There’s a peculiar existential loneliness that entombs us at any time when we lose our sense of connection to the online of being — the self begins to really feel like a twig torn from the tree of life, and one thing inside us withers with longing. We’re left with out sanctuary — a phrase that comes from the Latin sanctorium: a repository for holy issues. The phrase “holy” shares its personal Latin root with “entire” and has its Indo-European origins within the notion of the interleaving of all issues. After we lose that sense of connection, that sense of belonging to the sanctorium of life, we’re left much less entire.
Naturalist and ecological thinker Lyanda Lynn Haupt affords a treatment for this in Rooted: Life on the Crossroads of Science, Nature, and Spirit (public library) — a beautiful lens on “the way to reside on our damaged, imperiled, beloved earth.” She writes:
Rootedness is a approach of being in live performance with the wilderness — and wildness — that sustains people and all of life.
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The phrase rooted’s personal root is the Latin radix, the middle from which all issues germinate and come up. The radix is the unconventional — the intrinsic, natural, fervent coronary heart of being and motion. Rooted lives are radically intertwined with the vitality of the planet. In a time that evokes worry and paralysis, rooted methods of being-within-nature guarantee us that we’re grounded within the pure world. Our our bodies, our ideas, our minds, our spirits are affected by the entire of the earthen group, and have an effect on this entire in return. That is each a mystical sensibility and a scientific reality. It’s an consciousness that makes us tingle with its duty, its magnificence, its poetry. It makes our lives our most foundational type of activism. It means all the pieces we do issues, and issues wondrously.
For these of us who reside with secular rationality and a tenderness for all times, that sense of surprise and connection is a type of spirituality — the fundament of the sacred, through which the on a regular basis holiness of this world comes alive.
Haupt provides form to the best way through which “apprehension of life’s radical interconnection” — whether or not we name it rootedness, or belonging, or love — reclaims the which means of “God” for us who don’t abide by faith:
When the fraught identify God comes up in dialog or studying, I at all times remind myself that regardless of the supply or language used, we’re at root on widespread floor — invoking the graced, unnamable supply of life, the sacredness that cradles and infuses all of creation, on earth and past. I do know that prayer is the lifting of our hearts, our ideas, and even our our bodies in dialog, or contemplation, or remembrance, or supplication, or gratitude inside this entire, requiring no dogma, solely openness. Hildegard endorsed, “To be alive is to provide reward.”
Complement with poet Diane Ackerman’s fantastic private faith of “the Earth ecstatic” and the younger poet Marissa Davis’s beautiful ode to our primeval bond with nature and one another, then revisit the poetic physicist Alan Lightman on science, transcendence, and our religious connection to nature.