It was the cultural philosopher Thomas Berry who first turned my heart to the notion that the Earth Community is a “communion of subjects, not a collection of objects”. Understanding life on Earth as community, as kin, as sacred companions, changed everything for me; it changed my way of seeing and understanding the world around me; it changed my work, my home-life, my human friendships. It changed my spirituality. Although my head had been engaged and active in the environmental and social justice movements for some years, it was this feeling of Earth kinship, of love, of gratitude that moved my heart. This was twenty years ago when these ideas were considered off-beat at the very least.
Today it feels different and it is this I want to celebrate. Increasingly, I glimpse what I will call Earth-kinship in books, articles, conversations, media, and in Ministry*. Of late, I have been participating in an online community of practice called Co-creation with a Living, Intelligent, Sacred Earth. We are about 70 humans, many from the global south, from different cultures, some of us belonging to a living indigenous tradition; but most of us long separated from our indigenous wisdom. The programme is designed to nurture in us all a deepening awareness of kincentrism – a word coined by philosopher David Abram to describe the indigenous focus on relationship, on inter-dependence, on reciprocity in the web of life. Together we are learning, adapting and practising new and ancient ways of being, of seeing, of worshipping, of decision-making with the human and the other-than-human: with Tree, Rock, River Soil, Earthworm and Microbe. We are doing this to breathe life back into the inherent, intuitive, sense of Earth-belonging that we inhabited as small children. We are learning the language of Earth companionship so that we may one day hear her song. And we are doing this because we sense that it matters.
So, today I offer words of gratitude because I feel blessed to be alive at a time when this profound shift in human consciousness is taking shape – from the world-view of modernity that asserts the human as the apex species, dominant, and entitled to extract, destroy, exploit, accumulate – to the world view that celebrates all of life as sentient, intelligent, sacred, and bound together in a dance of reciprocity, where “all flourishing is mutual”; a world where, at last, we have the courage to speak the language of kinship where a tree is no longer an “it” or a thing but rather she is a guide, a friend, a teacher; where a mighty river system or mountain range is honoured and revered as “ancestor”. Witnessing this shift, I wonder whether, by weaving the remnants of indigenous wisdom with the insights of modern science and the power of pure intention, we humans may be ready now to begin the work of mending the rupture in relationship with the web of life – the rupture in “right ordering” that has flung us headlong into the polycrisis that engulfs us.
*Including: Kincentric Leadership : www.kincentricleadership.org; Robin Wall Kimmerer : Braiding Sweetgrass & The Serviceberry; David Abram : The Spell of the Sensuous & Becoming Animal; Thomas Berry : The Great Work & The Dream of the Earth
Clíodhna Mulhern