Getting to Know the Neighbors

As a practice of terraphilia

Last Friday—just two days ago—I moved out of my condo at the edge of the city to a house on the prairie in a development where there are no fences or streetlights, and rivers of wild grassland and woodland run between the houses as common open space, with trails threaded throughout. It feels like heaven to me.

The land here isn’t entirely wild, nor is the community of this land entirely new to me, but still, I am re-learning my neighborhood, both wild and human.

One way to practice terraphilia, to exercise our innate affection for and connection to this earth and the web of lives who animate this planet, is to get to know our neighbors. Not just those who are human, all the neighbors.

Not just those more-than-human neighbors who are involved in a domestic relationship with us, the wild ones who don’t rely on us for food and support: from the invisible microbes who animate the soil to the birds and butterflies who migrate through our cities, the foxes and coyotes who hunt our alleyways, the snakes and lizards who sun on our garden paths and walls.

Just as we come to know our human neighbors by observing their habits and interactions, we can come to know the more-than-human community as well. It’s one way of rooting ourselves in place and being part of this green and wondrous planet.

One way to re-connect to the source of healing and nurturing that we call nature, the life force of this battered but still breathing planet. The more we practice belonging, the more we heal ourselves and the planet we love and depend on.

Learning the community of the land

I woke this morning in the quiet, starlit darkness before dawn to the sound of a tecolote—an owl—talking from the gnarled old Oneseed Juniper tree outside my bedroom window. The sound wasn’t the deep hoots of a Great-Horned Owl; this was the whistled hooting of a Western Screech Owl, which despite its common name sounds not screechy at all, but more like “toot…. toot… toot.. toot-toot-toot,” the cadence speeding up at the end like a bouncing ball.

I lay snug in my bed, listening to the little owl outside my window and thinking sleepily how grateful I am to have moved to a place where I hear owls nearby.

As I ate breakfast, a dozen or more American Robins took turns—not always gracefully or graciously!—sipping water from the bird bath outside my kitchen windows.

On my dawn walks down the draw in this prairie-meets-foothills-woodland, I greet the native plants I pass. Plants are the “people” who I am naturally drawn to, but this morning it was the birds who spoke to me.

Whether greeting plants or observing birds and other wildlife, I am learning this place by observing and acquainting myself with the community of the land: who hangs with whom, who eats whom, who loves and hunts and forages and interacts—and who hangs solo.

Wherever you are—city, suburban, rural—you can learn the community of the land by coming to know your neighbors, whether rooted or winged, finned or furred or scaled. They are all part of the great web of life that makes this planet not just habitable for who humans, but extraordinary and numinous, an inspiration we draw on every day.

Here’s a practice: Set a goal of learning one new wild neighbor a week, be that a plant, animal, reptile, fish, or bird; a fern or lichen, a beetle or perhaps a whale. (Microorganisms are more difficult unless you have special equipment.) How can you learn ones you don’t know? If you don’t have a botanist or biologist or birder handy, the simplest way is to take a photo with your phone and upload it to one of the many identification apps freely available.

My favorite is iNaturalist, because it covers all non-human life, and because it is citizen science at its simplest. When you upload a photo with location, date and time information, your observation becomes part of a worldwide database of who occurs where and when. (The link is to the web-based version, you’ll want to download the app.)

Scientists can draw on this growing body of information to better understand ranges and patterns of species, and to observe trends in changes in populations over time. Your observations contribute to global knowledge, helping us understand life on this numinous and intricately interwoven earth.

And you flex the innate muscles of your terraphilia, enriching your connection with life in the capital L sense, the community that nurtures our lives here on earth. Your body, mind and spirit will thank you, as will the planet as a whole.

Thanks for reading my thoughts on getting to know our neighbors and the community of the land, and how that helps us belong to this extraordinary living planet. What follows for paid subscribers is a look at how the word terraphilia came into my life, and how it can change our relationship with the earth and each other.

One of my favorite of Richard’s sculptures, a granite boulder from the Upper Arkansas River Valley he sculpted into a firepit for a Denver couple.

Where did the idea of terraphilia come from?

The word terraphilia entered my life when Richard, my late husband, and I were searching for a term that would explain the motivation for our separate work, his abstract sculpture bringing local rocks into our everyday lives, and my writing and ecological restoration work.

We adopted ‘terraphilia,’ then an obscure technical term, invented our own definition for the word, and found it fit how we were already living. We had been practicing that affection for and connection to the earth and the planet’s living skin for decades, separately and together without ever thinking to name our practice.

terraphilia n. An intrinsic affection for and connection to the earth and its community of lives. Without this bond we are lonely, lacking, no longer whole.

Origin: terra, Latin, literally ‘earth’; philia, from the Greek, ‘fondness.’

I had never thought to name the inspiration for my work before. Practicing terraphilia was just what I did, whether writing about the community of the land (what we call nature) and humans’ place in that vibrant web of lives, or restoring native plant communities as a way to heal nature nearby.

Now I realize that the practice of intentionally living our terraphilia may be just what we need in these times.

What does it mean to practice our terraphilia?

Practicing terraphilia is not a prescription or a recipe; it is an individual way of attentive and respectful daily living that issues from the learnings of head, heart and spirit. The work is an embodiment of our inheritance as human beings, inhabitants of this living green and blue ball spinning in space on the third orbital path around our sun.

Whether quotidian or extraordinary, the collection of actions, habits and practices impelled by honoring our part in the community of earth will be different for each of us, as different as our hair and skin color, our speech and language, the assemblages of genes and memes we carry through life.

It’s about how we live our daily lives, and the power of the decisions we make every day. We can choose to live with love for this earth in our every decision, to live in a way that as Faithkeeper Oren Lyons of the Iroquois Confederacy said, bears in mind the next seven generations (and beyond).

The idea of practicing terraphilia may at first seem inconsequential. What can we individuals do that really matters? But over time and in the aggregate this way of living has the power to bring out the best in humanity, to restore us, our fellow passengers on spaceship earth and the planet that gave us all life.

Reciprocity as a way to belong

The practice of living our terraphilia leads us into a new, reciprocal relationship with this earth and all of the lives with whom we share this extraordinary planet. It is a way of healing our relationship with the planet and each other and healing ourselves. As Robin Wall Kimmerer writes,

“For all of us, becoming indigenous to a place means living as if your children’s future mattered, to take care of the land as if our lives, both material and spiritual, depended on it.”

Living as if our lives, both material and spiritual, depend on our daily actions and interactions. On belonging. On being part of the community of this earth. That is what practicing terraphilia means for our future.

Blessings!

Notes:

Terraphilia definition: Susan Tweit and Richard Cabe, 2010, originally inspired for 33 Ideas, an invitational art show at Denver International Airport with Colorado Art Ranch.

Robin Wall Kimmerer quote from her brilliant book, Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants. (Milkweed Press, 2015). If you haven’t read this book, please do!