"Speak to the earth; it shall teach thee." (Job XII: 8)

I'm going to draw quite heavily on Jennifer Bennet's book, Our Gardens, Ourselves, from which I took the reading, partly because it appeals to me as a garden lover. I'll also draw from the great Unitarian Ralph Waldo Emerson, and from Wendell Berry and -- oh, the list of marvellous writers about our mother, the Earth, just goes on and on and includes ancient and modern, male and female, conventional and pioneering. Because it is such a huge subject, I'm going to focus especially on one of the many senses of the word "Earth", the earth which is the soil, the actual material from which plants grow, which was explored in the reading. The other senses of "Earth" -- the planet among other planets, the surface of the world as opposed to the sky above, and others -- will come into it, but I'll concentrate on the earthy stuff from which so much life comes and without which we cannot exist, the ground of our being, in fact: our mother, the Earth.

Many ancient peoples have considered the ground beneath the earth's surface the land of darkness or the land of roots, the kingdom of the dead where demons live. On the other hand, earth -- the soil itself -- has always been respected as the source of life, so that there's a built-in ambivalence in the human attitude to the earth, reflected in the word "dirt". Is dirt good or bad? It all depends, doesn't it? Perhaps this ambivalence is reflected in our calling it "Mother Earth", too -- we honour mothers, particularly today, but they've also been saddled with responsibility for many of the world's troubles. One epigram I enjoy says, "A mother's place is in the wrong!"

In past centuries, when a greater proportion of the population worked on the land, people believed that they, like the crops, came from this brown soil which had its own ability to create and destroy. According to Genesis, the first book of the Bible, humanity came "from the dust of the ground." The first man, Adam, takes his name from the Hebrew word for earth, adamah. The word "human" comes from the same root as humus, as do humble and humiliate. In Greek mythology, Prometheus kneaded mud into statues that the goddess Athene brought to life. The ancient Babylonians, Egyptians and Chinese believed that the first human beings were made from clay, and in parts of Africa and North America it was thought that the first people emerged from the earth, not unlike those earthworms described in the reading.

If human beings were made from the dust of the ground, then earth would, in a sense, be mother, a word that comes from the same origin as matter and matrix. The ancient Chinese system that divides all things into yin (female) and yang (male) connects yin with the earth and yang with the sky. Confucianism, a Chinese religion with an authoritarian, logical orientation, is considered yang, whereas the nature-oriented religion of Taoism is considered yin. "Whoever is planted in the Tao will not be rooted up" is an earthy image in a poem by Lao-tzu, the legendary founder of Taoism. Mother Earth, who at various times has been honoured as goddess throughout the world under different names, is a personification of the ability of the earth to hold seeds, produce life and nurture living things. The words "fertile" and "barren" are applied equally to both women and soil.

What we call "earth" or soil is a very thin sandwich of stuff between the unliving rock below and the unliving air above. Soil is largely a mixture of those two things, about half rock particles and one-quarter air. But sand, clay or silt alone is not strong enough to keep huge trees upright or powerful enough to nourish them. Soil is also about one-quarter water, and that's a major part of what makes it strong. It's a thick, gritty sea. Like the ocean, the soil sea is the home of living things that can exist nowhere else, and it's these peculiar creatures that turn rock, water and air into earth. Roots dry out in the air and may drown in water.

They and almost all other soil dwellers will bake or freeze if exposed to above-ground temperatures year-round, but in the dark world underground, a temperate place that offers both air and water in the right manner and the right amounts, they thrive. The soil is an upside-down jungle where plants' roots travel away from the stems and branches that reach into the harsher environment of the air. Soil absorbs warmth from the sun and generates warmth; it's a kind of go-between that breaks chemicals apart and builds new ones. It generates itself from the air, rain and sunlight, from all the living things that fall on it and from its own inner population of living and dying organisms.

