Earth is My Loving Mother

As a child, I did not learn Mother Earth creation stories from indigenous people yet I knew her as the one who held me close, that nurtured me with her essence. Now older, I call her Gaia, the ancestral mother of the earth, and she remains my higher power.

My mom’s temperament was mercurial, and I craved the consistency I found in nature. The natural world is predictable and dependable. Rock will be solid and heavy today and tomorrow. The river will always run downhill, the sun will rise and set today and again tomorrow.

Nature was a place of safety to me as a child.

I escaped to the soft bosom of pine needles under a giant Sitka spruce when my parents fought. With my sister, I laid in a nest of soft meadow grass under the Alaskan sun.

Smelling the salty, fishy air along the ocean’s bluff, my dog and I walked in the wind until I nearly froze my ears. I’d forgotten my hat but my heart was warm the Sunday afternoon my brother left for college. I was comforted knowing he’d hear the calls of seagulls in Oregon just as I did in Alaska, and I didn’t feel so alone.

No matter where life has taken me, I can always find some nature to ground my soul. From my apartment balcony, I hear an owl in the predawn chill. On a walk, I stop to watch a snail maneuver over rough gravel and I relish the sun on my face.

I don’t dispute Mother Nature can be deadly.

But hers is a danger I can understand and can prepare for. Storms have patterns, animals follow genetic laws of behavior, so there is always a reason for what they do. Nature is a place of cause and effect; it’s only because we don’t understand its laws that it seems random.

Beauty, pattern, and order fill the natural world from microbes’ fractal patterns to the spirals in the galaxy. I’ve been studying Gaia’s wonders for decades, and I have barely begun to learn her ways. Humanity diminishes and our problems become less consequential when compared to nature’s scale and power. Yet, the knowledge encoded in a seed, an insect, or even a virus, is beyond our understanding.

My teachers have been ants.

One fall day, neither too hot nor yet too cool, I watched one ant for the entire afternoon. Harvester ants are fascinating creatures spending their days doing just what their name implies, carrying food into their burrows. This day, many of them were coming and going not in neat lines but in what appeared to be random patterns. In fact, several would march out 15 to 20 feet, wander around and return with nothing.

What were they doing? Having some time on my hands, I focused on one ant and learn about its behavior. It walked up to its fellow ants and touched antennae, communicating gently. Several hours later, I’d learned a few things, yet I had more questions than before. Fascinating and absolutely free entertainment in the sunshine and fresh air of my backyard, nature is a patient teacher.

Peace, curiosity, and constant amazement define nature to me.

Learning to live in harmony with the natural world and all its creatures is my calling.