I’ve always found the concept of ‘Earth Day’ a bit odd. Like so many modern American rituals, Earth Day highlights the way our ‘celebrations’ have become more about anxiety than joy, more about forgetting than remembering. I could put it a different way by asking the question: How is every day not Earth Day? How is every day not a celebration of this amazing place we call home? How is praise for this planet not embedded in every other celebration and ritual we perform? To set aside a day once a year and call it ‘Earth Day’…well, it just feels weird to me…

A few years ago, a friend sent me this youtube video of a song called ‘The Lost Words Blessing’, which is part of a larger artistic undertaking. (*It’s also the song I’m singing in the video posted above*) Their website describes the project like this: “Conceived and commissioned by Folk by the Oak festival, Spell Songs is a musical evolution of both The Lost Words & The Lost Spells books by acclaimed author Robert Macfarlane and award-winning illustrator Jackie Morris; creating a listening experience that intersects music, literature, language and art, as a call to reawaken our love of the wild.”

The shorter way they describe it is this: “Singing nature back to life through the power of poetry, art and music.”

The album, and specifically the song from that original video for The Lost Words Blessing, created a subtle shift in my known universe and became a container for much of the work I’ve done since. And yet the description “singing nature back to life…” has never sat well with me. It’s similar to how I feel about Earth Day, and I think it’s because we ARE nature. We ARE the Earth. Everything we are made of is a natural material generated, created, and birthed by the Earth. Human beings are not distinct from the Earth, and neither are the things we create.

Does this mean we humans aren’t currently creating and disrupting systems on a scale that may be unprecedented in geologic history? There’s plenty of evidence that, yes, we are. But even that is part of the Earth’s “natural” cycles, because we were created by the Earth. What we sing into being, the Earth sings first, because she sang us into being.

Are we also potentially creating conditions our species (and many, many others) can’t survive? Also, yes, and that is a conversation worth having, though not the purview of this post.

So I sing this song not because I think it will bring nature “back to life.” Just as I don’t think setting aside one day a year to celebrate Earth will somehow halt the juggernaut of human con/de-struction. Not to save the planet, which I suspect will continue to birth new life through generative destruction with or without our species. I sing it because I love singing. Because when I sing I don’t feel as angry. I remember anger is often just grief that’s trying to find its way home. I remember that I love being part of this Earth choir. I remember that I am a beloved child of creation itself. This song didn’t start with me, and it won’t end with me either.

But, that is the macro…the micro is that this song has walked with me through the deepest griefs of my life so far. When I found out one of my best, deepest friends was dying of inoperable brain cancer, I listened to this song over and over while I walked and sobbed. When I think of what we are losing now, what will lose, what we have lost, when I am overwhelmed again with weeping, this song reminds me to “let the heron still my breathing…” It breaks my heart and heals the wound at exactly the same moment, as every good spell should.

And that’s why, though I distrust the language used to describe the song, I trust the song, and I trust the singing, and I trust that one way or another, we will sing each other home.

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