Let the Earth be your Valentine
More-than-human love letters as an essential practice for the metacrisis
Dear beloveds,
It’s the Leo full moon morning, and I am basking in the afterglow of having sat with the moonlight for the first few hours of the wee morning. It felt sensuous, intimate, delightful. It inspired me to go back to a post I wrote in 2023, Lunar love note, in which I profess my love for the moon as a lover and teacher.
It’s Valentine’s week, and if you exist in the world, you can’t avoid love in your face - candy love, flower love, plush heart love, consumerist love.
It’s such a drag that modern culture only celebrates, honors, and values romantic monogamous love. There are so many other kinds of love that are possible, flavors of love like there are flavors of joy, and to only celebrate one seems so limiting. So tragic. So boring. So….scarce.
Love is abundant in its forms and possibilities. My friend Kimberlyn David and I celebrated friendship love last year in our series on The Art and Power of Friendship. Today my invitation to practice, for Valentine’s Day and for all days, is a more-than-human love letter practice. Fall in love with the Earth - let the Earth be your Valentine.
Two of my most beloved teachers, Joanna Macy and Thich Nhat Hanh, have demonstrated this practice through their lives and writing: Joanna, through her exquisite book World as Lover, World as Self, and Thay in his Love Letter to the Earth. This thread of world as our lover, as something and someone worthy of writing love letters to, runs deeply through their lives and work, and I find great inspiration there.
The climate crisis - one facet of the polycrisis - is palpable in all of our lives now, increasingly so. Both Joanna and Thay teach, as do many indigenous cultures, that what we most need to address our ecological crises is to remember that we are the Earth, to fall back in love with the Earth, and to hear the sounds of the Earth crying within us, and from this place of remembrance of our interbeing in a felt and embodied sense, we will know how to act accordingly, with love, care, respect.
All the data in the world cannot get us beyond this mess. Don’t get me wrong: the data is vitally important, and I have such deep reverence for the climate scientists and ecologists who have been sounding the alarm for decades now, painstakingly collecting and analyzing this data, running projections, repeating the data that conveys the realities of the climate crisis over and over with greater certainty and greater gravity, year after year, with every COP. If this were a matter of data alone, we would have addressed the crisis years ago.
It is a matter of heart.
To be clear, I do not mean to oversimplify things. The climate crisis is, of course, highly political, and the fact that few of the world’s leaders will do anything meaningful to address the crisis is very real. The fact that oil companies have engaged in disinformation and information suppression for decades is very real. The fact that the billionaire class is contributing immensely to the crisis and is doing everything possible to disrupt any political will that exists is very real. There are many complex reasons for collective inaction and ongoing destruction and contribution to the crisis.
However, it has become clear, over decades of having this data, of having a rational understanding of the ecological crisis at hand and its causes, that thinking and rationality alone will not get us beyond this. We need sentipensar, thinking-feeling with the Earth (Arturo Escobar), we need to collectively collectivize our hearts (Gesturing Towards Decolonial Futures Collective1). The climate crisis, the metacrisis2, is, indeed, a matter of the heart. It is a matter of our love and our care, and it is a matter of understanding not just with our minds, but with our hearts, bodies, and spirits.
So many things in this world will not love you back: work, social media. But the Earth will. The Earth does.
With all of that, dear reader, my invitation to you this Valentine’s week is to write a more-than-human love letter (more than one, should you feel inspired). Tell the moon you love her. Woo some bougainvillea (that’s been one of my main practices this summer season here in Costa Rica, as frequent readers will know ;). Write a love letter to your local mountain or river. Let the Earth be your Valentine, your sweetheart.
If you need some inspiration for this practice, in my post a few weeks ago on writing our way through and beyond, I shared my practice of writing love letters to the moon, and in my recent
post I shared about practicing more-than-human flirtation. I have had a love letter to coffee sitting in my drafts folder for ages, maybe soon I will finally let it see the light of day.The practice isn’t just the letter, though - the practice is the love. The letter is a starting point of expression, and intention and a vow, that will hopefully lead to an even deeper expression through our being and acting. That is the hope.
Choose a more-than-human being to profess your love to.
Offer your gratitude.
Count the ways of your love.
Understand that this love is how we make other worlds possible beyond our current extractivist one that is destroying itself. This love is radical. This love is necessary.
Know that every act of love and creativity and care in this moment is countering forces of domination and destruction.
Love and act accordingly.
Don’t let Valentine’s Day fool you. You can have many sweethearts, and they don’t need to be only human. Make some who are more. Treat them to a date, make them offerings. Flirt with them. Delight in their beauty, and vow to nurture and protect them. Let them love you back (they already do). And allow this love to permeate your life.
With so much love for you, dear readers, and the bougainvillea and moon and all of Earth’s creations,
Stephanie
Please read this whole poem, or better yet, listen to it with friends. And even better yet, do the whole exercise, over and over again. https://decolonialfutures.net/rt-recording/
The original post used the language polycrisis. I had been debating about which term to use, and came across Jonathan Rowson’s incredibly thoughtful argument on the use of metacrisis, which captures what I mean here about it being a matter of the heart.