Spiritual Practices to Save the Planet

music by Symphony of Science

I live in a house surrounded by giant old evergreen trees. And just down the street from my house is a forest trail that leads to the Puget Sound waters of Fletcher Bay. Sometimes I go for a run on these trails—in the morning when the sun is just starting to break through the treetop canopy—and my heart is captured by a particular moment. It starts with all the green whizzing past me. I’m in the rhythm of breathing and staring at my feet, making sure I don’t trip and fall over. And then I notice the roots and dirt give way to pebbles and sand. If I stop and look up, past the trees and ferns, I can see the beach before me strewn with driftwood, and the water, sparkling, and beyond that the Olympic mountain range and the clouds and grey-blue sky and occasionally a bright morning star that shines alone but unmistakable above everything. And it is very quiet. The sound of cars is gone and all I hear are the birds singing their morning songs and the surf gently hitting against the driftwood. And I try to stay still for a moment, just breathing it in.

There have been times I felt wicked high in this spot, overwhelmed with love for the web of life, the web of interdependence, in love with whomever or whatever I am in such a deep relationship. My every day concerns, the stories I tell myself, my worries and fear, my frustrations—they dissolve when faced with the truth and the steadfastness of that sacred relationship. I am nothing and I am everything, a piece of something magnificent. And that magnificence is a piece of me. And when I can rest into this epiphany for a just a second, really grok the moment, I feel free. On a cellular level, down to my bones, peaceful.

Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel says that “awe enables us to see in the world intimations of the divine, to sense in small things the beginning of infinite significance, to sense the ultimate in the common and the simple, to feel in the rush of the passing the stillness of the eternal.”

We can feel it while listening to music, or holding a newborn baby in our arms, or staring up at the night sky and into the cosmos. I will never forget one night in the California desert when I saw the entirety of the Milky Way for the first time with my bare eyes and I couldn’t help but say Woah over and over again as shooting stars flew in every direction. My eyes couldn’t capture it, my mind blown by the grandeur. All I could do was just lay back on the grass and surrender.

Laying in the grass like this with the cosmos exploding over my head felt like prayer, the kind of prayer that is a conversation between the immanent and the transcendent. The spark of the divine that resides in each of us—the immanent—and the divine that exists in all that is—the transcendent. And this conversation can happen with words or with music or with movement or any other number of ways. But I swear, it always happens in the body. It is embodied, not intellectual. For those of us on a spiritual journey, this conversation between the immanent and the transcendent is going on all the time, whether we are conscious of it or not. We pray without ceasing. But there are moments when that conversation, when that connection, is fully revealed. Total clarity. And we recognize our place in the sacredness of all that is. It’s not a permanent state of being, unless you are fully enlightened (big props to those who are.) It’s transient, floating past our awareness. But it is something we can nurture. The great spiritual traditions of the world have discovered countless ways to foster the experience of awe and wonder.

I am a theist—which is to say, I believe in the great Holy-What-Have-You—and my husband William is an atheist—which is to say he believes there is no Holy-What-Have-You. When we first started dating we would get into arguments about the nature of God and reality, with me quoting monks like Thomas Merton and Thich Nhat Hanh, and William quoting scientists like Richard Dawkins and Stephen Hawking. And while we disagreed on the details, we always agreed on the feeling of transcendence. On that day in the California desert, William was right beside me, repeating Woah like a mantra, witnessing to the power of the cosmos. We both agree on the freedom inherent in that holy moment of recognizing the beauty and improbability of life, the universe, and everything.

Scientifically, the immanent and the transcendent have been proven. We are stardust, born of the big bang, our bodies made from the same atoms that make up everything.

William the atheist enjoys sharing facts like, the chickens in our backyard were once dinosaurs. The water we drink was once dinosaur drool. Science can trace our genetic material all the way back to  a single-celled bacteria named Luca, the Last Universal Common Ancestor, that existed on Earth four billion years ago. And in fact genetically, we humans all share 99.9% of the same DNA. And it’s not just humans. Half of our genetic material is the same as the fruit fly, as well as the banana that the fruit flies mate upon. We share 1/4 of the same genes as the yeast that makes our bread rise.

These are facts both wondrous and true. Actively seeking them out, learning them and allowing our minds to be blown can be a spiritual practice, a form of prayer, an act of connecting the immanent to the transcendent.

(Can you feel William bristling at the suggestion that science is prayer? Let’s keep going anyway.)

In this chaotic world of insistent disconnection, where we can no longer ignore that we live in an unsustainable system on a wounded planet, nurturing spiritual connection that is based in science is an opportunity for spiritual healing. When we allow ourselves to wonder, to experience awe at a level where we feel it in our bodies, we reconnect our singular human life to that which is most sacred outside of ourselves: life, the universe, and everything.

The initial singularity of the universe, predicted by Einstein’s theory of general relativity, says that in the beginning immediately prior to the big bang, we were one. Back in the old days of television when you were trying to find the station and you had your little brother holding up the bunny ears to improve the reception, there was a ton of static. And that static on the TV, so annoying if you’re trying to watch cartoons, is called cosmic microwave background.

Cosmic microwave background is evidence of the big bang, evidence that the universe expanded from infinitely dense, compact, oneness. We carry the memory of this oneness deep in our genes… and so do the trees and the water, and the chickens and bananas and fruit flies, and every star in the sky. That’s who we are. That’s where we come from. And it’s a fact that connects us to one another and all that is.

In this time of change and uncertainty, of transformation and adaptation, we might take a moment to nurture our awe and wonder. We can resist disconnection by intentionally connecting with the truth of our place in the universe, the truth of the interdependent web that is eternal and unchanging.

Glory be to the Universe and to its children and to the breath of life itself. As it was in the beginning is now and ever shall be. World without end, Amen.