Why be Earthbound?

This winter (2019) has delivered the rains we hoped would come. They filled our ponds and well, our orchard swales. The pine and spruce forest surrounding us gulped them down deep into their bodies. Replenishment felt like a life-returning inhalation of breath after months of holding it. But then the rain kept coming. Day after day, the sky hung heavy above us as we waded down through the mud to tend to the goats and chickens, back up to haul firewood into the house. Relief turned slowly to concern and then to disconsolation as the sun remained shrouded in a ceaseless bank of front after front of weather.

Finland is dark in winter. This is our third consecutive experience of that darkness but our first devoid of all snow. Walking at night along the forest tracks without any artificial light has become a winter treat as our eyes and minds accustom themselves to the soft bounce of moonlight on deep snow. But lightless walks feel treacherous this year as we feel our way mole-like, legs tensed for the next slip on invisible ice as the temperature oscillates either side of zero.

This weather is not normal. At times this January, it has been 36 degrees centigrade warmer than it was last winter and the winter before that. Our friends living in yurts in Catalonia such as we used to have nearly been washed away in torrential rains, meanwhile Australia burns.

Our minds are constantly on change, both external and internal, both uncontrolled and designed. So much so that this season has proved a turning point for us as we develop our practice and our understanding of the nature of change. It has gifted us the motivational impetus of time and space to really try to articulate that understanding in a way that will hopefully be of use to others as they grapple with the same questions we do. So, we created Earthbound.

It’s a coaching process and community of practice slowly discovering what it might mean to be authentically human again. To be truly free from the insidious programming of the Matrix. To learn to see all life as a gift and ourselves as an expression of that Gift. To start to experience the world as a vast woven web of complex and reciprocally beneficial relationships placing us in deep interdependence with all life on this planet. To begin to open our carapaced selves to true gratitude, true compassion, true generosity, true connection.

We’re fellow travellers in this discovery. A journeyman and journeywoman forty-six years into the process of learning to remember who we truly are and what we are truly here to do with our given lives. We consider ourselves learners but we have become more and more consistent practitioners of a consciously chosen path over the last 19 years or so and are professionally trained to guide and coach others. We embarked on that path because our previous way of being simply stopped working for us. We experienced the deep morass of this Earth destroying machine’s patterns of disconnection and despair and its deleterious consequences on our mental health and our relationships. We knew change was necessary and that we were ready to believe that change was possible and prepared to start the work needed to realise it. And in turn, over the years, we’ve experienced and practised psychological therapies, embodied meditation, voluntary simplicity, transpersonal coaching, holistic permaculture design of livelihood and home, cooperative work and cooperative living, family life on the land, growing food, developing skills and trying to share our lives with humans and non-humans, and all the while learning slowly how to let go of the addictions and harmful patterns of behaviour and thought that are so deeply programmed into all us industrial humans.

We’re starting this project because we want to share what it’s really been like for normal, averagely "messed up" people to try to live otherwise and what we have learned from the empirical experience we have gained and the many wise teachers and mentors we have learned from over the years. We want to share the philosophy, practices, tools, resources, perspectives and ideas that have been of most use to us along the way. We want to honestly share our successes (and failures), in order to open up this world of choices to others who find themselves like we once did, deeply unaligned with the source of life, wrapped up in the all-consuming Matrix and feeling adrift from self, adrift from nature; which in the end is one and the same thing.

We’re do this because we both feel a deep calling to contribute to the work happening around the planet to create a new and ancient story of how to be in the world in a way that regenerates instead of destroys. We’ve made our choice to follow this long path home and this project is an invitation to others to join us and millions around the world in relearning, reskilling, remembering.

The name of the project is Earthbound. I asked my parents what the word conjured for them. Both started with: constrained, trapped, unable to leave Earth and the earth. For them, it was akin to housebound. I had guessed that might have been their initial reaction. My response was, ‘and so?’.

It is at the very core of the structure of the Matrix/industrial growth society/the Story of Separation that we be as untethered from the earth and Earth as possible. Untethered from its mundane and earthly processes, its mud and blood and fecundity. Untethered from its visceral materiality so that we may exist in abstracted unreality, living purely in our heads instead of our bodies and hearts, experiencing the living planet as a geo-mechanical servant of our needs, and more damagingly our desires.

Untethered from any truthful notion of the sanctity of life and death as we gave power away to off-world deities who in turn bestowed upon us semi-god status amongst our fellow living beings. Granting us divine dominion through violent force to make sure we get what we want first and foremost and always at the expense of the rest of our living planet.

