Hands holding a patch of soil with a small plant.

Photo by Noah Buscher on Unsplash

Air that connects us in the breathing together of all things…
Fire that feeds the sun that feeds everything else…
Water that runs as river, stills as lake, waves as ocean, drips as faucet…
Earth that shapes as landscape, greens, feels, knows, loves…

For as long as we have been expressions of earth reflecting back on the ways of nature, our thinking has constellated itself into a sacred conversation about the four elements—air, fire, water, earth. For the pre-Socratic Greek philosophers, the conversation revolved around the question of which element was first, primary, arche. Some argued for fire, others for air, etc. In the Japanese godai account of things, an enigmatic fifth element, the void, is added to the conversation. In Buddhist discourse, the human body serves as the model for the ways the elements work together, known through an embodied mindfulness practice, the Satipaṭṭhāna-sutta. Indigenous wisdom also tells of the human as microcosm or gathering place of the elements, and adds physical, emotional, spiritual, and intellectual as four additional dimensions or layers to the primordial, soupy elemental mix.

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.

As a planet, Earth is curiously named. For every other planet we assigned the name of a god or goddess from Greco-Roman mythology. Earth, however, comes from the Anglo-Saxon ertha, meaning ground, soil, dirt, land. Rather than evoking the abstractness of a mythological figure, earth is named for what it most immediately, most materially, most humbly is—the stuff that we stand on, the stuff that is us. In English, earth was originally both a noun and a verb, with the verb meaning to bury, or to inter.

“The earth and its fullness belong to the Eternal.
    The world is of God, and those who live in it.”
– Ps. 24:1 (translation by author)

In the biblical telling, the earth element comes into focus in the Genesis creation story, as God forms adam from the adamah, the earthling from the earth, the ensouled one from the soil, the human from the humus. We are earth to earth. We are, as the prophet Jeremiah imagined it, clay in the potter’s hands. We are, as Paul put it, earthen vessels. Jesus, who is given the title eschatos adam, Second or Ultimate Earthling (1 Corinthians 15:45), had a powerful affinity with all the elements—we have images or references to him calming wind, walking on water, baptizing with fire—but it is the earth element that features most prominently in his teachings and parables, as he was quick to draw on images and metaphors of seed, salt, sheep, fruit, flowers, harvest. In a poetic evocation of the Genesis creation account, Jesus once used mud to heal a person’s vision, suggesting that earth is both the element of original creation and the element of healing and re-creation. Jesus was so attuned to the earth element that he identified himself with it at the eucharistic feast with the earth’s abundance and nourishment on the table, saying “this is my body.” When he died, the earth shook. That Jesus’s resurrection was a bodily—that is, earthly—thing is marveled at in all the Gospel accounts, including the first appearance in which he was mistaken for a gardener, for one who works directly with the earth element as a landscape artist or farmer would.

“The earth produces of itself,” Jesus said in one of his earth element teachings, attending to a seed sprouting, “first the stalk, then the head, then the full grain in the head.” (Mark 4:28) The kingdom of God, he said, is like this—it’s like the happenings of the earth in that it just pops up, a glorious disruptive event of newness and beauty, like a sudden field of wildflowers, like a single clonal colony of quaking aspen dancing in the wind, like a fruit tree going from budburst to blossom.

“Earth’s the right place for love:
I don’t know where it’s likely to go better.”
– Robert Frost, “Birches”[i]

Today, as we face new challenges of ecological and climate peril, and as some of the planet’s wealthiest inhabitants dream of and plan for a post-terrestrial future, may we take this chance that the annual Earth Day invitation offers to praise the earth element and commit to re-earthing our always and already earthmade selves. May we be an expression of earth that is in grateful awe of itself as an element—this earth which is humble and glorious; which is origin and destiny; this clay-sculpted kin-dom of God where incarnation and resurrection energy runs wild and free; this Planet A named after nothing other than the very essence of itself; this place where all matter is holy matter; where matter matters; this place, this earth, which is the right place for love.