Even as We Fall

Photo by Zulmaury Saavedra on Unsplash

What if you felt the invisible

tug between you and everything?...

It’s a hard time to be human. We know too much

and too little. Does the breeze need us?

The cliffs? The gulls?

If you’ve managed to do one good thing,

the ocean doesn’t care.

But when Newton’s apple fell toward the earth,

the earth, ever so slightly, fell

toward the apple as well.

Ellen Bass

Do you feel the tug?  Feel the way our beloved Earth reaches for us? 

Not merely a poetic reaching, a proven one.  Science knows now that gravity creates not only the apple’s fall but Earth’s response, as well.

It’s a strange dichotomy, one Ellen Bass has captured perfectly.  However “good” we try to be, the ocean doesn’t care.  This Earth, even as it reaches for us, doesn’t care, either.  And yet!  And yet!  Water and air and soil, eagle and elephant, grasshopper, tulip, worm . . . all make our lives possible.

If only we could remember, as we stumble through our days, that the Earth blesses us.  If only we understood, as certainly as we understand we were once pushed, squalling, into the world, that it is the Earth that gave us our lives.  That it is the Earth that renews our lives with every breath.

I grew up next to a cement mill just outside a small town in northern Illinois.  My dad was the mill chemist, and the dusty plant loomed beside a cluster of houses built for the workers.  I loved the clanging, chuffing, tooting trains; the stream of puffy, white smoke from the mill stack, as beautiful, I thought, as any cloud in the sky.  I loved even the piles of coal dumped along the railroad track, waiting to feed the kilns.  But I loved more what lay on the other side of our sprawling yard, opposite the mill.  A tangle of deep woods.  While my mother attacked the cement dust that sifted down to cover every surface inside the house, I wandered out of doors, breathing those trees.  Even knowing nothing then of the way trees give our breath back to us, clean and restored, they represented life to me. 

(Once a boy visiting from Chicago stood at the edge of the wall of trees and spoke in a hushed voice of “the forest.”  We laughed at him.  To call our plain old woods a forest!  It wasn’t until I grew up and moved away that I realized how insistently that “plain old woods” sprouted in the acreage of my heart.)

Next spring, I have a new picture book coming out, Our Home, Our Only Home.  It’s about the climate crisis.  Even as I researched and wrote—and I completed the bulk of the work in early 2022—I knew I was ludicrously late coming to the topic.  And that was back when my government was making at least half-hearted attempts to mitigate the looming disaster.  Now, with climate deniers in charge, I wonder if my small book, when it appears in 2026, will seem, not just too late, but utterly naive.

Yet, surely, we must keep saying it.

And saying it.

And saying it.

Not only because this is happening to us and not even because we are the ones responsible for the unfolding disaster, but because of that invisible tug. 

Can we learn to feel it?  Each one of us? 

That we need our Earth home is beyond obvious.  Mars will not receive us.  But we must understand—we must, somehow, absorb the understanding in our very bones—that this Earth is us.  That we are this Earth.  That together we form a living being. 

One that reaches out to us even as we fall.