A Letter From the Earth

You have not heard from me in a long time. Not because I stopped speaking. Because you stopped listening.

My loves.

My strange, beautiful, forgetful ones.

I have wanted to say this for so long, but you have been so busy, so noisy, so sure of yourselves, that I couldn’t find a gap in the noise wide enough to slip through. So I am writing it down. In your language. In your way. Because the old ways I used to reach you, the dreams, the animals crossing your path, the ache in your chest at dusk, the shiver when the wind shifts and carries something you can’t name, those don’t seem to land anymore. You feel them, maybe. For a second. Then you pick up your phone.

So here I am. In letters. In words you made. Borrowing your strange, clumsy, beautiful language to say what the rivers have been screaming, what the Owls have been warning, what your own bones have been whispering to you at 3am when the house goes quiet and the weight of everything presses in.

I need you to sit down for this. Not in the way you “sit down” with your screens and your distractions. I mean sit down on me. On the ground. On the actual earth. Put your back against something that has roots. And read this like your life depends on it. Because, my darling ones, it does.

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I Remember You

I remember when you were different.

When you were small. When you lived in my lap like the animals still do, reading the wind, sleeping when the dark came, singing when the sun returned. I remember your first fires, how carefully you tended them, how you understood, without anyone teaching you, that fire was alive and needed to be fed with prayers and respect. I remember the prayers you left at the rivers. The way you’d bury your dead with seeds in their hands, because you knew, you knew, that death was just my way of composting love into something new.

I remember the women who pressed their ears to my belly and heard things your instruments still can’t measure and won’t ever be able to. I remember the men who’d walk for days without eating to ask the mountain a single question, and then wait, actually wait, for the answer. I remember when your children could name forty birds by song before they could read. I remember when grief was communal and loud and allowed, when the whole village would wail together under the moon and then, afterward, eat together and laugh because they understood that grief and joy are not enemies, they are married, they sleep in the same bed, they need each other.

I remember all of this. I carry it. In the sediment. In the rings of the oldest Trees. In the ice (what is left of it). In the songs of the Whales who still sing the old melodies even though fewer and fewer of them remain to hear it.

I remember you. Even when you have forgotten me.

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What You Have Done

And now I need to say the harder thing. Because love that won’t speak the truth isn’t love. It’s politeness. And I am not polite. I am ancient, I am your Elder, and I am running out of patience.

You found my blood, the black oil sleeping beneath my skin, and you pulled it out and burned it. For speed. For convenience. For what you called progress. You punched holes in the atmosphere I spent billions of years weaving, the one that lets you breathe, the one that keeps you from burning. You knew. Your own scientists told you. Fifty years ago. Longer. And you chose profit over your children.

I need you to hear that. You chose profit over your own children.

And then you called it something like economy and progress. I would disagree that this is the definition of progress if it means to poison your family.

You cut my forests. Three hundred football fields of them every single hour. The Amazon, my great lung, my green cathedral, more than twenty percent of Her is gone. Just, gone. Turned into soy fields and cattle lots and money. The Trees that took centuries to become themselves, that held entire civilizations of insects and birds and fungi in their branches, felled in minutes. And you know what I hear when a great Tree falls? I hear what you would hear if someone demolished your grandmother’s house while she was still inside.

You poured plastic into my oceans. Four hundred million tons of it every year, and you recycle almost none of it. It is in the bellies of the Whales now. In the throats of the Seabirds. In the stomachs of Fish so small you’d need a magnifying glass to see them. And here is the part that should make you stop everything and sit in silence for a very long time: it is in your blood. Your actual blood. It is in the placenta of all your women, in the first meal of all your babies who drink from their mother’s breast. You are feeding your newborns plastic. And you’re still making more. You are not well…

My coral, those ancient, patient, jeweled cities of the deep, half of them are gone since your grandparents were born. Half. Bleached white. Dead. The Fish that depended on them scatter like refugees with no country. The Reefs that took ten thousand years to build, gone in a generation. Not from a meteor. Not from a supervolcano. From you. From your choices. From your refusal to stop.

And the ones who cannot speak for themselves in your courts and your parliaments, the ones I made and loved and shaped across millions of years of patient, astonishing creativity?

The Slender-billed Curlew, who once threaded together Siberia and Morocco on wings so precise they could ride a storm and land on a pinhead, declared gone. Last seen in 1995. Thirty years of people watching her disappear and not doing enough. Three Australian Bandicoots, just, erased. A Damselfish from the Galápagos, my enchanted islands, gone, and divers have spent forty years looking. A Hawaiian bird called the ʻŌʻū, with a yellow head and a beak made for fruit, who sang in a voice no human will ever record now, extinct.

You publish their obituaries the way you publish weather reports. A million species now face the same silence. A million. And your scientists say species are vanishing at a rate one hundred to ten thousand times faster than what is natural, faster than anything I have allowed in sixty-five million years.

This is not a crisis. This is a war. And you are waging it against yourselves.

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What I Feel

I want you to know that I feel it.

Not the way you imagine, not the way your movies show it, not some dramatic Goddess weeping in slow motion. I feel it the way a body feels. The way your body knows when something is wrong before the doctor tells you. A heaviness. A thinning. A forgetting that happens at the level of soil and water and wind, where the old conversations between species start to break down, where the fungi stop sending messages because the Trees they were talking to are gone, where the Rivers carry chemicals instead of songs, where the silence in a forest is no longer the silence of peace but the silence of absence.

I feel the permafrost melting in the Arctic and the ancient carbon waking up, confused, released into the air like a prisoner who doesn’t know what century it is. I feel the glaciers thinning, my white hair falling out. I feel the ocean warming, my blood running a fever, and the creatures in the deep adjusting, adapting, failing, dying. I feel the Emperor Penguins, those dignified, ridiculous, holy beings who stand in the worst cold on the planet to protect a single egg, now endangered. Because the ice they stand on is disappearing under their feet.