The earth has been compared with a human body, usually female, and with parts of her body -- a breast or a womb -- but there's a vivid metaphor which is less romantic. Topsoil is most like a stomach. It accomplishes digestion for plants, most of which cannot do it for themselves. The organic matter being digested is made up of all kinds of dead creatures, as well as the products of living things, that are broken down into simpler substances which plants can use. The living creatures that do most of this digesting are tiny organisms which are tirelessly busy breathing, eating one another, multiplying, growing, producing heat, absorbing water, breaking molecules into atoms, gathering atoms into molecules, secreting and excreting various substances and then dying, becoming food for others.

Then there are earthworms. The great Greek philosopher Aristotle called earthworms "the intestines of the earth"; they make the soil more porous by tunnelling, they carry soil from the surface downward, and they digest soil to produce castings, which are perfect topsoil. Charles Darwin, who wrote an entire book about them, said: "It may be doubted whether there are many other animals which have played so important a part in the history of the world as have these lowly organized creatures." And, surveying the earth in its mysterious, paradoxical life-and-death nature, Wendell Berry, the influential ecologist-philosopher, relates life and death in this way: "If a healthy soil is full of death, it is also full of life: . . . Given only the health of the soil, nothing that dies is dead for very long."

So this is our mother, the Earth. Full of life and full of death; the stuff that we're made of, and nothing that we could recognize as human, in fact quite dramatically not us -- dirty and dark and primitive, and the absolutely essential material for everything from the flowers we nurture to every little cutworm eating the grass in our lawns. No wonder it's inspired contradictory attitudes, from the Biblical injunction to Adam and Eve that they should "till it and keep it" to the perspective voiced by a chief of the Nez Perce Indians who was advised to use the land for agriculture and said:

You ask me to plow the ground. Shall I take a knife and tear my mother's breast? Then when I die she will not take me to her bosom to rest. You ask me to dig for stone. Shall I dig under her skin for bones? Then when I die I cannot enter her body to be born again. You ask me to cut grass and make hay and sell it and be rich like white men. But how dare I cut off my mother's hair?

This imagery of the earth as the mother from which we were born is also used by writer and landscape gardener Julie Messervy in a beautiful book called The Inward Garden. She explores the idea that our spatial view of the world, the very way we see things, is forever coloured by our beginnings. The body of our mother is our first and most indelible landscape, she says, and the good feelings engendered by that body become our primary associations of security, warmth, comfort and protection. As we grow and learn to explore the world outside our mother's body, we begin to link our first feelings to the landscape around us, seeing it almost as an animate being. No matter how old we are, Messervy says, we never lose entirely these primal feelings toward the earth. Instead, they float beneath the surface of our adult lives, revived by images of natural beauty which reawaken the sense of Mother Earth as a living spirit.

Ralph Waldo Emerson has remarked on the same connection between our early experiences and our later attitudes to Mother Earth. He says that our whole outlook on the world is conditioned by nature; although we don't always remain as conscious of our relation to our mother as when we were children, this relationship is still is the primary shaper of our minds. What becomes mentally imbedded is more than single impressions, nature impresses us with a deep sense of the cyclical:

Every day, the sun; and, after, sunset, Night and her stars. Ever the winds blow; ever the grass grows . . . There is never a beginning, there is never an end, to the inexplicable continuity of this web of God, but always circular power returning into itself.
("The American Scholar", 1837)

Emerson says this continuous circular movement is the chief characteristic of nature. "Nature ever flows; stands never still. Motion or change is her mode of existence", Emerson says in his 1840 Journal, and, "There are no fixtures in nature. The universe is fluid and volatile". And the cycles of Mother Earth are not all sweetness and light; as Emerson points out, nature is often utterly ruthless:

The habit of snake and spider, the snap of the tiger and other leapers and blood jumpers, the crackle of the bones of his prey in the coil of the anaconda, -- these are in the system, and our habits are like theirs.
("Fate", 1852)

But it would be a mistake, Emerson says, to jump to the conclusion that nature is only violent, only ruthless. It is equally true that

. . . poetry is in Nature just as much as carbon is: love and wonder and the delight in suddenly seen analogy exist as necessarily as space, or heat, or Canada thistles . . .
(Journal, 1859)

