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It is not an easy time to send a love letter to Life as We Know It. To the oceans. To the lands. To the whales, the salmon, the trees, the bees. To our children’s future lives.
It is not easy to love the Earth right now, because she is slipping from our fingers, from our hearts, from our souls. To love our world—to fully, fiercely love life as we know it now—opens us to catastrophic loss, grief, and unimaginable change.
It is not easy to love the whales right now, to do so means to watch them die before our eyes. To watch a whole spate of young Southern Resident killer whale calves starve to death. To watch a mother orca named Tahlequah carry her dead calf across a thousand miles and 17 days, her passage calling the hearts of people around the world. It is not easy to know that her own consciousness is so formidable that she may well understand her family’s imminent extinction. It is outrageously painful to love her. To love her dead calf. To love the salmon they never had a chance to feast upon. Because loving the salmon means facing the pain of their loss, too. Which leads to acknowledging the larger and frightening erosion of the once vibrant Pacific Northwest Ecosystem.
And then, to acknowledging the global fraying of the web of life as we know it.
It is not easy to love Earth right now. To do so means taking climate change into our hearts. To do so means facing one of the worst extinction events on this planet ever to occur, at the hands of our young species and its very recent culture of domination. Domination of women, people of all colors and our indigenous allies, domination of Earth’s ecosystems, animals, plants, air, and seas. Whales. Salmon. People. The domination that threatens to end our world and life as we know it.
It already is.
It is not easy to send a love letter to Earth.
But for many of our changed hearts, it is time to love this planet and life as we know it with our whole lives, our whole hearts, our whole souls.
To open to loving Earth now is an act of sheer bravery and ferocious action. And to throwing wide our arms to the partnership with all of life that human beings have known since our species’ birth only a few hundred thousand years ago—a tiny fragment of Earth time. But across those short eons, our ancestors knew collaboration, they knew harmony, they knew how to actively sustain and flourish the web of life that gave them—and now us—the only embodied chance to love we will ever know.
Today, dear Earth, let us love you better. Let us unleash our own sea of love.
Aho.
