Our Relationship to Mother Earth

Earth: Through All Things, Part 3

Oh what a catastrophe, what a maiming of love when it was made a personal, merely personal feeling, taken away from the rising and setting of the sun, and cut off from the magic connection of the solstice and equinox. This is what is the matter with us. We are bleeding at the roots, because we are cut off from the earth and sun and stars, and love is a grinning mockery, because, poor blossom, we plucked it from its stem on the tree of Life, and expected it to keep on blooming in our civilised vase on the table.—D. H. Lawrence

The Eden story is also a story of separation of humankind and the rest of creation. While the scriptures teach us that the Gods intended a binding relationship between humanity and the land—care for it and it will care for you¹—the fall from the Garden led to the natural world becoming victim to the idea that humankind owns knowledge. In this demarcation is the deeply harmful belief that nature is “other,” leading to its objectification, plunder, and commodification. Environmental degradation is directly connected to the devaluation of women—the creators, nurturers, and caretakers of life on earth—and patriarchy’s disabling narrative that men have limited responsibility and capacity to be equally nurturing. Deforestation is destroying sacred trees. Living by the rhythms of the seasons and the body has given way to mechanistic production, which does not honor our ecological heritage as humans embedded in creative cycles of growth, harvest, rest, and replenishment. We find ourselves looking back at two thousand years of human-centered Western philosophy that has taught us to retreat into our own heads for solutions to our problems and to prize the rational human mind above nature.

The rationality that was honed in the Enlightenment by Descartes and others is a great tool; it has specific uses and has given us miraculous technological advancement. As effective as it is in its purposes, rationality alone is insufficient because it cannot begin to answer the essential questions of meaning, purpose, and human connection. While raising the standard of living along many metrics for billions, the dominance of rationality has also brought us to what more and more are recognizing as a collective “meaning crisis.” We forget, in all our self-referential humanness, that we are creatures of the earth and need to commune with the land. We need grounding, an anchor to place, wherever we live. In our highly secularized world, many have grown to see the physical world as empty of significance, inanimate, or created primarily for human use. In calling the places where we live property, artificially demarcated, we invariably act in ways that are largely ignorant or dismissive of ecological networks that care nothing for our contrived boundaries. And so our environmental crisis derives largely from a disassociation between people and the places they live—a severance that can leave us with feelings of anxiety and despair.²

In the Western philosophical tradition, the masculine has often been connected to the qualities of intellect and reason. Intellect and reason have largely been seen as superior to “everything else in nature—everything which is physical, emotional, instinctual and wild,” traits shared by nature and the feminine. Because of this, there lingers a societal and cultural perception that both women and nature must never be fully embraced as they are but must be overcome by the uniquely human—masculine—force of reason. In this tradition, men are therefore seen as largely superior to nature and to women.

As the archetype of femininity, Mother God also goes unembraced in this paradigm. We have the opportunity in this life to weave together the good that comes from all types of intelligence—emotional, physical, instinctual, spiritual, as well as rational. And it is primarily in nature where we heed the call of Mother God. Just as we were given divine attributes mirroring our Father before we took on this mortal coil, so were we given attributes emulating our Mother, one being the call of abundance latent inside each of us. There is wisdom only Mother God can give, and it begins to take form in the deep soil of beliefs in our hearts and psyches. As She taught Her son Jesus how to embody feminine intelligence, harmonized with masculine intelligence, Her spirit nurtures our desire for integration and wholeness as we experience Her workings in the land. Earth reveals the divinity of the Mother in its processes, which we can participate in through cultivating the earth and our numerous spiritual and physical gifts. The wisdom of the land, the plants, and the animals is our heritage—the heritage of the Mother.

The connection to the cycles of life manifest in Mother Earth and mirrored in women’s bodies is the wisdom needed to lessen humanity’s collective harm in the world. Mother God reminds us that rootedness to place is rootedness to ourselves, to each other, and to the divine. In the Book of Mormon, we see examples of what it looks like to belong to the earth and to each other. After Jesus’s visit to the Nephites and Lamanites, there is a sustained period of time when “there were no contentions and disputations among them, and every man did deal justly one with another. And they had all things common among them; therefore there were not rich and poor, bond and free, but they were all made free, and partakers of the heavenly gift . . . and there still continued to be peace in the land” (4 Ne. 1:2–4).

