There is a profound alienation at the heart of the modern self: we move through seas of strangers, we feel trapped between the cramped borders of the body. Without dissecting the many reasons for this disconnection, let me offer a simple possibility: we are blind to the lives of non-human beings. Can a transformational rediscovery of earth begin to fill the void of separate selfhood? Here is a small poetic snippet about earth-belonging from the book I am writing:
You remain alienated from self, world, other, because you have forgotten your belongingness to earth: the spaceless takes shape in space.
You have forgotten your belongingness to days: eternity is sterility without the flesh of temporality.
Fatten your soul on the flesh of full days.
Pour chilled morning light into the glass of your mind.
Eat the noon berries. Yellow juice somnolents the belly, stickies the hands.
Let dusk lie you down on goldening grass. Beneath light-heavied leaves, prepare your body for release.
The sun drops and the day dies. And yet you remain to watch the decomposition of light, to see the dawn resurrect.
Each day is a contained creature, time exhaling meaning sufficient for the moment's needs.