Earth Day Jubilees — don’t spend the whole week on zoom! Ideas for sensual, familial, and even ReEnchanting celebrations

Integrate powerful online gatherings with delighting in the sensuousness of our human-earth family. As Earthlings, to celebrate our home is to celebrate our creaturely interconnection with it.

Earth Day celebrations without being outside (usually a local park or other manicured ecosystem) with my fellow people, dogs, and related animals feels, well, not at all like Earth Day. In the 50 years since the first demonstrations across the U.S. against what Walter Cronkite then termed the “fouled skies, filthy waters and littered earth” caused by so-called human progress, significant environmental progress has been made because people, as citizens and consumers and spiritual beings, came together and demanded it of their lawmakers and corporations. As this Scientific American article shows, and as you probably already know, we’ve got a long way to go.

Instead, gatherings are forced into cyberspace instead of shared physical space. As my 5-year-old self would say: this sucks. Still: sharing time together is one form of sharing space.

Because climate change is a direct result of the mindsets and processes set in place via colonization which violently dis-membered people from place, reconnecting — I usually use the term reMembering — people and place is absolutely critical to any long term approach to living together well.

These days there is greater recognition that to celebrate the Earth means celebrating people as well as plants and animals and birds and reptiles and insects and fungi and the elements. Eco-justice and environmental justice are increasingly integral components of what is considered “good” approaches to policy, programs and other initiatives.

This week, many of the online spaces are exploring the nexus of climate change, eco-justice, and COVID-19. It is a fascinating intersection with a range of interpretations.

Take-aways vary from “oil is crashing, can renewables take off?”, “listen to scientists” to “nation states only listen to science when it immediately and drastically threatens the lives of their elite members” to “the virus causing a fever came from a feverish Mother Earth to help us reflect” to “the virus shows that dense human-animal contact is unsafe” to “the virus shows pre-existing social inequalities” to “climate change is a human health issue also” to “now we all know how connected we really are”.

As a minister and eco-theologian, I have a lot of friends in the eco-spiritual and environmental/religious spaces. As an entrepreneur and a legacy advisor for Families, I also have many colleagues and friends in the wealth management and advisors field. As a healer and an artist, I am part of artistic, healing, and health professional networks. As a former professional in international development and climate adaptation, I’ve an international climate adaptation and food security network. All of these networks are filling my inbox right now.

I could probably go from one fascinating, highly informative zoom gathering/webinar to the next for the next three days and not get bored.

Which is only part of the point of Earth Day.

I’m definitely going to “Black, Green, and Traumatized”, co-hosted by Green the Church (an amazing network of black churches working towards environmental wellness) and the Black Food Security Network 3pm-6pm on Wednesday April 22.

EarthX, in partnership with National Geographic, is hosting a diverse and wide range of live streaming. Discussions vary from block chain to Extinction Rebellion leader Xiye Bastida in conversation with Jane Fonda to National Geographic Explorers to Small Island States to the XPrize — breakthroughs in renewable energies. The Center for Earth Ethics at Union Theological Seminary and Wicks Poetry Center are collaborating for “Earth Stanzas” for an interactive poetry project, as well as a series of conversations focusing on indigenosity, COVID-19 and human-earth health. I’m intrigued with conversations such as “Pandemic as Portal — a conversation on transformation and liberation” with movement specialists and healers. Social venture and innovation networks, from NEXUS global to the Venture Cafe (which connects innovators to one another and to funders) to the Fashion Innovation conference are all open and inexpensive if not free. If you want more — EarthDay2020 has a massive collection and you can find almost any event on almost any topic. And of course, as they always said when I was a kid, “Earth Day is everyday!”

Here are a few suggestions for celebrating yourself as part of the human-earth family.

If at all possible, get outside. Obvious? Great. Do it. You can leave your camera inside. This is not about instagram worthy photos.

This is about authentic connection with a living being who is not separate from you but who is in you. This is an opportunity to get into your sensual, erotic, animal body, and feel the sacrality of your creatureliness.

Our spiritual journey on this precious precarious blue planet is in the body of a mammal. If your cat, dog, rabbit, local cow, goat, horse, or the squirrel outside your window hasn’t convinced you, mammals are sensual creatures.

We love stretching our bodies in the sunshine, shade (at the right moments) and playing together. If we aren’t playing with other humans right now, we can still play with the shaft of sunlight through the window, sway to the the breeze on the balcony, dance to the rain on the rooftop, delight in the thunderstorm.

Stretch outside. Maybe it will turn into yoga or maybe it will become a moment to pray with your body. With as few clothes on as is comfortable and possible. Feel the wind on your flesh. Just you and the trees and the sunshine. Dip your toes in your local creek. Make an offering — possibly the most ancient form of “giving back” to She whom gives us so much. It doesn’t matter your theology and where or even if you locate the Divine in relationship to trees and animals. This world is sacred and you are part of that sacrality and you don’t need anyone to tell you its true because you already know it to be so.

Start exploring your ecological family history.

I teach whole courses on this. It’s a journey that can take years, especially for working parents and grandparents, since most of us are so deeply dismembered from the lands, waters and wind that gave rise to our selves.

An easy starting place is to think about your grandparents: where did they come from? what might have been their relationship to the earth? To non-human creatures? What did they eat? Did they grow their food? Then start telling a story about them to your children (or as a creative writing or music exercise) that included their relationship with the non-human world.

Play music to plants, or tell a story to a stone.

If you think plants don’t respond to music, you have not been paying attention to the latest science. And are you so sure, do you know so much, as to be certain that the stone won’t in some way we can barely understand feel the energy of your attention?

If you don’t partake in reEnchanting the world, who will?

And then listen. The world speaks to us all the time. Even — especially — now. Just listen. There may be a lot of noise online. Definitely in your inbox. But there are less planes, less cars outside right now. Beneath leaf blowers, sirens and chattering humans, what might you hear?

Of course, there are gardens to grow, forests to cultivate, herbs to plant, names of birds to learn, bat houses to build, wetlands to restore, indigenous languages to revitalize, ancient knowledge traditions to celebrate, renewable policies to push for, local food solidarity groups to join and options to give organic food to those suffering from COVID-19. There are thousands upon thousands of great environmental NGOs that need financial contributions, high value investment ecologically helpful options outside of the stock market, and entire industries that we can now re-imagine and actually (unlike post the crash of 2018) quite possibly change.

But don’t forget to take some time over the next few days to fall in love with our common home. Express that love in ritual and song, in deep sighs and non-verbal communications. Re-generate yourself and your family.

Because you, your family, your community is part of Earth.

Since you aren’t going anywhere. None of us are. We are all here.

And maybe, just maybe, you’ll sense your non-human family welcoming you home.

Sara Jolena Wolcott is a healer, minister, and advisor. She directs the anticipatory community and online eco-theology initiative, Sequoia Samanvaya.