Reintegration: Healing the Self, Healing the Earth
by Jesse Wolf Hardin • Reserve, NM

There is no division between where we live and what we are.– Scott Russell Sanders

The Sweet Medicine Sanctuary is a restored riparian wilderness, a river ecosystem made healthy again through the reintroduction of cottonwoods and willows, cattail and clump grass. Ringtail cats cavort next to splashing muskrats, and fish make love under an expanse of heron wings. It’s been twenty years since I first started chasing cattle off the sanctuary proper, eight years since it's been legally fenced, five since the first interns began aiding its healing and celebration, and two since litigation has made it possible for the entire canyon to begin to rewild. With each new season, increasing numbers of plants have made their way back home here, and every Spring comes the sound of yet another bird species I’ve never heard. With every reintroduction the land becomes more of what it once was– and in this way, more itself.

Like this land, I have lost parts of myself, only to regain them through practice and prayer, personal insistence and the passage of time. Things such as the willingness to laugh and the ability to cry. The honest depths of agony and far extremes of joy. My inner animal and the reason for being. The inclination to play and the patience to stay. It’s a good thing, because the longer I’m here, the better able I am to hear the will and whisperings of the Earth and the more myself I am.

Of course, the walk downriver hasn’t always been easy. Although some seasons I’ve leapt about, moving rocks for soil berms as if work had no weight, other months sore joints have made it difficult to plant a single seed. But truth be known, in either case, I’ve never really been healthier: knowing who I really am, what I most need to be doing, and where I certainly belong.

Indeed, what is it to be healthy but to be whole: a balanced unity of gifts and needs, heart and mind, vision and action. Gaia (our Earth Mother/Nature) teaches that good health isn’t the absence of trauma or pain, but rather, the most complete embodiment of our authentic selves. The depth of sensation, emotion and experience. The fullness of expression and response. The fulfillment of our passions and our purpose, our destiny and our dreams. It’s how we live, not how long. Wellness means living well: consciously and compassionately, artfully and purposefully.

It isn’t disease that makes us unwhole, because pain makes us more aware of our bodies and feelings and the way our lifestyles and our immediate environments are affecting us. Suffering tempers our skills, tests our resolve, and strengthens our will. Debility teaches us humility, and infirmity counsels patience. The loss of one sensory organ leads to a heightening of the others. At its worst, a deadly virus does nothing but return us to the earth we arose from, extend from, and belong to. We are made unwhole not by death, but the failure to fully live– by that which dilutes our focus, weakens our intention, or dishonors our spirit. That which makes us doubt our instincts and intuition, significance or value. We are made unwhole by the suppression of our feelings and the repression of our needs– by the subjugation of our animal beings.

We have to give up certain aspects and components of our selves in order to fit into society’s mold. It is the loss or neglect of these parts that contributes to our greatest dis-ease: Our imagined separation from the rest of the living world. And with their re-membering and reclamation, we take the first of many steps towards the necessary cure.

Likewise, the Earth isn’t made any less or any less healthy by the eroding of mountain rock into fertile valley soil, or the death of a cottontail in the jaws of a fox. Not even by the shredding of forests by an erupting volcano, which grow back relatively quickly. Even the natural extinction of species is only a recycling of the parts into the whole, each pruning back resulting in a new burst of growth, an opportunity for new color and form. To the degree that it is sickened, it is not because of the annihilation of individual life forms so much as the overall reduction of biological, cultural and topographical diversity. We sicken the earth by the extincting of species for no reasons other than obliviousness and greed and the appropriation of habitat so there’s little place left for the wildlife to spring back.

The monocultures of agribusiness and the genetic manipulation of life are wounding the earth. And it’s not just through the killing off of native songbirds, but the hundreds of indigenous languages being lost to neglect as well. By our failing to notice Gaia’s every miracle and gift, every hint of wind, the opening of a sidewalk blossom, the dance of a floating leaf, we separate ourselves. And through our forgetting to give thanks. We make the world sick with our neglect of self and planet, the dishonoring of Spirit, and the conceptual and physical dismembering of that which was one.

We say the integrity of a structure is compromised if any portion is degraded or removed. It is the same with a person or an ecosystem. The health of people or places increases with the diversity and magnitude of their expression. Thus any reduction in diversity impinges on the integrity of the whole. The role of the social and eco-activist becomes one not only of resistance but of restoration and re-immersion.

It all starts with us literally coming to our senses. Our creature senses are organs of reintegration, and when opened and heightened they bring the world we’re integral to even closer. It is taste that can stir our gratitude, sight that can awaken awe, touch that can mend the imagined separation between body and soul, self and place. We feel through touch, and touch heals. Our sensory and emotional contact inspires the protection, nourishment and celebration of that with which we’ve engaged. It can result in forests defended, trees replanted, and native grasses gently stroked and sung to!

Our future personal, social and ecological health may hinge on our personal integrity and the integrity of the natural world that we love. Like the extirpated Mexican Gray Wolf or the defamed spotted owl, we seek only to be and belong. For us, to be reintegrated is to be accepted back within the identity of the Gaian whole, to exist and act in harmony with tribal human community and the community of nature. Belonging is more than feeling settled, welcome, or even committed. It’s the state of being at one with the needs, expression and spirit of the living breathing Earth.
By learning to wholly serve, we intentionally rejoin the whole. And it is through this bringing back together of disparate and damaged parts of self and of Earth that we never have to feel apart again.

Jesse Wolf Hardin is a deep ecologist, contemporary spiritual teacher, and author of Kindred Spirits: Sacred Earth Wisdom (Swan Raven Pub., 800-366-0264). To arrange for a presentation, for information, wilderness retreats and resident internships contact: Scot Deily, The Earthen Spirituality Project, Box 516, Reserve, NM 87830, or www.concentric.net/~earthway