This disconnect is a construct that plays havoc throughout all strata of our existence. It is that deep feeling of emptiness we experience in the dark hours before dawn and it is the underpinning of our need to control and horde, to fight the other throughout our lives if those lives are lived unconsciously.

So what happens if we view being Earthbound as a universal reality of being human and instead of fighting tooth and claw to break our perceived shackles, surrender to the truth of the word? Whether we like it or not we are unquestionably, for all time, bound to Earth, and that is, paradoxically, a realisation that offers ultimate freedom.

All our needs are given freely and abundantly by our living Earth. Starting from the very fabric of our cellular being, to the air we breathe, the water we drink, the food we eat, the materials from which we derive food and medicine and shelter to the other beings, human and non-human, that give us love and compassion and community. If we truly untether ourselves from Earth and the earth, as some might have us do, we must leave all that abundance and joy behind forever and instead make our way into the cold dark vacuum of space. In the Matrix (industrial growth society), we already live a shadow version of that perverse desire to colonise lifeless planets instead of simply regenerating and aligning with this one.

We encase ourselves physically, psychologically and spiritually in the man-made armour of concrete, steel, false beliefs and judgements, which we have been erroneously taught protect us from ourselves, our neighbour, and the cruelty of wild, untamed nature. And yet the opposite is in fact true. The armour is not protection but its own form of bondage. Layer after layer of prison that separates us from all that which truly nourishes us.

The word Earthbound also conjures for us the notion of movement towards the earth; an earthbound trajectory. A journey away from our airy temples of cold logic towards a direct and physical re-integration with nature. We lived the first half of our lives to date seeking intellectual freedom from our hearts and bodies, trying to soar ambitiously skyward as our Matrix programming asked of us. We have spent the second half coming very slowly, step by step, back out of the egoic clouds and down towards the soil and soul of the world. It’s been a bumpy ride no doubt about it, but that journey back towards an Earth-based life is one that our whole species must undertake if we have any hope of ongoing existence. To survive we must relearn how to allow all life to thrive and that starts by retaking our humble place as one amongst all other beings.

To be bound by law is to be forced to do something or face the consequences imposed by society. Again, from an industrial, unaligned perspective that can feel restrictive, hierarchical, domineering. Obey or be punished. But when looked at from an authentic human perspective, from one aligned naturally with ourselves and the rest of life, to be bound by nature’s laws is to abide by a sacred covenant that is the wellspring, the source of everything we hold most valuable. Not financially valuable, but actually valuable.

The Latin root of the word is valere, which means both to be strong and to be well. To be bound by a willingness and a necessity to serve that from which we can derive both our strength and our wellness is not a forceful imposition placed upon us from high, but an honour and a privilege. A sacred, unbreakable contract with nature is both our ultimate joy and solace.

The final connotation for us comes in the form of kinship. To be bound by ties of blood. For millennia this concept has been both the glue that bound people together while concurrently being at the heart of endless conflict and heartache. If you are of our blood you are of our tribe, if you are not of our blood, you are other. You are a potential adversary in a world driven by a belief in scarcity. But to be bound by blood is ultimately to be bound by earth and water and air and fire. Our body’s physical make-up belies the concept of separate bloodlines; of separation at all. Our bones and flesh are made from the same foundational source as all other life on Earth. Our bodies contain ancient water that has passed through countless beings before us and in turn we gift that back so that countless more may use it. The food that nourishes us grows from the earth that has always nourished and will always nourish if we allow it to. The air that is being breathed through us day and night without our force of will, without our possession of it, is made of molecules that once passed through the great bodies of dinosaurs. We are bound, every last one of us beings on this planet, by the very fabric of our material and spiritual existence. We are all kin; this dragonfly with this woman with this grass with this seal. We are kin because we are bound by ties of Earth.

Realising all that, and living fully in accordance with that realisation in the face of such powerful, insidious and persuasive Matrix programming telling us otherwise, is no mean feat. We only experience fleeting glimpses of what its full experience might one day be. But when I ask myself a simple question, and then really listen to the answer with my head, my heart and my gut, there is a clear and unequivocal reply. There are many human emotions but only two genuine feelings: aligned or unaligned, right-way-up or upside-down, love or fear. When we let go of control, of selfishness, of separation, even for the briefest of moments, we know deep down where it counts the most, that to be Earthbound is to be alive and that ultimately, to be alive is to be free. So we chose to try to remember how to be free and we’re creating this project to offer support and companionship to those who choose the same.