Fourth Nephi further defines how “prospering” in the land had everything to do with living in harmony with each other. It is perhaps worth our time to consider how harmony with each other is related to harmony with the land. How would peace among all, in a city or a nation, translate to peace in the forests, rivers, and mountains? A Zion state is linked to a millennial state in scripture: “The wolf and the lamb will feed together, and the lion will eat straw like the ox” (Isa. 65:25, NIV). “They shall not hurt or destroy in all my holy mountain, for the earth shall be filled with the knowledge of the Lord” (Isa. 11:9). Isaiah shows us that godly knowledge, which was given during Jesus’s visit to the Nephites and Lamanites, eschews the desire to dominate, ending a reign of hurt and destruction. Godly knowledge leads us to true community, a desire, perhaps, to communicate honestly with each other, to make our relationships go deeper than masks of composure. We live our covenantal commitment to rejoice together and mourn together, to delight in each other, and make others’ conditions our own. It’s as if we finally believe we deserve abundance and for all living. We believe in how wholly we are loved and how wholly Earth herself is loved. The knowledge of the Lord is finally understanding the purposes of creation, and I believe that final purpose is love. In that godly wisdom, we can finally surrender in vulnerability together. We can finally answer love’s call to give care, attention, recognition, respect, commitment, and trust, as well as honest and open communication—to heed love’s transformative power.

The blessings of prosperity then and now continue to belong to those who keep their covenantal commitments, upholding the truth that we are bound together. In Omni 1:6 specifically, “prosper in the land” and “cut off from [the Lord’s] presence” are lined up as opposites. This indicates that prospering in the land is equivalent to having the Lord’s presence. There is something innately divine, then, about living in harmony with the land as well as with our brothers and sisters; it allows for the work of healing and miracles to thrive (4 Ne. 1:5). These scriptural examples of harmony make me wonder what it would look like, now in our times, to truly belong to each other and the Earth.

On our individual ascension paths, we are called to search for what has been all along: deep presence. If we allow ourselves to be attentive from moment to moment to our embodied experience, little by little we are taught that we do not live in an abstraction. We do not live in a painting where nature is merely a backdrop but in a world where the divine is infused into every living thing: within our own limbs and hearts, within the food we eat and the soil that makes food possible, within the sun and moon that give light to our eyes (D&C 88:6–13). The seemingly paradoxical nature of deity being in and through all things as well as existing in their own bodies of flesh and bone is not, on second thought, paradoxical at all but the very definition of what it means to be divine and to experience the kind of being-ness that our heavenly parents desire for us.

I remember, when I was seventeen, leaving the house after an argument with my parents. I walked out the front door into the spring drizzle, full of anger and pain, toward the mountains east of Salt Lake City. The air was crisp. Low clouds filled the sky as dusk came on. I walked three miles alone up into the foothills until I reached the canyon. I hiked to an upper trail, hidden by the understory, and lay down in the dirt as the dark settled around me. The earth hummed under my humming body and held me. I let go of my pain and gave it to the mountain. I felt my breathing slow, my gaze soften. The stillness of the night enveloped me. I sensed a deep listening from the spirits of shrub oak and big-tooth maple, a recognition of my presence. I felt, Your existence is enough. You belong to me, and I to you. Whatever happens will be. The rains will come, or not. What is, is. I am that I am. I am the existing one. You are that you are. You are the existing one.³

The ritual of going out into the natural world in solitude is a vital way to experience deep presence. Our breathing changes. Our attention is restored.⁴ We feel rejuvenated, soothed in the rhythms of waves, wind, and birdsong. We encounter the mysterious offerings of attentiveness to creation—epiphany, revelation, transcendence—that have no substitute. By doing so, we commune in ways that allow for the exploration of our internal landscapes, which has the potential to transform our ways of engaging with each other. Richard Rohr, American Franciscan priest and writer, speaks poignantly of the divine revealed by our attentiveness to the outer world and to our inner world: “We come to God through things as they are; spirituality is about sinking back into the Source of everything. We’re already there, but we have too little practice seeing ourselves there. God, in Christ, is in all, and through all, and with all.”

Learning to listen to the silences, to the great pauses and stillness from moment to moment, may be our greatest quest.

A heightened attention in the world leads naturally to a greater consciousness of our embodiment. In awakening to the reality of our condition—the natural and supernatural contriving—we probe the depths and limits of our knowledge and compassion. We learn that being open to not knowing will bring more knowing. That a state of open-heartedness is necessary for growth and wisdom. As much as we learn about ecosystems, of natural orders and interconnections, there is so much that escapes our understanding and language. So much wonder lies at our feet.

The Mother’s influence goes beyond deepening our understanding of our embodiment. We can see the Mother more clearly through Her creations. Mother God can be in plain sight and we miss Her because of the state of our hearts or our distracted minds. She asks for our humility in the face of the other sacred beings She has been instrumental in creating: the ancient wisdom of the redwoods, the language of humpback whales, the touch-mourning of a herd of elephants when one of their own lies down and dies. She asks for the resounding reality of our oneness to be expressed to each other now, in this life. Our own salvation is dependent on loving our neighbor as ourselves. Are the bears, wolves, trees, deer, and sparrows not also our neighbors? If we are doing the inner work of healing and heart expansion, it becomes much easier to see and feel how interdependent we all are, how true it is that our destinies are bound up together.

