Finding Hope in the Animate: A Daily Practice of Reconnection

There is an eye staring at me from the window of the house across the street. Whenever I look up from my writing, I see it: a giant eye looking back at me. Knowing it’s the reflection of a tree branch distorted in a way that evinces the shape of an eyeball doesn’t make it any less potent: the house across the street is watching me. By extension, my own house also watches and listens to me. It knows whether I’m home, whether I’m paying attention to it or neglecting it; and it has a history that affects its present just as my history affects my present.

Have you ever had an experience like this? Been in a house that seems like it’s listening to you, or camped out in the woods and felt watched, or walked down a quiet street in the early morning and felt you weren’t alone? Our ancestors experienced this all the time. To them, the idea of unseen beings keeping an eye on them was as normal as the idea of an invisible worldwide network of information is to us. What a trip.

We’ve forgotten our ability to see what children see: a world that sees us in return.

We’re born with this, though. Most of us come out knowing that the world is animate. As little ones we befriend stuffed animals, trees, sticks, cars and dolls. What is that, if not an innate drive to understand the world as alive? Our ancestors, the vast majority of them, would relate better to a two-year-old child than to a modern adult, not because their brains weren’t equally developed but because the modern adult has lost the animate link. We’ve forgotten our ability to see what the child sees: a world that sees us in return. All it takes to regain it is a night alone in the woods. The call of an owl or a wolf, the rising of hair on the back of your neck: suddenly, in the space between heartbeats, you are an animist again. You don’t believe, you know the trees are alive — watching you. The cellphone in your hand feels more distant, your ancestors more near.

We need these experiences, and the world needs us to have them. The more we understand Earth is alive, the more likely we are to care for her: this beautiful, terrible, animate being that is our only home. When we know the water, trees, soil and air as our kin, we’re less likely to violate them. One way we can cultivate this knowing is to spend time in a regular practice. Just like a human relationship, our relationship with Earth needs to be one not just of taking, but of giving. We wouldn’t constantly take from a human partner and expect the relationship to thrive. Yet the human race takes food, water and energy from the earth and gives back constant abuse. Pollution, overuse, extinction of species, rape of land and indigenous cultures, and more. How can we possibly make up for this? The answer is, of course, we cannot make up for all the hurts humans have caused. But our individual practice can still be one of respect, kindness and love. Every morning, we can wake up and give gifts to our home. Living things share the land you occupy: grass, plants, soil. Make offerings to those things in whatever way you can. I offer my morning coffee to a tree in my yard. Every day I connect with this same tree, sharing my sustenance with it and giving thanks for life. I make a prayer of peace and happiness for all beings. It sounds simple but it is profound: a simple act that sets my mind toward gratefulness for every single thing I have. Every shred of clothing, every morsel of food, every drop of water and breath of air comes, ultimately, from Earth.

Sharing food and drink is not the same as watering a plant. We water grass and plants to keep them alive and sometimes to harvest them; this is good practice, surely, but sharing sustenance is not the same thing. This is a practice we do to bring our mind around to the sacred. It does something to us when we pour out a treasured treat we’d otherwise have consumed; when we deliberately give it to another being. In my case with the tree, this moment out of each morning stops me, gives me the chance to think not only about what I’m consuming and why, but who shares this patch of earth with me. In this way I have noticed the tree’s seasonal changes day by day, week by week. I’ve learned that the tree is female — when she blossomed a few weeks ago, there was no pollen dusting our driveway, meaning her red petals wait for the pollen of a male. Now, some mornings I wait with her, feeling the wind on my skin, wondering if any stray molecules of golden dust brush against her branches, high up where she sways and dreams.

Plants have a way of getting us to do what they want.

After several weeks or months of this practice, you may begin to hear a small voice asking you to do more. You may feel a tug to take a daily walk, a pilgrimage even, to go and sit beneath a tree or on a hill and listen until you get a message. You may find yourself spending less time with your phone or in your car, and more time in the woods. Plants have a way of getting us to do what they want; I suggest you do not resist their gentle insistence. Their quiet messages may be painful or disconcerting at first; the connection may feel oddly like a disconnection. Many of us have dissociated from our origins, from our home. Even more painful is the process of rejoining to a place that feels irrevocably damaged, as if while we were distracted, things have gotten out of hand and now must be reckoned with. Like a “dead” limb that tingles painfully on waking up, learning to love the world again feels uncomfortable.

The truth is that uncertainty governs most things, including our outlook. Climate scientists don’t have much good to tell us about the future of the world. There may soon be ten billion people on the planet if our population keeps growing at the current rate, a number that seems unsustainable given the droughts, fires, floods and other events that already threaten the food supply. Since we haven’t been here before, it can feel hard to use this place as a springboard toward the future. It’s okay to stop intellectualizing for a moment and to say, “I don’t know.” Where are we going? We don’t know. What can we do about it? We’re not 100% sure at this point. But humans are not just incidental fleas on the back of a sick dog. We are, as Tyson Yunkaporta says, a custodial species. We were meant to care for this place. Not to destroy it, and certainly not to ignore its peril as it edges toward a tipping point.

It should be clear we cannot fully embody our humanity unless we fully connect with the earth. This means putting down the cellphone or laptop and stepping outside for part of every day. Stepping away from technology and entering the experience of connection with the wild: that part of ourselves which grieves for dying forests, for extinct white rhinos and river dolphins, which howls with sadness and does not try to explain it all away or fix it. That part of ourselves which, like a child, knows Earth and her citizens are not only sentient but very, very wise. That they have things to teach us, still, in the midst of chaos. In a very real way, we cannot move forward until we’ve paused to grieve what’s been lost. The hesitation to embrace loss is a failure to embrace change, which is the future. Without knowing loss, how can we expect fullness? The wild itself teaches us this. Trees die and decompose; other trees then find the light and live. Animals kill one another to feed their young. Everything moves in vast cycles of growth, loss, destruction and regeneration. Sharing coffee with a tree might sound inane and ridiculous in the face of war, starvation and disease. But it will change your heart. And that is the only way anything useful has ever been done about the state of the world: by beginning with the human heart.