Bodies of Earth

Words by: Erin Anderson

Photography by: Al Ross

Because of the changes that happened on Earth long ago—

volcanoes, floods, ice, fire, shifting continents—

certain populations of humans learned to survive by taking before giving,

by bending the land toward their hunger,

by harvesting more than they returned.

This is the inheritance we carry:

the bodies of ancestors pressed into soil,

the weight of histories buried beneath us,

the memory of storms weathered and storms avoided.

Presence is not a posture.

Presence is not the soft rise of breath

or the calendar insisting that a frozen January is a beginning.

Presence is the choice to show up for what is alive—

to meet the body of another,

to meet the body of the earth,

to meet the truth pulsing beneath our own skin.

To weather the storm is not just to endure.

It is the conscious act of standing where the wind meets your chest,

feeling the rain enter your pores,

letting cold and heat and lineage move through you

without fleeing the sensation.

And yet, we have learned to flee.

We have learned to numb.

Bodies mirror each other—

bodies of land, bodies of water, bodies of people—

and still we extract from them,

taking without returning,

ignoring the pulse that asks to be honored.

What are we truly sustaining when we speak of sustainability?

A world built on extraction, detachment, urgency, unprocessed pain.

A body braced. A family stretched thin. A community drained.

A land cracked. A river hollow. A soil stripped of memory.

We have mistaken endurance for living,

maintenance for healing.

But the earth knows better.

Spring is the real new year.

The thaw.

The softening beneath what seems dead.

The quiet brightening under soil.

Nothing begins in the freeze.

Regeneration begins in descent,

in listening,

in the tender unguarded leaning toward what lives.

Newness is a thaw in the ribs,

a release in the hips,

a loosening at the base of the spine.

Newness is the green shoot trembling upward,

insisting another way is possible.

Repair must begin at the center.

The body is the first land, the first water.

We swim in a belly before our feet ever touch the dirt—

held, carried, nourished by someone else’s tides.

Our mother’s body gives us life,

a selfless giving offered without certainty,

with only the hope that we will one day learn

to give in return,

to sustain life beyond our hunger,

to extend care further than our survival.

And yet, for too long, we have extracted from this first land—

from our bodies and the bodies of others—

pulling from wells we never pause to refill,

forgetting that how we tend this inner terrain

shapes how we tend the world.

Repair begins here:

thaw the body first.

Then the family—roots interwoven and imperfect.

Then the community—lungs breathing beside ours.

Only then can we repair the land.

People are the earth.

We are not separate from what we harm.

We are its moving, breathing roots.

Place your hands on your heart and belly.

Feel the freeze.

Feel the thaw.

Whisper:

I return to what is alive.

May regeneration be my real new year.