A year or so ago, I came across V’s (formerly Eve Ensler) letter of apology to the earth, “Dear Mother,” and I felt a catch in my throat from the resonance. In this poetic letter, V seeks forgiveness from the earth for her unconscious loss of appreciation for nature and her substitution of it with human ambition.
"I didn’t see you, Mother… My trauma-made arrogance and ambition drove me to that cracking, pulsing city. Chasing a dream, chasing the prize, the achievement that would finally prove I wasn’t bad or stupid or nothing or wrong. Oh my Mother, what contempt I had for you. What did you have to offer that would give me status in the marketplace of ideas and achieving? What could your bare trees offer but the staggering aloneness of winter or greenness I could not receive or bear."
V gave voice to my quiet sense that, in recent years, due to busyness and some unclear
priorities, I had allowed some of the more spiritual, soulful, nature-honoring elemental parts of my being to lie latent and to shrivel. My alchemy had shifted, and the result was a slow dwindling of the inner flame, a malnourishment. I since have learned to prioritize my spiritual growth, practicing transcendence in several arenas in my life, and I now make extra effort to commune with nature. And I am realizing that part of listening to the spirit and tuning in to nature, in my case, means heeding the creative impulse. I'm beginning to work on that more consistently.
As someone who appreciates a city now and then but prefers the greater peace and
simplicity of the country, I also found power in V’s comments on abandoning Mother Earth for the “cracking, pulsing city:” the city which suggests so much that is human-made, beating with the thrum of human ambitions and with the furious pace we adopt in order to keep up like cogs in the wheel. The human-constructed buildings, so many skyscrapers that catch the eye while blocking us from the beauty of the sky. “Look at us!,” the skyscrapers seem to say. “Look at how magnificent and tall and proud we are! Look at what humankind can achieve! Look what heights we can reach!” They strike me a bit like Shelley’s Ozymandias, “Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!” As I walk a city, I enjoy myself like any other, but I do occasionally find myself contemplating the lasting value of much of this development and striving and reaching and attempted upstaging of the glory of the skies.
To hear a spoken word poem I wrote this spring that encapsulates the themes of abandoning nature and the dissatisfaction of misplaced human striving, click below.
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