Earth

I had the strangest sensation sitting on the hillside, gazing at the neighbouring mountain peak just higher than the village. It felt like I had fallen into another world...

Earth

As a child I dug in the earth in my mum’s garden. I spent so much time down there as a kid, climbing trees and building dens. Enveloped in the smell of the earth. A wild place on an awkward slope with nothing planted or planned. A little patch of ancient Irish forest. Once I buried an old biscuit tin there with a story I had written. I remember putting small red berries in the tin. I think the story was about magical people who lived in the garden, and they buried the story as proof of their existence. I tried to dig it up recently. I wouldn’t have spent time on such a fanciful notion if it wasn’t for my daughter being captivated by the idea of digging up my old story. She called it a time capsule. Thirty years ago is truly ancient to her eleven year old mind. We spent some time together clearing away nettles and brambles and dug a few shallow holes. There was no sign of the tin, but once I got started, I was more determined to try and find it than my daughter. Now the vague recollection seems both more real and more mysterious, as we never found the tin.

I found myself back in the soil in my twenties. I did something very out of the ordinary for me and spent a few weeks helping to dig trenches for water pipes in a village in Peru. I wasn’t much of a labourer, but I got to step out of the world that I know and the ‘me’ I am used to. When we arrived we were welcomed with traditional dancing. Then there was a communal meal sitting in a circle on the bare earth. In the village we had no running water and slept in an adobe hut. One evening the local people cooked potatoes under the earth, in a smouldering fire covered over with soil. I never knew you could cook like that. Many years later, in a community garden in Belfast City Centre (Brink), I discovered that this was a traditional practice in Ireland too. I spent an afternoon with strangers, harvesting and preparing vegetables together and eating it after it was cooked in the ground, covered over to allow it to smoke.

All those years ago, near the end of my two week stay in the village, I had the strangest sensation sitting on the hillside, gazing at the neighbouring mountain peak just higher than the village. It felt like I had fallen into another world. A world with a deep feeling of realness and peace. It had taken time for me to be really present, in a world of soil and sun. In a village with an ancient language that has no written form. Working alongside locals who gave offerings to Pachamama before breaking the ground with spades. I had struggled to understand how they see the earth as a living being that deserves respect and reverence. It took time to break out of my normal operating system, where everything in the world is organised to serve the whims of a people disconnected from the earth. It was disorientating. As if I had suddenly fallen and landed in a different world that was similar to look at but felt different, maybe even magical. Now looking back, I wonder might my ancestors who tended to the same childhood garden have always had a strong sense of relationship and belonging to land and earth.

Both the garden and the village were pretty ugly by white-people standards. The garden, a neglected and ruinous place. The village in Peru considered ‘undeveloped’, and far from picture perfect. The surrounding countryside was beautiful, with mountains and valleys and wide open spaces. The village itself was made up of mud brick houses, sun drenched vegetation and cultivated land - all their own shade of brown. During the welcome we were given when we arrived, a village Elder told us he was proud to share their way of life with us. This is a lot to take in for a white minded person. That a barefoot man in an impoverished and desolate landscape has something to teach us about how to live.

The day George Floyd was murdered, it started to become clear to me. Suddenly we realised we are all part of it. That the myth of a white ‘race’, the lie that humans are white skinned people, kills so many and disconnects us from our own truths. Suddenly there was a tear in the sky of the reality I grew up with. If I can bear to look through it I see it is not accidental that I live in a land that has other-worldly wealth compared to that village. Those lands were colonised by my white European ancestors and centuries of the Transatlantic Slave Trade built our wealth using the lie that there are different races of humans. We called our lies science and progress, but we lost ourselves and ignored our duties.

We have forgotten how to rest in the armchair of our own guts, sitting in our bones, feeling our flesh and its rhythms. We set ourselves above the land and destroyed it with greed. We fear humanness itself, seeing it as dangerous and unseemly. We cast it onto others. We might think we can find our own way back from our disconnection from the earth we stand on. What we really need is to seek the wisdom of Indigenous people who never lost their way. To rediscover what was once our own way of life. It might take us seven generations to catch up to them. Or maybe four clear years of handing the reins over to them would be enough.

Somehow my daughter has always had respect and care for the natural world, even though I lacked the wisdom to teach her it. She worries on hot days about the climate crisis, and again I realise there is a lot I don’t know. Anti-racist activists encouraged me to reconnect with the land and the pre-colonial culture of my own people. I took my daughter to our own little plot of ancient Ireland, at the bottom of my mum’s neglected garden. We gave up digging for my childhood story and planted a tree together. An attempt to put her fear driven energy to use (cf free online training Active Hope). A way to find hope. We don’t know any druids but we attempted our own blessing to the four directions.

Maybe I don't need to find the tin, but the act of looking for it reconnected me with the child inside me who could believe in things she couldn’t see, who hoped, and left it to the wind and the soil. That little girl who wrote stories where the land and that garden was alive and thinking. I haven’t done anything about the injustice of climate change affecting People of the Global Majority more than us whites who consume more than we need. Now the challenge is to listen to and work together with these youngsters who have not become fully disconnected from the wisdom of connection to the soil. Knowing how to live in balance with the earth and stop when we have taken enough. Ensuring to give back so that our descendants seven generations from now can be born from the same earth we walk on today. The same earth we dig, cultivate, and play on.