Thank You Planet Earth ....

I never considered myself an environmental crusader. I'm certainly not in favor of slashing down acres of ancient forest or destroying the ozone but my allegiance to the planet itself has yet to drive me down a path where I actively railed against the wrongs we humans commit against our own home.

Lately however, both my understanding of and relationship to the earth are shifting.

In meditation training we learn to establish a connection to the earth as well as work with energy from the planet. Now I am coming to better realize what that connection and energy can provide. Simply put, they cut through all the existential questions around belonging, worth and value of individual human life.

I'm quite sure for some people this is dead simple and my realization not very interesting.

But if you're someone who's spent your life trying to quantify your own value and worth through the culture, family, politics and religion you just happened to be born into you might appreciate what I'm discovering.

Which is that all of the above is human machination - and while we run from one idea and its manifestation to the next - the earth continues to rotate on its axis supporting all of it.

Once I stepped back and started to define my existence by my earth citizenship first rather than to a state, country, family, culture, generation or any other human organization I started to relax and see that just like a tree that grows up out of the ground and therefore has right to be here so do I.

Without this realization and understanding one could spend years caught up in quandary around how and why one had any reason or permission to exist and take up space on the planet.

Things of course get complicated - well we human beings make things complicated - and as we do the sun rises and sets on the earth. I wonder how rooted in this realization the environmental movement truly is .... or if from time to time it too gets caught up in the drama that gets created by collective human minds.