When I Come Home to Planet Earth

From the
beginning of our time on Earth,
she has been our home.  From the beginning Earth has been our home in the solar system.  From the beginning Earth has surrounded us with love, with food, with water, with shelter, with fortitude, with places to play, with places to raise our children.  Earth nurtures us. 
She provides the home that we love.

There is nothing quite like seeing Earth from the air.  The sea is so vast.  The land is equally vast.  The roads and the rivers seem to lead to nowhere, with vast expanses between.  The clouds billow above them casting shadows.  The sun, ahh . . . the glorious sun, sends light waves to planet Earth to warm her, that the plants may grow and the trees tower upon the mountains.  The light rays bend into the plethora of colors we call rainbows as it passes through ice crystals and water droplets on its way to Earth, adding magic and mystery.

Down here on the surface, the perspective is different.  Roads lead everywhere.  The towering trees cast the shadows, as do the buildings.  And the rainbows stretch from horizon to horizon, still adding a bit of magic and mystery.  We can only see a small bit of Earth at a time.  Here, life is abundant.  Here the world is small.  Here the Earth rises grandly before us in the sight of a mountain.  Here the vastness of the ocean is as small as that stretch of beach, a bit of coastline.  Here our senses are filled beyond imagination with the richness of the sensual world.

What is it we love most about Earth?  We love the abundance, the vastness and richness and the enormous variety of the sensual world.  Earth fills an enormous hunger for beauty.   It makes us curious about the mysteries, both on our planet and in the heavens above. When I walk on planet Earth, the world seems soft and subtle.  The flowers arrange themselves in grandeur.  The ferns as well.  When I work the soil I am in amazement that from this earth come the most delicious things we eat.  The crystals in caves form spires and nodes where water and minerals become rock.  The stones themselves give us our history that we may know something about what came before.  The Earth brings forth a multitude of wildlife.  It brings forth the whale and the tiniest crustacean, the mighty elephant and the lowly caterpillar, the condor and the hummingbird.  Earth elevates us.  It submerges us.  At times we rise up and feel her grandeur, and at times we feel so small as to be submerged by the din all around us.  Human life is ordered by what we discover here.

How would you feel if you lost your home?  Bereft . . . without nourishment . . . without the icons of our history . . . alone.  The beauty, variety, and grandeur of our deeply sensual planet would be lost.  Our hunger for earthly beauty would go unfulfilled.  Imagine what it would feel like to no longer be able to go exploring what and who the multitudes are.  We could no longer discover Earth’s undiscovered places, species, and cultures.  Where would we lay our heads at night?  How deep would be our grief!

The Earth nourishes our bodies, our minds, and our spirit.  While there are those who think if life on our planet died that we could just go to another planet, it is very doubtful we would find the kind of paradise we have on Earth.  We are uniquely adapted to this planet.  We fit on Earth like a hand in a glove.  And this is why we love Earth so much.

So how do we make sure we don’t lose this magnificent home we love?  We take care of what we have.  We rebuild what is broken .  We clean up the messes made on land, sea, and in the air.  We replant what has died.  We restore the water supply. We restore the earth, removing pollutants.   We sweep away the debris of yesterday’s excesses.

How do you treat a home that you love?  How would you like to clean up the Earth, what could you do?  In your corner of the world, what needs refurbishing?  What needs removing?  What needs restoring?  What needs to be swept away?

How do you treat a home that you love?  How would you like to clean up the Earth, what could you do?  In your corner of the world, what needs refurbishing?  What needs removing?  What needs restoring?  What needs to be swept away?