HOME, E.T.: Earth Day for Aliens

Earth's Day often brings me back to center, back "Home." It reminds me that we human beings are part of a much wider "We." But celebrating Earth's Day while humanity still operates as Earth's conquerors, leaving whole-Earth devastation in our wake, is always a bit of a conundrum. As Earthlings in a posthuman context, we struggle with what it means to be "Home." We might feel a bit alien. What is our true Home? Do we, can we truly "own" our Home? Or do we simply acknowledge belonging at Home? Do we create Home? Or does Home create us?

Perhaps Home finds us when we feel loved, when we feel like we belong, where we feel safe, treasured, and nurtured. We might aspire to be like E.T. yearning to be home in the heart, and leaving a legacy of healing in our wake. Or, we might fail to recognize our Home is also Home for those we tend to marginalize or exclude. As we grow more myopic about who belongs in our common Home, we may be feeling like unwelcome aliens ourselves. We may see ourselves as somehow separate from the rest of creation, cut off from the Life force that gives us energy for relationships, growth, and joy. In a biosphere cannibalized by our inexorable march toward global domination wrought by desire for excess ("more is better"), productive expediency (instant gratification; profit over planet), and unsustainable waste (non-compostable toxins), Home has been abused, trashed, and left for dead. Sadly, our destruction extends to all our relations. When will we come "Home" to a place where we know we belong in the web of Life as a whole?

When we truly look at Earth as a whole - a thriving, vibrant, biodiverse ecosystem - and act for the good of the whole, we may not feel alien. We may feel embedded, held, and loved. And we, in turn, may hold, reverence, cherish and celebrate Earth for and with all our relations. We may feel as our Home does, like we are one. And it's a HUGE Party!

The late Pope Francis, whose famous eco-encyclical, Laudato Si ('Praise Be' - 'In Care of Our Common Home') called us to our ethical responsibility to care for Earth as home to ALL our relations, knew that the basis of our mutual protection in a planet overcome by greed, excess, and waste is Love. Love binds us with all living Being, reminding us that a perceived separation that places humanity outside or above creation is tantamount to death for Life itself. We humans are not the center of Earth's drama, only one species among many. Earth is Home for us all. All our relations belong here, at Home.

If we are to find our way HOME, we need the companionship of all creation to be central to our understanding and way of proceeding. If we compost Earth's degradation, and nurture what is life-giving - our kinship with creatures, water, plants, trees, soil, and the very air we breathe - HOME welcomes us all. And this is something we ALL can celebrate and love.

Aliens No More. Remember. We're all just walking each other Home.

A Poem for Earth's Day

Earth Day

By Jane Yolen

I am the Earth

And the Earth is me.

Each blade of grass,

Each honey tree,

Each bit of mud,

And stick and stone

Is blood and muscle,

Skin and bone.

And just as I

Need every bit

Of me to make

My body fit,

So Earth needs

Grass and stone and tree

And things that grow here

Naturally.

That’s why we

Celebrate this day.

That’s why across

The world we say:

As long as life,

As dear, as free,

I am the Earth

And the Earth is me.