Coming Down to Earth

Welcome to this new meeting place, which is as much yours as mine. All you have to do is step through a door, walk out from under a roof, climb out of a car, look up from a phone, and there it is: the most real thing in your life. Whether you live in the desert form of it, the mountain form, the coastal form, or the flyover form, there is more sky above you and more earth below you than the mind has room to fathom.

This is where the minerals in your bones come from, along with your food, water, and air. This is where the weather is a higher power whether you believe in God or not. The ground under your feet gives you the gravity to stay put when you feel like you’re flying apart, and the sky over your head goes on forever when you’re trapped in a stifling moment of time. There are all kinds of reasons why you treat them like scenery most days. You’re busy, you’re tired, there’s dinner to cook, and so much email to answer.

Yet the patient earth waits for you, and when you’re ready there it is—with real sap, real shine, real scent, real birdsong. The life force in it is what you want, but there’s death in it too, which can be real comfort when you think you’re the only one being singled out for destruction. Small wonder so many people say they feel closest to God in nature. What else (with the possible exception of love) can make us feel so alive and so fragile at the same time? The difference is that most human loves aren’t infinite, while the earth might as well be. It’s as close as we can come to something we can see, hear, taste, smell, and touch that existed billions of years before we got here and is set to last billions more after we’re gone. But don’t think too hard about that or it will give you an awful headache.

The point is—for those whose faith in the future has dimmed, or whose willingness to wait for heaven has worn thin—there is a portal right here on earth that opens every single day with a little breeze of solace coming through, a little slant of light shining on some beauty you might otherwise have missed. This doesn’t change anything, necessarily. All it does is pick you up in its arms for a moment and set you down softer, with more room inside you for whatever comes next.

That’s where I want to meet you in this column—between your place on earth and mine, with mostly small things to share—because the big things have a way of eating the scenery. Day by day, they can suck up so much oxygen that the little, life-giving things keep volunteering to leave the stage so they don’t take up too much room. Do you know what I mean? There are people afraid to talk about how much they love planning next year’s garden because that might sound like they don’t care about democracy. There are people who may never admit that feeding the birds on Saturday fills their souls more than going going to church on Sunday. Human beings sometimes suffer from a hierarchy of meaning that the earth is large enough to embrace.

So let’s meet here and make room for it all—twice a month, at first, and more, if you like. Let’s come down to earth and tell each other what gives us life now, right where and how we are. But let’s also keep it short, because there’s a whole world outside waiting for us to arrive.