Terraphilia and Unconditional Love

Year of Spiritual Thinking

When the teabag label nails the truth.

What we do best comes not from our heads but our hearts, from an ineffable impulse that resists logic and definitions and calculation: love. Love is what connects us to the rest of the living world, the divine urging from within that guides our best steps in the dance of life.

—Susan J. Tweit, The San Luis Valley: Sand Dunes and Sandhill Cranes

Hello, Friends,

Two weeks ago, I wrote about one of the lessons from my Year of Spiritual Thinking project: spirituality is woven through every moment of our lives. Even—or perhaps especially—the most mundane ones. The invitation to the sacred is always present. Our job is to notice and honor that.

Here’s my other big realization from the Year of Spiritual Thinking: To practice terraphilia means practicing unconditional love. Love of this existence in all its facets and extremes—beauty and grief, joy and trauma, pain and rapture, meanness and generosity, hatred and kindness.

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.’

It means cherishing this life, this planet; our communities, both human and moreso; our neighbors and friends and families; those who are like us and those who are not, and especially, cherishing our own fallible selves.

It’s easy to practice terraphilia and unconditional love when we experience a technicolor sunset or a parade of planets gracing the night skies. Or the smell of baking bread, the smooth skin of a baby’s cheek, the warmth of a kiss. It’s much harder to love the weedy and ugly parts of life, the devastation of bombed-out Gaza or burned-out Altadena, the bloody carcass of a deer hit on the road or a friendship that sours.

But those are all equally part of this very imperfect and impermanent existence. Loving the difficult and painful aspects is not the same as liking them, condoning them or perpetuating them. Life—both the multitude of lives who animate this planet and the sacred and unexplainable spark of life that flicks each of us into being—is not simple or single-dimensional. It is all, and not all pretty.

Unconditional love is hard work. The effort to live with heart open is not something we can achieve in every moment or even every day. But we can work at it (that’s what “practice” means) and we can learn from that effort. Always.

Gluttonous, the eastern black swallowtail we raised when I harvested anise plus—inadvertently—a live caterpillar from a-late autumn garden.

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Here are is an ordinary, everyday ritual to practice terraphilia, loving existence and ourselves and to begin your day on a positive track.

First Cup Gratitude

What’s your morning cuppa? Mine is hot chocolate, made with whole milk, my own cocoa mix and biscochito sugar flavored with vanilla beans, cinnamon and anise seeds.

Whatever you drink, use that time mindfully: as you prepare your morning brew, take a moment to consider the plants that create your drink, where they grow, who grows them, and how they reach you.

Thank the coffee trees, the tea bushes, the cacao trees. Thank the land where the plants are rooted: the earth, soil, sky, wind and rain and snow. The people who grow and harvest those plants. Thank those who process and pack and ship what goes into your drink.

Plants have made very iota of sugar we have ever consumed. A leaf is the only thing in our known world that can manufacture sugar out of materials—light and air—that have never been alive. All the rest of us are secondary users, recycling the stuff the plant has made.

—Zoe Schlanger, The Light Eaters: How the Unseen World of Plant Intelligence Offers a New Understanding of Life on Earth

As you take that first sip, savor it. Inhale the aroma, feel the hot liquid on your lips and tongue (don’t burn yourself!), and tease out the threads of flavor.

Make that first cup a way to celebrate and love your life and the lives who support yours, to start your day with gratitude and wellbeing.

What’s Ahead

I’m working on a new book inspired by this newsletter and the Year of Spiritual Thinking project, so from now on, I’ll be sending out a newsletter every two weeks (the first and third weeks of every month). If there’s a fifth week of the month—there’s one this month—I might surprise you!

Thanks to your enthusiasm, the quarterly book discussion group focused on nature and spirituality will start in April. I’m still figuring out books and format, so stay tuned.

Some Good News from the LA Fires

Gardeners and plant-folk have started a free neighborhood “seed library” of native and edible plants for replanting gardens, yards, parks and open-space in Altadena, as Tejal Rao reports in the New York Times. Seeds are alive: hope in an animate package. Plants have the power to help cleanse soil and water, and reweave landscapes. May this neighborhood seed library sprout a rejuvenated community.

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Blessings to you all as you practice terraphilia and love of this existence and each other!