What is it to re-member?
I choose the word ‘re-member’ deliberately. I recently have developed an appreciation of this word as pointing to something very important. It is my contention that the Western modern industrial culture I grew up in holds a pathological belief in human separation from the rest of life, that we have forgotten our membership of the living Earth.
The definition of ‘member’ is:
‘a person, animal, or plant belonging to a particular group’ or
‘a constituent piece of a complex structure’
And one definition of forget is:
to fail to re-member
I will convey to you the story of how this re-membering started to become a bodily lived experience for me. And noting that my understanding of this is that it is an ongoing learning, not a one-off event that ticks a box or gets you a certificate. I have for a long time had a great love for plants, animals, nature and soil, but also it has always felt quite normal to consider these as objects outside the boundary of my concept of ‘self’.
In 2022, I started to have bouts of an illness that was medically inexplicable. Extreme nausea, lethargy and fluttering heartbeat, energy levels through the floor. In early 2023 this intensified, longer and more frequent periods of illness. I felt like maybe I would not be able to keep working, I was unable to sit at a desk or do anything. Going to the conventional doctor or the natural therapists alike were of no help. There was nothing they could point to, no diagnosis. I started to feel like my body was shutting down, and that death was not too far away. I felt the fear of my death in a way that I have never contemplated it before. I felt that there was a very real chance that I was about to die. I kept trying to turn away from this visceral feeling that I was going to die but the illness would not let me alone, and death felt very close by.
I was on a holiday, taking a break from work and trying to recover some energy. One day, when I felt I could barely walk, and I could no longer pick up my daughter to hug her, I sat down lightheaded at a bench, wondering how I was going to find the energy to stand up again. I picked up a magazine on the counter. There was an article written by an indigenous elder of that Country, and some words really hit me as significant, something to the effect of ‘what is important right now is for everybody, indigenous and non-indigenous alike, to remember we are not separate from Country’. I went home to the cabin we were staying in, still in fear of dying.
I lay down to sleep that night and decided as I lay in the bed. I will face completely and directly the possibility of my death, and if it my time to die I will go willingly. As I turned towards this possibility, the one thing that became unbearable was to consider my wife, and children after my death. The fact of their loss and pain after my death felt the most unbearable and intolerable fact. I held this pain and it softened, I realised that my kids would be looked after, I would want in my heart for them and my wife to be happy and loved and looked after without me there anymore. This gave me a release to face the fact of my death. But it was not what I imagined.
I felt the presence of my ancestors and the indigenous elder from the magazine outside the small cabin I was sleeping in. I knew many people to be present, and to be deeply concerned for me. Even the animals and plants seemed to bend towards me in concern. I felt waves of energy coursing through the left side of my body as some form of communication. It was not scary; it was perhaps the deepest sense of comfort I had experienced. I realised that my body felt vast and I had no sense of separation between my body and the Country I was upon. I could feel water, rivers, mountains and plants as inseparable body.
Images of my life journey came to me and a pattern of meaning in all of it became clearer. I was essentially reminded that my earlier work on the land was important work that I needed to return to, but in a new way. In that moment I made a vow, that I would put my life in service to this understanding of the human being as Country, that the originating violence of our modern industrial culture is the belief in separability are strong beliefs but they are misguided and the true source of much of our pain and suffering.
I want to be clear that a knowing of oneself as not separate from Country does not mean that there are no uncomfortable sensations, pain, emotions. Rather, it changes the locus of the suffering in such a way that it is not pathologised to an individual form of dis-ease. This change in perception is significant. If we can connect our suffering to the fact that the living Earth, ‘Country’ is suffering intensely right now because of an abusive and violent relationship that is poisoning, extracting and clear-felling life it makes a difference in how we view healing. Healing at the individual level of therapy, spiritual work or more psychological understanding is not going to address this. The originating violence of believing in our separability from the land permeates our culture, and it is deeply painful. We are all trapped in a ‘family violence’ relationship with the Earth just now.
Right now, what this means for me is that I am not interested in hiding my suffering and pain. My tendency to hide my own suffering has been driven by a false understanding that suffering is something that originates in and belongs to me as the separate individual. And that therefore my suffering is a sign of my maladaptation to the presumably healthy wider culture. But what if much of the grievous pain we as humans feel is the deep suffering of this living Earth and all its creatures, the pain and violence inflicted on her body. If our body / self is not separate then how can we as human beings not feel this suffering?
Might it be that we can make visible and honour our suffering as evidence of our inseparability from life. Might it mean stepping away from perhaps the central narrative in our culture, the idea that all our sufferings and pain are excusively personal individual issues to be managed in isolation with wellness, psychology or even spiritual searching? Might it be that a collective turn towards tenderness and love to the body of this Earth could be the healing that is called for just now?