I wonder about being an environmentalist. It seems cold. According to the definition, my wife and children are part of my environment, but I don’t think of them in those terms. My hands and heart, are they part of my environment? This brings up the age-old question, who am I? Am I a spirit that inhabits a body, or am I my body, or am I part of a larger whole – that is beyond my skin-encapsulated body. Does my body have “leaky margins”, as Jeanne Houston refers?
I have trouble calling myself an environmentalist – “environment” seems so separate. It’s hard for me think of myself as being in love with my environment. How many of you look at your friends, spouse, children, aunts, and uncles and think of them affectionately as environment? Now, how many look at the air and water and soil and see them as environment. It is easier for me to call air, water, and soil “my environment” than it is to call those people really dear to me “my environment”.
Then the next question is, what do we call all this “stuff’ around us.
That’s the point, it isn’t around us. We are it; the air, water, soil all flow in and out of us. Our bodies are completely different every seven years. Eileen is literally not the same person physically that I married twenty years ago; she has completely changed three times, and vice versa.
My point is, it seems hard to fall in love with one’s environment.
Lou Gold, who gave a presentation at Northern Kentucky University in February, talked about falling in love with Bald Mountain where he spends four months of the summer trying to protect it. He also talked of falling in love with a woman friend; but he told her right away, “I am already married to a mountain”. Her response, “It’s okay, I love your wife, too”. Not once in his talk did Lou refer to Bald Mountain, this part of Earth that has bored deep into his heart as his “environment”.
It seems that the word “environment” is one way of keeping the Earth at arm’s length. I don’t want to be an environmentalist; I want to be in love with this incredible Earth that is so much a part of me and me of her. I am Earth, and I want to love myself, and love myself deeply. In this love I find the happiness that I seek. In this love I will find excitement, aliveness, and meaning. In this love I will touch the sacred, the Spirit that seems so elusive in our western world. In this love I won’t destroy.
Eileen, Megan, and Devin (my family) seem so much easier to be in love with than the air, water, and soil (at least most of the time). However, maybe in the awareness of the interconnection I can love them “in” Eileen and Megan and Devin, for it is who they are; and in Misty, our dog; in the oak tree in the woods. It is to recognize that whatever I love, I am loving the Earth, because that is who they are. Maybe then I can stop destroying who Eileen, Megan, and Devin are now, but also who they will be in seven years; the air, water, and soil around them that will become part of them over the next seven years. And maybe someday, like Lou Gold, I will fall in love directly, not with a mountain, but with this part of the Earth that surrounds me here in the spectacular Ohio River Valley.
I do not think that we will protect our “environment”, but we might protect what we fall in love with, this Earth of our everyday life.
As Earth Day, 1990 approaches, let each of us find a place that we can come to know, deeply care about, and protect with all the means that are ours. It is out of this connection, out of holding this piece of land in our hearts, that we will come to lessen the destruction we personally do to the Earth, and possibly someday commit ourselves to preserving this planet. We will do this not only because of our awareness of its total interconnection with all that we presently love, but because we have learned who we are.
rjamesschenk.org 