Human Being or Humus Being?
A meditation of our Earthly connection
Below ground, it’s much easier to see and sense that all things are connected. Tunnels dug by moles, ants, termites; mysterious underground rivers and waterways, human-made piping, aqueducts, catacombs. Roots entangling with one another, communicating with unspoken messages, connecting with mycelium. Consider that we, surface dwellers, too, are a part of the underground community. Everything — from what we eat, what we wear, to where we live — comes from the ground beneath our feet. We are human from humus. It is where we go when the last breath leaves our mortal body — human entering humus, human turning back into humus.
‘Fully understanding who we are requires the realization that we are part of the earth, the soil, the humus, to which we will return.’
— Douglas Kindschi, Director, Kaufman Interfaith Institute
Entire civilisations have risen and fallen thanks to the layer of topsoil that clings to land’s surface. While we’ve been busy oiling the cogs of the insatiable capitalist machine, many of us have forgotten to nurture the real life that continues to give us life — the dark, musky, sweet soil beneath our feet that’s quickly turning sandy, dusty, lifeless. Not only have we forgotten, we have been actively abusing it with chemical fertilisers, herbicides, fungicides, insecticides — whatever -cides we can conjure up to curate a perfect monoculture landscape, grown for some distant corporation’s profits.
It seems the most important lesson humanity has to learn is: to live in harmony and regenerate the beauty of nature, in other words: to live a life that is in reciprocal relationship with all beings. These lessons we can learn from indigenous peoples who have been historically and presently violently silenced. We can also learn from our elders-by-millenia: fungi. Mushrooms are like icebergs; the true expansive extent of their existence lie beneath our feet. Their sweeping yet tight-knit network of hypha and mycelia connect plant roots to fungi to bacteria to nutrients and more, likening their ‘wood wide web’ as a much more advanced, intelligent, and loving version of our world wide web.
Time loses its human given meaning when we dive deep underground. Life is better understood when we expand our understanding of a second, an hour, into what’s called ‘deep time’, or geological or cosmic time, or billions of years. When we stretch time to see — really see — a rock changing shape, diatoms fossilising, tiny marine animals getting compressed into natural oil and gas, a kind of time-lapse video with Mother Earth as the photographer, all of humanity’s history exist in a heartbeat.
In Kichwa/Quechua, the word for world and universe is pacha, which is the same as the word for time. World evolving with time, ebbing and flowing, hardening and softening. All beings that share this planet in this moment in time are important. Robert Macfarlane, author of Underland and other wondrous books about nature, reminds us not to let this existential thought grind us to a halt of inaction. Instead, we could relish being ‘part of a web of gift, inheritance and legacy stretching over millions of years past and millions to come’, and consider all that we are leaving behind, mountains of plastic, forest clear cuts, nuclear waste alike. Perhaps the best legacy to leave on Mother Earth is to leave no trace of humanity at all.
‘…in deep time, things come alive that seemed inert.’
— Robert Macfarlane, Underland
English is after all a language of colonisers, a language of people who failed to see and preserve the beauty of nature but instead saw ways to profit from extracting and destroying. Did the colonisers create a language to justify their destruction, or were their actions misguided by their short-sighted, lifeless language? In contrast, the Ojibwe or Anishinaabemowin language doesn’t only allow us to feel what it’s like to live amongst living beings in a restless world, but help us see deep time. What’s it like to understand a rock as something alive? What’s it like to be a rock?
In the language of Ojibwe or Anishinaabemowin, a language of more than 200,000 Ojibwe people who reside on Turtle Island (so-called United States and Canada), the word for earth or land is aki. ‘Aki is also the source of life — the features, beings, forces, relationships, and processes’ that make up Mother Earth. Many native languages give us much better — closer — understanding of nature than English. In Ojibwe, rocks are animate, bays are animate, even Saturdays are animate. To be an apple, instead of an apple. Things become a who, instead of a what. Sharing this concept with her students, a student of author Robin Wall Kimmerer questioned whether speaking and thinking in English ‘somehow gives us permission to disrespect nature… by denying everyone else the right to be persons’.
Much of our cities — as much as 80% of the built environment in an average city — are made of a lifeless material: concrete. Grey concrete walls, streets cut through green; black tarmac roads, highways sever lush landscapes. The roots of the odd tree that the city has allowed to live push through the concrete sidewalk, threatening its own existence — had they destroyed too much of the sidewalk to be ruled a nuisance?
Rubber soles line our shoes, isolating us from the natural vibrations and gentle touch of the ground. Have we lost physical touch with the natural world, our life source? Is this the definition of progress — that we should distance ourselves further and further away from all those considered wild, savage, dirt-y by modern Western society?
When indigenous peoples say that the earth heals, that Mother Nature is the best pharmacy we will ever need, they aren’t just referring to medicinal plants and fungi, but also the healing power of actually connecting to earth. Standing barefoot on soil, meadows, forest, or beach; touching soil when we garden and farm; swimming in natural bodies of water, like a lake or the ocean. It turns out that this wild, savage dirt helps us improve sleep and our overall physiology, reduce inflammation, pain, stress, and much more. We are bodies that heal with earth.
Even as someone who firmly believes in holistic healthcare and earthcare, I certainly raised my eyebrows when I read this heading in a scientific medical paper, ‘Our lost connection to the Earth’. But I am glad that this kind of non-Western-convention-conforming knowledge, knowledge that indigenous peoples have known as fact for a long time, is taking root in the scientific community. The western world is slowly catching up to and reconciling with native knowledge.
Human: inhale, exhale. Inhale, exhale.
Even in describing our breathing, we often lead with the taking, the inhalation, of oxygen for our bodily needs. But lest we forget, quickly following is exhalation, exchanging carbon dioxide for precious oxygen.
All around us, Tree: inhale, exhale. Inhale, exhale.
Our collective in- and outbreaths connect all of us. Our outbreath of carbon dioxide connects us to leaves via stomata, to roots, to the rich microbiome in the soil, to the soil itself. We are alive thanks to their outbreath of oxygen.
As long as we keep breathing, we are in an inextricable tango with the rest of nature, and we will find a way to reconnect with this forever giving, forever forgiving planet, by learning to truly be.
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