Profoundly, the Mother also teaches us in our movement toward communion how separate we are from each other in our mortal existence, so that we may have humility in our reaching for interconnection. We are unique beings, yet we are full of forces and energies that can collide and intertwine. Our patterns of relationality and meaning are gathered from the apparently empty spaces between each other as much as they are through our moments of direct communion and connection. She teaches us how we will never fully understand the life of another soul, as tangential as our experiences are. That trying to understand another’s experience by imagining ourselves in that experience is not the same as what the other experiences, but that in striving to connect, we touch the face of the divine. Living in the tension of what we know and don’t know about others, ourselves, and the Gods is how we grow.

Communion in community is everything to Mother Earth and Mother God. The intelligence inherent in nature’s fabric ensures that transformation lies in community. Through our Mother’s eyes, we see community as an ever-expanding set of relationships in which our proactive engagement produces ripples of change continuing into the eternities. As She must have taught Her Son, Jesus, how to embody wisdom, unity, and enduring love, Her spirit nurtures our desire for eternal connection as we watch Her workings in the land. An intimate connection to the earth is fundamental to our growth and expansion both temporally and eternally; it is the metamorphosis we need to change Earth’s trajectory. Thus, hastening the awakening of the feminine archetype, the cyclical process-oriented pathway to change (rather than the goal-oriented masculine mindset), is the only way to heal Mother Earth and ourselves.

For me, one of the most powerful visions in scripture is of Mother Earth sounding a prophetic voice: “And it came to pass that Enoch looked upon the earth; and he heard a voice from the bowels thereof, saying: Wo, wo is me, the mother of men; I am pained, I am weary, because of the wickedness of my children. When shall I rest, and be cleansed from the filthiness which is gone forth out of me? When will my Creator sanctify me, that I may rest, and righteousness for a season abide upon my face?” (Moses 7:38). She calls out to be saved from the wickedness of her children, to rest in righteousness. She knows she will be saved eventually, but in the agony of the present moment, she calls out for some idea of when she will be free from the destruction and hate that racks her body. She invites us to stay open and vulnerable to her pain. It can seem easier, in our sometimes spiritually infantile approach, to sever a relationship that is in decline—whether from illness or other factors—to leave before the beloved can leave. Earth is a dying beloved, spouse, and mother, and we’ve severed the relationship because it hurts too much to lose it or because we never truly learned to value it in the first place. Our job now is to fully embrace and embody the reality that the divine is not simply distant beings—it is all of creation. All of creation is the work of divine hands. Every bird, every tree, every soul is a divine revelation.

Is it necessary for our very survival to believe in the sacredness of Mother Earth, that within her is the hidden world of God? How can we possibly know God if we destroy that hidden world? How can we ever know ourselves? For “we cannot protect something we do not love, we cannot love what we do not know, and we cannot know what we do not see. Or hear. Or sense.” I believe the denial or acceptance of God begins with how we relate to the world They have created. They did not create it for our personal or collective gain but for our joy, so we may learn that joy is not found in storing up earthly treasures where moth and rust corrupt but in forging eternal bonds.

Mother Earth is an everlasting soul, and unlike ours, Her salvation is guaranteed: She will be celestialized. She is our earthly sustenance and security and is promised to be sealed up through the everlasting covenant as an eternal, celestial home. The implications of Her innate divinity are staggering; our own transformation into celestial beings depends on our capacity to envision who She truly is.

Discussion Question:

Has the natural world been a guide to you in times of spiritual difficulty? In what ways?

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Kathryn Knight Sonntag is the Poetry Editor for Wayfare and the author of The Mother Tree: Discovering the Love and Wisdom of Our Divine Mother and The Tree at the Center.

Art by Hilma af Klint.

1. The Everlasting Covenant was a covenant between El Shaddai (male and female deity, like the ‘elohim of Genesis 1:26) and all of creation, made first to Adam and renewed through Enoch, Noah, and Abraham. See Exodus 6:3–4; Genesis 9:9–10, 16.

2. There are many articles and studies available on what is termed “eco- anxiety.” Here is a link to a recent article: https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/327354. Excerpt: “Researchers coined the term ‘eco-anxiety’ to describe chronic or severe anxiety related to humans’ relationship with the environment. In 2017, the American Psychiatric Association (APA) described eco-anxiety as ‘a chronic fear of environmental doom.’”

3. A common translation of the Hebrew phrase ֶהְיֶהא ֶׁרֲשא ֶהְיֶהא‎, (’ehyeh ’ăšer ’ehyeh) is “I am that I am,” along with “I am who I am,” “I will become what I choose to become,” “I am what I am,” “I will be what I will be,” “I create what(ever) I create,” or “I am the Existing One.”

4. Spending time in nature has many benefits, including reduced anxiety and stress, increased attention capacity and creativity, and an ability to engage and connect with others. See Jill Suttie, “How Nature Can Make You Kinder, Happier, and More Creative,” Greater Good Magazine, March 2, 2016, https://greatergood.berkeley.edu/article/item/how_nature_makes_you_kinder_happier_more_ creative.