Ecology as love story

Right here, in the soil, is where most love stories are born.

Today’s essay is the last of our Love series. In the last few weeks, we have explored the theme of Love from a place of tenderness and political consciousness. We delved into pleasure & sexuality and analysed the incredible work of bell hooks All About Love.

This essay is part of the series Poetic Antidotes in Movement, in collaboration with Kindra Calonia, a movement teacher working at the intersection of yoga, writing, and decolonial theory. We usually choose a theme for the month and create an essay, and a movement series in collaboration. The theme we chose was Love from a disruptive place (because Aquarius is the sign of disruption and future vision). So, I decided to write an essay about Love where humans are not centred, I decided to explore the love stories that happen in nature, inspired by a course I just took at Advaya.

Usually, this series (and the audio) is not available to all readers, but today it is, so you can get a taster of what Kindra and I are creating. The themes we touched on in the past are Power, Darkness, Multitudes & Queer Ecology. Kindra’s movement meditations and classes are a balm for the body, you can follow her work here or here.

Here’s the essay💜

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There is a forest where a white flower blooms for 7 hours and then dies. I wonder if the expression “short but sweet” comes from it because this flower has an incredibly enticing smell and very sweet nectar. How can a flower pollinate if it is alive for only 7 hours? Well, because of a love story. The flower’s sweet smell attracts a species of bat native to that part of the world, who, as they eat the flower, pollinate it. Because of the lack of nutrients in one flower, this bat must eat from hundreds of them, therefore helping many of them reproduce despite their short lifetimes. But deforestation is threatening this love. A smaller forest would mean fewer flowers, which would mean fewer bats. If this relationship is severed, both species will disappear. 

Nature’s equilibrium is balanced because of relations, because of Love. Planet Earth is filled with Love stories. The water of rivers and its banks are in a perpetual dance to make the river itself, to allow for life to grow, and for the water to not stagnate. Tides and oceanic movement are also the fruit of a loving relationship, that between the Moon and the Earth. The consequence is the abundance of marine life that we have spent years studying, admiring and bathing in. The Earth holds us through Love, we are alive because of it. 

Land Art by Robert Smithson

In the last few weeks, we have observed love in many aspects, and all of them centred on us, human beings. Our anthropocentric views often lack perspective and feed into the arrogance that gives us permission to uproot trees from their environments, overuse resources, and pollute the seas. As biophilosopher Andras Weber says, “‘The Earth is currently suffering from a shortage of love’,” and it is perhaps exactly this lack of love that contributes to homophobia, racism, transphobia, sexism, and violence. When our environment suffers, our body suffers. Our culture has separated its understanding of love from the ways of the Earth, it's time to remember.

What if we looked at love through the lens of nature? Would this change the way we do things? This week, humanity is out of the picture. I want you to step out of your own being, become liquid, merge with the earth, the sky, and the roots of trees and simply observe. Right here, in the soil, is where most love stories are born. 

“Ecosystems are love stories. Our most profound ways to relate and to feel, to exchange and to be touched, are ecological forms of gifting life, of loving. When we discover ecology as the vibrant love story it really is, we can unlearn the violent habits of our civilisation.” This was one of the introductory texts I read for the course An Ecology of Love, led by Andreas Weber which I attended last Autumn. 

If Love is a practice of aliveness, as Weber says, then nature is the greatest teacher of love. Not only was algae born from a bacteria-filled oxygen-less world million of years ago, but we have examples of aliveness right in front of our eyes, even where we walk every single day. Plants adapt to all sorts of challenges, in Piccadilly Circus in London, where cars, people, pigeons and other creatures tread on concrete with their weight every single day, there is still space for a plant to grow. Sometimes in the crack of a marble step, between cobblestones, plants find a way to flower so that they can continue to live. 

Ana Mendieta

Ecosystems are manifestations of Eros: they are love processes that are physically present in the domains of living connections where life feeds more life.  “We are attracted to ‘nature’ because it charges us with the realisation of our erotic desire for life. In an erotic ecology, to live means to love” writes Hannah Close.  

I spent last weekend in total silence, without any technological distraction, simply reading the incredible work of Sophie Strand, which has been incredibly healing for me. I had gotten my period and instead of being “active” and going for a hike, I decided to live like moss, letting the sun heat my aching body, and the earth holds me as I travelled through the mythological realms of Strand’s writing. What I find incredible about her teachings is her ability to let nature speak to her in a clear way. In one of her essays, she speaks about connective tissue disease as a mycelial metaphor: “Our wounds don’t show up in our bodies. They show up in our ecosystems. When we feel pain, we must ask where that pain is asking us to look. What plant, landscape, ocean, mountain, resonates with our particular plight? How can we let personal illness galvanize us into a greater connection with our ecosystem?” 

Me last weekend

I began doing just that. I observed, and found a world beneath the place I was reading. Ants carrying tiny pieces of wood somewhere, vines intertwined with dying trees giving them colours, lichen living peacefully on the trunk of a tree. If the dimensions of love are care, commitment, trust, responsibility, respect, and knowledge, then Nature teaches us all of them, sometimes all at once. Mycelium networks are an example of essentially all those things. The act of care is passing information from tree to tree, often saving it from danger, the commitment is the consistency of its presence under a forest’s earth, the responsibility and respect lie in its role and existence, and its knowledge is years of carrying intelligence from the forest’s life. 

And this happens constantly. Humpback whales carry the songs of their families for miles around the world, only to consistently and trustworthily come back to the same place to give birth and teach responsibility to their cubs, who will then teach it to the next generations. The constant cycles of natural behaviours, including human, are what teaches us that there is an inherent love story in many places we would not notice. 

Land Art by Nancy Holt & Robert Smithson

We ourselves are relational beings mostly born into communities, our mother’s birthing process is mostly aided by a group of people: be it nurses, doulas, friends, or partners. To be human is therefore to be born into some sort of caring relationship. The lack of recognition of this love brings us to a place of suffering. 

We can write love stories about nature, and love letters to nature (like Pablo Neruda),  perhaps this would bring us closer to understanding that what we are seeing are reflections of our own behaviour and potential. We have forgotten about our capability to care, trust, respect, and love, and have created pyramids of hatred and power struggles that are detrimental to us. We won't outlive this climate crisis, it will outlive us, and probably the few billionaires who get to colonise Mars. 

Perhaps what we need right now, is to remember that Love exists.  

Here is Kindra’s movement to accompany the essay, it is an 8-minute free movement series (please adapt to your capacities) that asks: If I could Dance for Nature, How would I?

Robert Smithson