I have gone through many, many changes in my life. Sometimes, I think back to 5 years ago, not to mention 10 or 20, and think “wow..that was a different life. A different me.”
One thing that has remained consistent is my love for nature.
Since I was a child, nature has felt like home. In the Soviet Union, our family lived in a small one bedroom apartment in a big city. However, it was common to have a place outside the city - a datcha - where you lived in the summers, and where you grew most of the vegetables that the family ate throughout the year. It wasn’t fancy. It was necessary.
Our datcha was my favorite place on Earth. The house had a fire stove, a kitchen table, and some beds, the bathroom was an outhouse, and whatever we left over the winter would be stolen every year; one time, a thoughtful robber left his old coat in exchange for my dad’s slightly newer one.
But the garden. The garden. We grew everything…potatoes, carrots, cabbage, snap peas, herbs. Peonies and Lilies of the Valley. Strawberries. Raspberries. Bushes and bushes of raspberries that taste like red sweetness and wet earth. Heaven.
My sister and I spent hours in that garden…a lot of the time it was doing chores; weeding, picking off the beetles that ate the potato leaves, planting something or other.
I never minded; not really.
Even as we complained about the chores, even as our hands got tired of picking oblepiha (“sea buckhorn” in English, apparently) and weeding the pea beds again, we were playing. The bugs, the snails, the flowers, the worms - they were our playmates (and sometimes, admittedly, our playthings..sorry, dear worm and fly friends. We were not always kind to you.)
I also spent a lot of time dreaming. I think, looking back, that I was listening to the plants…I think that I always sensed their whispers, always felt them, always regarded them not just as food but as fellow beings with life force and spirit.
.
I loved watching my grandmother tend to the flowers. I loved helping my father dig the holes where the potatoes would go. I loved watching them work with their hands, with the earth…I loved being a part of it.
I don't know how I got so far from it, and I do. It happened gradually; moving to the US, buying food instead of growing it, focusing on school and then work and living in big cities, not realizing how far I am until everything in me began to ache for nature..for home.
My hands still do not know dirt most days..and yet they crave it. My feet wear shoes most of the time, and yet barefoot is when the world makes most sense. My muscles hurt from sitting in a chair…I’d rather they hurt from time spent digging, planting, harvesting, tending.
I know that I am not alone. I know that many, many others are hearing this call too; that your path may look different, but that the longing is the same. We are not meant to live so far from our Mother Earth; we are Her and she is us and we are not whole without her. It is hurting Her, it is hurting us…and it is time to reconnect.
We may not have chosen the separation, but we have choice now, and we are finding our way back.
It is happening slowly, but it is happening all the same. Nature keeps calling, and we are answering. I am spending more and more days barefoot these days. More and more people are planting gardens, brewing teas, and healing with herbs. I am talking to trees again, and not alone this time - and the more we talk to them, the more they are talking back.
I do not know all the how’s, or where's, but I know, I vow, that I - that WE- are making our way back. And in this moment where the Earth is in so much pain, this gives me hope.
We are daughters, sons, children of this Earth.
Of Earth Mothers we are born, and Earth Mothers we are to become.
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