“We abuse land because we regard it as a commodity belonging to us. When we see land as a community to which we belong, we may begin to use it with love and respect.”
—Aldo Leopold
How do you experience yourself as being in community with the non-human world?
The Daily Compass offers words and images to inspire spiritual reflection and encourage the creation of a more loving, inclusive and just world. Produced by The Church of the Larger Fellowship, the Unitarian Universalist Congregation Without Walls.
My dogs aren’t human and are very much part of my family. However, I don’t know if I feel like I’m in community with the land.
I walk in the woods almost every day, and I do feel connected to it. I don’t feel like my interactions with it are social, so I’m quite hesitant to call it my community. While I have no legal title to the forest, it does kinda feel like it’s “mine.” That encourages me to take care of it, though I wouldn’t litter anywhere else, either.
I’ve seen a lot of people treat their human community with the same respect granted to disposable commodities: vandalism, smoking in non-smoking areas, theft, vicious gossip, and so on and on. I don’t know if that means that community doesn’t have inherent value or if it means that people don’t realize that these things actually impact their community.
I don’t think I’m unusual in that I treat things the best that I think are valuable and that I’m fiercely possessive of and/or believe I simply don’t have the right to desecrate. The possessiveness makes me protective, but I don’t think that it’s quite the same thing as viewing it as a commodity because I can also have a strong sense that my dogs, human family, friends, etc. are mine and I don’t objectify them. Somehow true commodities aren’t even as much “mine” because my heart doesn’t “own” them.
I think that maybe my idea of something being valuable and personal is the same thing as Aldo Leopold’s idea of community, but I’m not sure. Either way, the Earth as a whole seems too big for my heart to fully grasp. Various smaller causes fit, though.
How do you experience yourself as being in community with the non-human world?…
I worship The Goddess; and I see the Sacred within, around, and through everything in Creation. I believe in the actual existence of The Fae – as Guardians of Mother Earth, and all the Elements. I believe that when we – as humans – join our Sacred Sparks in the most elemental of unions, with the purity of our passions; we meld the two of us with the most Divine of the Sacred Flame … healing hurts, that run deeper than any could imagine.
Blessings! from a shamanic healer who uses sexual empathy to bring these powers to light.
Dwayne
I live in a place where you have to consider relationships to non-human life everyday. A family of deer regularly eat in my backyard (forget the flower garden), bears take strolls down my street, a group of turkey go for their daily route around the neighborhood and you can hear a certain owl at night, going from tree to tree, hooting each time. Likewise, the occasional spider has to be relocated (in my basement during cold weather.) I have a very acrimonious relationship with yellow jackets though. We just don’t get along. We also have to respect the trees, especially in wintertime when a few have to fall. Much of the relationships depend mostly on paying attention.