The first lesson about Mother Earth for Emerson is that it is an organic whole, and whatever use is made of nature must be respectful to that truth, as respectful as if the earth were a mysterious, divine Being. Emerson's friend and fellow-philosopher Henry David Thoreau speaks of this element of mystery as a treasure:

We need the tonic of wildness . . . At the same time that we are earnest to explore and learn all things, we require that all things be mysterious and unexplorable, that land and sea be infinitely wild, unsurveyed and unfathomed by us because unfathomable.
(Walden)

But Thoreau never seems entirely sure whether nature is revealing a divine reality or an evil one, and his uncertainty is reflected in many of his images, notably in a description of nature as animal:

Here is this vast, savage, howling mother of ours, Nature, lying all around, with such beauty and such affection for her children, as the leopard; and yet we are so early weaned from her breast to society.

This is a rather different picture of Mother Earth from the one we're most used to. She's affectionate and beautiful but dangerous like the leopard. Thoreau believed that a wilder and less-civilized life than average, such as the one he lived at Walden, needs more attentiveness, more living in the present, which is a good thing. It calls on more of the senses and allows less absent-mindedness. For example,

It is darker in the woods . . . than most suppose. I frequently had to look up at the opening between the trees above the path in order to learn my route, and, where there was no cart-path, to feel with my feet the faint track which I had worn, or steer by the known relation of particular trees which I felt with my hands.

Alertness is required as we walk on the wild side of Mother Earth, and alertness, aliveness, awakeness are primary virtues.

Thoreau loved his home at Walden and the surrounding area, but he favoured the Eastern attitude of non-attachment, particularly in his discussion of the very down-to-earth topic of walking, which he thought was an absolutely essential human activity. He uses the word "sauntering" for the kind of walking he thinks is particularly good for the soul. The word "sauntering", Thoreau explains, comes from the French "sans terre", meaning without land, "which, therefore, in the good sense, will mean, having no particular home, but equally at home everywhere". The proper relation of a human being to our mother, the Earth, is to walk through it as we walk through a home, allowing it to affect our whole being. Finding the right balance of the wild and the "refined" or higher human nature, which goes beyond the Earth, is what life is all about for Thoreau. Cultivating the quality of "mindfulness", or full attention to a single activity helps us to achieve this balance. For example, he asks, "What business have I in the woods, if I am thinking of something out of the woods?" At the end of his essay on Walking, he states that "Above all, we cannot afford not to live in the present . . . [in] the gospel according to this moment . . . we saunter toward the Holy Land . . ."

I've taken you through some of the thoughts of classical and contemporary thinkers about our relationship to the Earth, particularly the surface of it, the Earth that we actually feel with our feet and dig into with our hands if we're gardeners. The image of Earth as our Mother has come through loud and clear, I think. And, appropriately for this Mother's Day, all the writers I've quoted have wanted to raise our consciousness about this stuff on which we walk, to make us more aware of what our feet and our hands and our everyday lives are doing to "Gaia", the name that's often given to the Earth Mother when she's imagined as the Being from which we all take our own being. What difference might this consciousness-raising make to the way we live -- how might our lives be changed by honouring Gaia, our Mother, the Earth? Well, many of you would rather think out your own answers to the questions I raise than have me suggest answers to you, so all I'll do now, in true Unitarian Universalist fashion, is to raise yet more points to ponder, namely:

1. Is it fair to keep taking from our mother and never giving back?

2. How many times has your mother told you to clean up your room, and when are you going to pay attention?

3. You wouldn't throw trash at your mother, would you?

4. What's the best way to treat a mother when she's getting old and sick -- ignore her, hand over the responsibility to someone else, or take care of her yourself?

5. Maybe we shouldn't always be tied to our mother's apron-strings: perhaps we don't need the Earth as much as we used to -- could we be growing away from her?

6. What would be a good Mother's Day gift for our mother, the Earth?

And finally, can you relate to these words from the Bible's prophetic book of Isaiah -- do you think they could come true?

The wilderness and dry land shall be glad;
The desert shall rejoice and blossom;
Like the crocus it shall blossom abundantly
And rejoice with joy and singing.

So may it be, on this Mother's Day and always.