for shells and unusual things that had floated to shore. We found a giant jellyfish (dead), hundreds of hermit crabs (alive), a baby shark (dead), and lots of starfish (which are alive but appear to be dead). We also found broken glass, pop cans, plastic bags, and candy wrappers, and at one point, when my boys ran ahead, I looked down and there at my feet was a used syringe.
We’re disconnected from the earth. And we know it. Or at least we can feel it, even if we don’t have words for it.
We have been given this responsibility to take care of our home, to carefully steward and order and manage it, and we’re in trouble. From oil to air to pollution to wetlands, we find ourselves in our bare feet on a beach, almost stepping on a needle.
Notice the premise of many car commercials. How many of them deal in some way with getting out of the city and exploring nature? The makers of these commercials understand that we are alienated from the earth.
Many people live in air-conditioned houses and apartments.
We alter our air with electric machines.
We spend vast sums of money and energy to change our air. And we drive in air-conditioned cars—the 8 percent of us in the world who have cars—to air-conditioned schools and offices and stores with tile floors and fluorescent lights.
It’s even possible to go days without spending any significant time outside.
And it’s still considered living.
It’s easy to go for weeks and maybe even years without ever actually plunging your hands into soil. Into earth. Into dirt.
But this car— this is the one, the one with the space for my cooler and the kayak that I don’t own. This is the car that will change things.
Massive amounts of money are spent convincing us that this particular automobile will give us access to the mountains, streams, and deserts that we are unable to access at this moment. And when we make that trip, in that car, the one from the commercial, we will be connected with the earth. With our home.
We see this disconnection in the relationship between our sleep patterns and the invention of electricity.1 Prior to the lightbulb, people generally went to bed when the sun went down and woke up when the sun came up. With the invention of electric light, sleep habits became less and less regulated by the rising and setting of the sun. As a result, people today get far fewer hours of sleep a night than people did a hundred or two hundred years ago. We even have third-shift jobs in which a person works through the night while it’s dark, and then sleeps through the day while it’s light. All of this affects our connection with nature. Where once the rhythm and flow of life were dictated by the rhythm and flow of the earth, we now live relatively independent of these forces.
There’s no better way to understand how disconnected we are from our environment than to ask the big metaphysical question, the question that has challenged the great minds of our generation and the generations before us, the question that if we had a clear answer for it, would unlock the deepest mysteries of life on this planet:
Where does our trash go?
The truck comes to our place of residence, they dump into the back whatever we dumped into the approved container with the phone number and name of the company on the side, and we think no more of it.
Have you ever later in the day thought to yourself, I hope my garbage made it there safely?
Where is “there”? And how many “theres” are there? And what do they do with it when it gets there? Does every town have a there? Can the people who live next to there smell there? Are there laws about how many theres a town can have? Is there a point at which a there is full? How is this determined? Can the people who run the theres give us a percentage of how full their there is? Do they get together and discuss these sorts of things with other people who own theres?
No, we don’t even think about it. We know that skilled, highly trained people are on the job, and so we don’t spend a moment thinking about it.
Until we go camping. And the sign says to take out everything we take in. And for an hour or a day or a week, we’re highly attuned to what we’re doing to the environment. We pick up every wrapper, we bury everything that should be buried, we wait until every last coal is burned out. All because we don’t want to pay the fine.2
Which of course raises the question, Is there some sort of larger fine that all of us are going to have to pay, as the human race, for our actions? And if we were aware of what that fine was going to be, would we all of a sudden care very much about “there”?
But our disconnection isn’t just with each other and the earth.
Yesterday I was with a friend who recently started a new job. He had taken the job because he had a clear vision for how he could help bring significant change to the company. A few months into the job, he was exhausted. As he sat across the table from me venting about all of the ways he’s frustrated and burned out and tired, something powerful began to happen. He began to remember why he took the job in the first place. He started articulating all of the ways that he had become disconnected from his original vision for the company because of the voices around him telling him how he should do his job. Right before my eyes, he rediscovered his passion for the work he was doing. He repeatedly asked me, “How did I get so off track? How did I become so disconnected from myself?”
We struggle in our connection with the earth, in our connections with each other, and with being connected with ourselves.
But it wasn’t always like this.
In the Beginning
In the first chapter of Genesis, when God creates the first people, he blesses them. This is significant. God’s blessing is the peace of God resting on people. The story begins with humans in right relationship—in healthy, life-giving connection—with their maker. All of their other relationships flow from the health of this one central relationship—people and God. They’re connected with the earth, with each other. They’re naked and feel no shame.
And then everything goes south.
They choose another way. And they become disconnected.
God goes looking for them in the garden, asking, “Where are you?” The first humans make coverings of fig leaves, and then they’re banished from the garden.3
Disconnected from each other.
Disconnected from the earth.
The woman is told that there is going to be conflict between her and the man. The man is told that there is going to be conflict between him and the soil.
And this is where you and I come in. We were born into a world, into a condition, of disconnection. Things were created to be a certain way, and they’re not that way, and we feel it in every fiber of our being.
Is this why the first thing newborns do is cry?
We’re severed and cut off and disconnected in a thousand ways, and we know it, we feel it, we’re aware of it every day. It’s an ache in our bones that won’t go away.
And so from an early age we have this awareness of the state of disconnection we were born into, and we have a longing
