Like the monarch butterflies, themselves facing the stresses and challenges of a changing world, we as a species need to embrace the radical art of transformation and migration that butterflies teach, because there’s a truth and a challenge that’s now as close as the air we breathe: in our climate-changed world, we cannot be done with our changes.
Foraging invites us into a relationship of gift to gift, abundance to abundance. In theological terms, foraging invites us to move from dominion to stewardship, and from stewardship to relationship and reciprocity. For in the end this world is God’s garden, and it is a gift and a grace—and a delicious taste—just to be a part of it.
For this Earth Day 2023, I invite you to meditate with me on the earth element, and particularly, to consider what the concept of re-earthing might mean, what re-identifying ourselves with and as earth might mean, in an age in which the earth element faces perhaps unprecedented challenges of ecological upheaval and climate peril.