Birth, Ghosts, and Messages from Mother Earth

As I write this, a major international meeting to address climate change is beginning. We all know that too many forests are burning. Too many floods are destroying too  many homes and lives. Mother Earth is screaming. She needs our attention now! After years of motherly encouragement has been largely ignored, the question looms as to if it is too late.

I am writing this on October 31, the day Halloween is celebrated in various versions around the world. Halloween evolved from the Celtic holiday, Samhain, where people would light fires and don costumes to avoid ghosts finding or identifying them. This day marked the important transition from summer harvest time to the darkness and death of winter. The boundary between worlds was believed to be more permeable at this time, with ghosts returning to haunt the living.

I like to look at relationships that aren’t always obvious. I ask myself of course how might Halloween relate to the COP26 conference starting in Glasgow the same day?

What do haunting ghosts and climate change urgency have in common? Can you imagine the screaming of Mother Earth resonating with the howling of ghosts and goblins? What has died and come back to haunt us?

We can start by acknowledging our fear that the earth itself may be in the process of dying. Then, we can consider what has led to this planetary threat.

Indigenous Wisdom: Birth and Earth

We can look back to indigenous peoples who have always traditionally lived in harmony with the earth. Their respect for the Great Mother was echoed by their respect for her expression through the biological process of birth. Ancient peoples saw their fertility as directly related to the fertility of the land they cared for. When the land was fertile, they ate well and birthed well. Colonialism and modernization have methodically undermined and destroyed these traditions and their associated harmonious relationship with birth and the earth.

Today, birth tends to be treated as a medical event, a dis-ease, requiring hospitalization and medical interventions. While it is true that medical advances have enabled lives to be saved, medical doctors rarely learn anything about “normal” birth. Their training is about coming to the rescue when there are problems and actively doing what is needed to be done. They hone their perception to danger and threat. As a result, medical interventions are grossly overused and natural, relaxed, intuitive birthing is discouraged. Too many of us have been born with unnecessary drugs, forceps, surgery or other interventions, with often tragic effects on babies’ and mothers’ ability to bond, breastfeed and enjoy their lives and relationships.

Echoes of our Birth

In the field of pre- and perinatal psychology we understand that people tend to live their lives according to how they experienced their time in the womb and during or just after birth. Some even believe that wars are the expression of men still angry at how they experienced their mothers as toxic in the womb. Psychohistorian Lloyd deMause wrote an entire book about how our pre- and perinatal experience underlies human history.

If it is true that aggression relates to prenatal and birth experience, it is not much of a stretch to see its relationship to how we treat Mother Earth. The Great Mother, as ancient peoples called her, can easily represent the mother we gestated in. When we perceived threat as little ones, our main line of defense is to shut down and tune out the pain. We live in a highly dissociative world in the 21^st century. For example, are you feeling your body as you read this? How is your breath in this moment?

We are living in threatening times in many ways just now. The uncertainty of the pandemic, even for those who don’t believe one is happening, can resonate with the stress experienced in our earliest days of life. Learning that our planet may not survive as long as we hope our children might can stimulate very early fears, loss and grief. We may feel helpless or compelled to do something.

Resonant with the season of death marked by Halloween, we now have records of the numbers of those hospitalized and dying due to COVID appearing in our news every day. Research is showing that human fertility is being affected by pollution. Is our species dying? Is our history coming back to haunt us? Which ghosts do we need to hide from? Perhaps they have something to teach us. Perhaps it is time to slow down and listen.

Our ability to live in harmony with nature is also part of our history and our nature. Mother earth is begging us. What would it take to hear her?