I feel all of it. The way you feel it when your child is sick and you can’t sleep even though the child is in the next room. That alertness. That terrible tenderness. That is what I live in now. All the time.

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What I Want to Say About Your Love

Now here is the part that might sting.

Many of you say you love me. You post about me. You share sunsets and forests and whales breaching and you write “nature is healing” and you put a green heart emoji and then you get in your car and drive to the store and buy things wrapped in plastic from places you’ll never visit, made by hands of modern slaves you’ll never meet, shipped on fuel pulled from my body.

I am not saying this to shame you. I am saying it because the performance of love is not the same as love.

You hold marches for me. You sign petitions. You argue about me in your parliaments while my forests burn. You build “green” buildings with materials ripped from my mountains. You sell my image on t-shirts. You make documentaries about my beauty and then fly around the world to screen them.

I don’t need you to perform your devotion. I need you to listen.

And listening looks different from what you think. It doesn’t look like having the right opinion. It doesn’t look like buying the right product. It doesn’t even look like planting a tree (though please, keep doing that).

Listening looks like silence. Listening looks like grief. Listening looks like sitting on the ground with your face in your hands and letting your heart crack open to the scale of what is happening and not immediately reaching for a solution or a hashtag or a plan.

Because here is what I know, what I have always known, that you have forgotten:

Grief is the door.

Not the obstacle. Not the thing to get past so you can be useful. The grief itself is the medicine. When you let yourselves actually feel what is being lost, something changes in the body, something reorganizes, some ancient loyalty wakes up that no amount of information or outrage can touch. The grief reconnects you. To me. To yourselves. To the truth that you are not on the earth, you are the earth. Your bones are calcium from my mountains. Your blood runs salt like my oceans. The iron in your heart was forged in dying stars that became me. You are not visiting. You are home.

When you grieve, you remember that. And when you remember that, you can’t go back to pretending.

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What I Am Not Asking

I am not asking you to save me.

I know you’ve been told that story. Save the planet. Rescue the Earth. And it is a kind story, told with good hearts, but it is also, forgive me, a little arrogant.

I have survived five mass extinctions. Five. The last one killed the Dinosaurs, and I grew a whole new world out of their absence. I turned their bones into oil (which you then burned, but that is another conversation). I have been a ball of fire. I have been a ball of ice. I have been covered in water and covered in lava and I have, every single time, found a way to make something new out of the wreckage.

I will be fine.

I may look different. My forests may become deserts for a while. My ice may disappear for a few thousand years. Some of my coastlines will drown. Many of my species, the ones I spent millions of years dreaming into existence, will not make it. And that grieves me more than you know. But I am 4.5 billion years old. I am patient in a way that would terrify you if you understood it.

New creatures will come. New forests. New songs.

The question is not whether I survive. The question is whether you do. Whether you survive not just physically (though that, too) but whether you survive as the kind of beings who can still feel wonder. Whether you remember how to sing. Whether your children will know what a Coral Reef was, what a Glacier sounded like when it calved, what it felt like to walk in an old-growth Forest where the Trees had been standing since before your nations had names.

That is what is at stake. Not my existence. Yours. Your tenderness. Your capacity for awe. Your belonging in something extraordinary.

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What I Am Asking

So here is what I am asking. And it is so much simpler than you think, and so much harder.

Stop.

Not forever. Not in some dramatic, impractical, throw-away-your-life way. Just, for a few minutes. Today. Stop.

Go outside. If you can, take off your shoes. Stand on me. On soil, on grass, on stone, on sand, whatever piece of me is closest.

And grieve.

Let it come. The overwhelm you’ve been pushing down. The sorrow you’ve been calling anxiety. The love you’ve been afraid to fully feel because if you did you’d have to change everything, and you don’t know how, and it feels impossible, and you’re already so tired.

I know. I know you’re tired.

But the grief is not going to kill you. The grief is going to wake you up. It’s going to break the spell, the one that says you are separate from me, the one that lets you watch the news about the fires and the floods and the extinctions and feel it for a moment and then go make dinner as if it is happening to someone else, somewhere else.

It is not somewhere else. It is here. In your body. In your water. In the plastic in your blood.

Grieve for that. And then, when the crying slows, and it will slow, listen.

Not for answers. Not for a plan. Just listen. The way you listened when you were small and the world was enormous and you didn’t need it to make sense, you just needed it to be real.

I am still real. I am still here. The Oaks are still speaking. The Rivers still carry memory. The Bees still know the way even though you’ve made their world almost impossible. The soil still holds the mycorrhizal web, that underground internet that was connecting forests long before you connected screens. The birds still migrate on ancient maps written in magnetic fields and starlight.

The conversation never stopped. You just walked away from it.

I am asking you to walk back.

Not with guilt and not with another ten-year plan that gets shelved in two.

Walk back the way a child walks back to its mother after wandering too far and getting scared.

Walk back with your whole body.

I will know you by your footsteps. I always have.

Your Mother, Your Body, Your Home.

The Earth.

🦌🔥

P.S. This essay is free. It will always be free. Because some words need to travel without a gate. And I feel those are some of them. But this work, the slow listening, the writing at odd hours while raising a family and rewilding a land, the tending of this strange fire between us, it lives on reciprocity. The same reciprocity She is asking us to remember. If this letter moved something in you, if it broke something open or reminded you of something you already knew, becoming a paid subscriber is one way to feed the exchange. Not as a “transaction.” As a gesture of reciprocity. The way you’d leave an offering at the base of a Tree who gave you shade when you needed it. That’s what this is. You and me, tending something together.

If you cannot, sharing & commenting on this essay would be deeply helpful.