POINTSOFVIEW | AT HOME ON EARTH
By Kyle Kramer
Stop. Listen. Learn.
EarthandSpiritCenter.org
E
arlier this year, I adopted a “sit-spotting” nature meditation practice, which I wish I’d started doing a long time ago. Every other morning, before dawn, I hike back into the forest behind our rural home, to a secluded spot where a spring-fed stream tumbles down layers of exposed limestone. I sit there for about half an hour, watching a small stretch of the stream and listening to the sounds of the water and the woodland. I journal for a bit, then I hike back home. Even though—or maybe because—I take the same route every time and sit in the same spot along the stream, I encounter something new every single outing. It never ceases to amaze me how all the trees, water striders, crawdads, turtles, salamanders, deer, raccoons, and other creatures I see on these ventures know exactly how to live in their place. They need essentially nothing from me, save that I leave them and their woods in peace. As these months of the coronavirus pandemic have unfolded and shown us how vulnerable human life and human society really are, I feel that I have a lot to learn from these welladapted fellow earth dwellers. LESSONS FROM THE PAST
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Lately, like most of us, I’ve been preoccupied by our country’s renewed reckoning with our sinful history of slavery and racism. I find myself thinking back to the early centuries of European colonization of the Americas.
Whatever romantic stories we may tell ourselves about the colonial period, it’s undeniable that Europeans came here for bareknuckled economic reasons: to extract wealth from the land for investors back in Europe. When the founders of Jamestown, the first permanent European settlement, arrived in 1607, they encountered the indigenous Powhatan tribes and an economy that was utterly different than what they knew from England—totally opposed to the profitdriven directives they had from the Virginia Company that had sent them. They could not or would not learn from or emulate the Powhatan ways of subsistence in that land. Within a short while, the colonists who were not yet dead were sick and starving, and were soon at odds not only with the land, but with the Powhatan as well. “Why,” Chief Powhatan reportedly asked the English colonial leader Captain John Smith, “should you take by force that from us which you can have by love? Why should you destroy us, who have provided you with food? What can you get by war?” We know the rest of the story: The colonists chose war. Through enslavement, violence, and disease, the colonists committed genocide against the indigenous Americans. Alongside those atrocities, colonists soon began to import Africans to supply slave labor for their agricultural economy. And, of course, in order to do all this, they had to convince
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FREELANCE BOB/FOTOSEARCH
Kyle is the executive director of the Passionist Earth & Spirit Center, which offers interfaith educational programming in meditation, ecology, and social compassion. He serves as a Catholic climate ambassador for the US Conference of Catholic Bishopssponsored Catholic Climate Covenant and is the author of A Time to Plant: Life Lessons in Work, Prayer, and Dirt (Ave Maria Press, 2010). He speaks across the country on issues of ecology and spirituality. He and his family spent 15 years as organic farmers and homesteaders in Spencer County, Indiana.
LEFT: COURTESY OF KYLE KRAMER; RIGHT: JAMES WHEELER/FOTOSEARCH
Kyle Kramer
