Happy Earth Day, Everyone!

April 22 was Earth Day, which reminded me to celebrate and assess my relations with our planet and all it’s many life forms. I’d be glad to see the demise of the coronavirus currently plaguing the world’s primates (mainly us), and some bacteria are too toxic to really celebrate. But most forms of life - two-legged, four-legged, furred, finned, feathered or rooted in the ground – are well worth saving and honoring, parts of the one interdependent web that supports our existence too. A dance of activities, from eating to mating to building a home sanctuary, connects us all.

Henry David Thoreau said, “In wildness is the preservation of the world.“ Wildness, an expression of universal creativity and freedom within connectedness, can be our best guide to living sometimes. We often use the word wild in a negative way. But that’s a bias of human civilization building. Wildness is that attention to surroundings and to self-preservation that is the heart of interdependence. When people lose sight of their essential connectedness to the whole web and to each other, disaster often strikes.

Our ignorance of the interweaving of all life (lack of attention to surroundings) enables the ongoing destruction of habitats and of many species, the poisoning of air and water, all of the climate crisis. Our arrogance in telling ourselves we are the dominant force on Earth sets us up for all manner of plagues. Actually, I would argue that bacteria are the dominant life on Earth. In fact, a human body harbors more bacterial cells of many species than it contains human cells. You wouldn’t be able to digest your food, for example, without them.

And now, some people, poisoned by the absurd ideology of individualism (an illusion, for sure) refuse to become immunized against COVID-19, thinking they are making the decision only for themselves. That is not so. The more people who remain susceptible to this coronavirus, the more variants, generally more lethal and more contagious, we’ll all have to cope with. And, to me worst of all, those misguided individualists fail to take into account the many people too fragile for vaccines. Children with cystic fibrosis, people undergoing some cancer treatments, and many others. Their protection from COVID-19 comes from the rest of us getting immunized. It is essential that we understand we are all part of one human community, living in smaller communities, part of one life community – never truly separate individuals at all.

For Earth Day or on any day of the year, I suggest reveling in being part of the complex, magnificent whole, life on Earth, our true family, our sustenance, our inspiration, our continuation, if there is to be one.

I’ll leave you with the words of one of the great sages of India, Sri Aurobindo, who wrote:

What, you ask, was the beginning of it all?

And it is this…

Existence that multiplied itself

For sheer delight of being

And plunged into numberless trillions of forms

So it might find itself

Innumerably.