and formed the lettuce has reincarnated in my body and will flow back into the perfect circle of life. Water is the raw material of consciousness that animates everything that lives. The respiration of all the organisms on the planet creates and recreates the air, merging us in an incessant coevolution. Our breath is the umbilical cord that unites Mother Earth and living beings to each other, through the immense placenta that is our atmosphere, outside of which we would not last ten minutes.

The same water molecule that has watered and formed the lettuce has reincarnated in my body

Oren Lyons, spiritual leader and Iroquois lawyer, said that trees and humans share the same destiny, each one breathes what the other breathes. I have also heard that talking to plants stimulates their growth. But there is a simpler and no less beautiful explanation. Our very presence nourishes with the carbon dioxide that we exhale to the vegetables and, sheltered by the hedges, the same air takes breath in the same orchard in which lettuce, worms and gardeners breathe, as if a representation of the whole world took place in the atmosphere of this tiny space.

The earth cultivates us

The freshness of the orchard, the health and vigor of the vegetables, the beauty, the mood, the well-being of the plants and the trees, the worms and the bees, the fireflies, the toads and the hedgehog that prowl at dusk … everything has its resonance in the gardener, despite the fact that in this realized utopia there is at the same time an undeniable predation, competition and struggle that are an indispensable part of the same cycle of life and death.

As we advance in the material and mental construction of this space, we are taking the first step towards a deep connection that concerns all the dimensions of our being. The garden itself acquires an entity (even, one would say, identity); the space is defined and delimited through the hedge that shelters, isolates and at the same time communicates, like a skin, the garden with the outside universe.

The cycles of the plants are closed from seed to seed, preserving the ancestral memory of local varieties. From nest to nest, the circles of the birds that breed or approach each time in greater numbers close. Plants and animals find our place at every moment. Diversity increases and fertility grows in a soil that is increasingly pulsating and alive. The gardener ends up understanding that what he cultivates is the Earth that cultivates him.

Regain the link

In a way, this process of returning to Earth is a way of recovering the memory of some particles that ignore the whole to which they belong. In a process that comes from ancient times, we have forgotten that we are an inseparable part of a biosphere whose balances are delicate and its resources, limited. It is time to return to a new paradigm in which the individual and the fragmentary regain their natural connection.

There is in each one of us an indelible memory that urges us to plant trees, to camp in the clearing of the forest.

Bridges are needed to unite the watertight compartments of science and spirit, the social realities of the northern and southern hemispheres, and the stratospheric distance that sometimes separates our cerebral hemispheres, building unsustainable, virtual, and illusory realities. But first of all, it is necessary to regain the link with the natural world and begin to define our identity by placing ourselves in our rightful place within the society and territory that host us.

Davi Kopenawa, leader of the Yanomami Amazon tribe, said of the “civilized” people: his heart is full of forgetfulness. Is it possible that the “white man” finally remembers and reaches a new consciousness of himself in the whole? The challenge is formidable, but we may still have time to restore the broken balance. From the small plot in which each one is, in the town or the city, both with the work we do and with our way of living, we can undertake the exciting journey towards a new integrated consciousness.

There is in each one of us an indelible memory that urges us to return home, to plant trees, to camp in the forest clearing, to take off our shoes to walk on the dew. The more time and passion we invest in life, the greater the pleasure, connection, and vitality we enjoy.