A Year of Spiritual Thinking from Practicing Terraphilia
by Susan J. Tweit
I am embarking on an experiment that both terrifies me and exhilarates me: I am beginning a Year of Spiritual Thinking. For the next year, I am going to give myself permission to radically shift my perspective and experience everything—my writing, my re-storying work, my daily routine and relationships, my routines and rituals and habits; my house and even my truck, all of my experiences, and the world around me—through a primarily spiritual lens.
This year of spiritual thinking is most determinedly not religious. The word spiritual, says my dictionary, means “relating to or affecting the human spirit or soul as opposed to material or physical things.” It is deeply rooted in that connection to the ephemeral and essential, arising from the Latin spiritus, which means both “breath” and “spirit,” and itself comes from the verb spirare, “to breathe.” So to consider the spiritual is to consider the mystery of our essential selves, and also the way we inspire the formless, colorless, odorless gas—oxygen—we require to live.
In this year of spiritual thinking, I hope to explore the essence of breath and spirit, both of which are basically inexpressible in words, and the wisdom gained from that essence.
My main intent here is to shift the balance of my life from striving to a deeper level of being in love with this world and we who share the planet.
By striving I mean attempting to achieve something, whether that is some kind of goal in my writing or an award for one of my books, or a review in a particular place, a certain level of income, writing an article for a particularly prestigious journal—that kind of outward focused striving for power, recognition, money, or material things.
My aim in taking this year of spiritual retreat at home within ordinary life is to simply shift my focus from striving, as I have done all of my adult life, to reflecting, to considering what this life means, and sharing that wisdom, whatever it may be. Hard-earned as it may be, and in my case, it usually is hard-earned because I tend to learn by smacking my forehead into some obstacle, not by thinking about it.
From Striving to Engaging in Relationship with the Living World
I simply want to change the tenor of my life from the years of working toward something—“some thing”—material or career-focused or whatever, to being. To taking part of this life in a deeper and richer way, to being engaged in this existence in a deeper and richer way, to practicing my terraphilia* not for something, but to be part of something.
To be in relationship, to deepen my relationship with this living world and we who share the planet in a way that I am most concerned with the richness of relationship, not richness in the material or social or cultural sense.
I have no program or framework for the year ahead. I am not going to study with a particular teacher. I have no goals or expectations in mind. I am not going to go anywhere or attempt to “escape” my ordinary life in order to find enlightenment. I want to learn what I can learn through the minutia and wonder of everyday life.
There is a Buddhist saying that the fastest way to enlightenment is not through retreating to some sacred community, but by living our everyday lives. Nor does reaching enlightenment change our lives, only how we live them. The other Buddhist saying that comes to mind is from mindfulness meditation teacher Jack Kornfield, “After the ecstasy, the laundry.”
Recognizing the Sacred in Everyday Life
I want to shift the moments that comprise my life to the spiritual. To, for instance, make my morning breakfast cereal in a more mindful way, to take time to thank the oats, the blue corn ground into meal, and the flax. The grapevines that grew the fruits dried into raisins, the blueberry bushes that flowered and were pollinated to swell into blueberries. The clean water the cereal soaks in, the cinnamon trees whose bark produced the cinnamon, the ginger root dried and ground into ginger.
I want to remember to be part of this life in its most quotidian moments in a way that I see and value the richness and the spiritual depth and the connection to all others with whom we share this planet. That’s what this year of spiritual thinking is all about.
I have no expectation of how it will go or what I will learn. To have expectations is to doom any possibility of change and transformation. Because to have expectations is to already have made a box to fit into. And that negates the idea of reaching within and without and learning more deeply how I belong in this world and how I can love this world.
And that combination of terror and exhilaration? It comes from, as the philosopher L.A. Paul writes in her book Transformative Experience, “[Knowing] that undergoing the experience will change what it is like for [me] to live [my] life, and perhaps even change what it is like to be [me], deeply and fundamentally.” link to L.A. Paul’s book: https://academic.oup.com/book/7934
We can’t and don’t know how life will transform us. But we can learn from it.
*Terraphilia: n. The intrinsic affection for and connection to the earth and the planet’s web of lives we all carry in our cells. When we don’t tend this bond, we become lonely, hungry for something we often cannot articulate; we are less than whole. My late husband and I borrowed and re-defined the word to explain what motivated our work, his abstract sculpture bringing local rocks into our everyday lives as “ambassadors of the earth,” and my writing that explores the bond between humans and the rest of this living earth.
My weekly newsletter, Practicing Terraphilia aims to help us explore, grow and strengthen a reciprocal relationship with this numinous planet. We’ll consider whether our daily actions and behaviors are aligned with loving this earth and our fellow passengers on the planet. We’ll look at ways to be the best humans we can be, whatever the challenges and times. And ways to love ourselves—just as we are—in the doing.
Blessings! Susan
Links:
Practicing Terraphilia: https://practicingterraphilia.substack.com/ (If you have trouble signing up, email me with your name and email, and I’ll add you to the list manually. info@susanjtweit.com)
Bless the Birds: https://bookshop.org/p/books/bless-the-birds-living-with-love-in-a-time-of-dying-susan-j-tweit/14982089?ean=9781647420369
Walking Nature Home: https://utpress.utexas.edu/9781477309346/walking-nature-home/
My other books on my website: http://susanjtweit.com/books/
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