A Crisis of Forgetting: An Invitation to Remember Through Writing

The Crisis of Forgetting

The crisis facing our Earth is a crisis of forgetting.

Writing can be a way to remember.

Writing can be a way to come home.

The epidemics of overwhelm, burnout, so many of our chronic illnesses, and despair, are crises of forgetting.

We would not be alive without the trees that help us breathe, without the water that cleanses and nourishes our blood, without air that we breathe every day. Yet most of us live without remembering our essential interconnection with the web of life, of which we are a part.

Ice is disappearing. Forests are suffering. Storms and droughts are reshaping our world.

Still, we live as if it doesn’t matter.

I believe you know what’s at stake in our world, but you might feel helpless to do anything about it. My invitation to you, through an earth-centered, body-centered, sacred writing practice is to help you remember.

Remember your connection with the earth.

Remember your connection with your own body.

Remember your connection with what’s sacred.

Remember your connection with your self.

Creative expression is as ancient as human culture. We have always needed a way to express our connection with what’s ineffable.

In this way, a creative writing practice can be central to your own practice of coming home.

Writing will help you remember who you are.

But in our world today, it’s not enough to know who you are as an individual living in a vacuum. It’s essential that you remember your place in the web of life.

Why?

Listening to the Earth

Nature is begging us to remember.

The rivers, drenched with sewage and pesticides, are crying out to us.

The ice caps, melting, causing rising sea levels and flooding, are crying out to us.

The pelicans, covered with oil from the latest oil spill, are calling out to us.

How will we respond?

How can a sacred writing practice help?

Pause now.

Take a deep breath.

Feel your feet under you, and bring one hand to rest on your heart.

Breathe in, feeling the connection between your hand and your heart.

Let your own heart beat soothe you, calm you, remind you that you’re safe.

I want to acknowledge the crisis unfolding on our Earth, because I feel that it’s the elephant in the living room now—the unspoken, looming problem that most of us don’t know how to face.

But I’m not writing this to overwhelm you, or to add to your despair. I’m neither a scientist nor a pessimist. I am a woman in love with the natural world and my life’s work has been to listen to the earth. And the trees. And rivers and streams. And the rocks at the river’s edge. The blue heron who stands on one leg at dawn. The bald eagle nesting on the branch of the oak tree in winter, scanning an ice-covered river below, for fish.

These trees, rivers, stones and birds need us to remember our connection to them.

Their call to me has been a kind of prayer.

These words are my prayer back.

Many things are needed now, to heal our relationship with the Earth.

The first step, though, of any action, is to listen.

Listen to the cries of the earth, the cries of your soul, the cries of your heart.

Writing as a Way Home

If you are homesick for your own soul, your soul is also homesick for you.

If you long to write as a way to come home to your self, writing also longs for you.

This homecoming, in our world, will always have frayed edges, if we continue to forget the home that Earth is for us.

The soul needs the body and the body needs the earth.

When we forget, as deeply as our species has, to get us to this moment of planetary crisis—we need to return to the Root.

The root of what we need to remember, and why.

Our origins.

Our source.

This is the power of prayer.

When we turn to prayer in the way I’m suggesting here, it’s the ultimate act of homecoming.

Not the home of religion, but the home of your soul.

Timeless, eternal, one with all of life.

Writing is a practice of remembering, even as it allows you to discover, create, explore and understand. Those things are possible because first, you remembered the truth about who you are: you are a person capable of writing, capable of creating worlds.

Prayer is a practice of remembering.

To pray, through writing, allows you to remember the deepest threads that bind this life together. It’s those deepest threads that we need to find now, to repair the torn fabric of our world.

Returning to Our Origins

I invite you here, to start again.

To return to your origins in the body of this earth.

To return to your origins in the vastness of the heavens.

To recall your brothers in the massive bodies of whales.

To recall your sisters in the sleek silver bodies of dolphins.

To know we are one body, praying for each other with every breath.

To know we are one spirit, writing each other’s prayers with every word.

To reclaim our love for each other, we begin by loving ourselves.

And know that in loving your own life, you do so for the sake of all life.

Life on earth needs you to come home to yourself, through writing and prayer—through writing as prayer.

You will learn here to care for yourself as you would care for the earth.

And to care for the earth as a part of yourself.

Each act of writing, each practice of self-care, is done for your own sake, on behalf of the whole.

For your own sake, as a part of the whole.

So that you learn that you are not just “you.”

You are we.

We are all that is.

The dolphin’s cry is your cry.

The melting ice, your tears.

The impulse to pray is older than organized religion.
We all need it to restore the sacred to every aspect of our life.
Because that is what will allow us to make choices on behalf of the whole.

Your writing practice will nourish you, teach you, remind you, and heal you—even as it nourishes and heals your connection with life itself.

Every action taken with awareness of the sacred thread connecting all life will help us remember who we are.

When we remember who we are we know what actions to take on behalf of our own lives, and all life.

The Earth’s Call

The forests, the oceans, the mountains, and the streams have not forgotten.

They are asking us to remember.

Their life on this earth is a prayer to us, to come home.