To Be in Love with Everything that Lives
The Orgy that Is the Earth

When I am in the midst of a forest, on an ocean beach, on a mountain top, when I see a hawk, a deer, a rabbit, whenever I experience the wild earth, I feel an intense desire to make love with all that surrounds me, to immerse myself in what is clearly a marvelous, erotic orgy. At times, I do immerse myself. More often, sadly, the years of domestication I have been through rear their ugly heads and hold me back. But I have experienced the wild earth and know it lives and want to be part of its orgy.

Many radical environmentalists speak of the earth as a mother. I find this strange. My mother was the first authority I confronted in my life. She molded me to follow rules rather than my desires, to be exploited and to exploit rather than to share love and pleasure, to give up the beauty of the present for an imagined future, to sacrifice adventure for security. She tamed the wild, free creature I had been, domesticated me, created a repressed, inhibited, resentful and unhappy being. Herself domesticated and repressed, she could not birth me in joy and pleasure. She had been made too rigid, fearful and hard. Instead she birthed me in pain and resentment and tried to mold me in her image. My struggle against internalized authority has been largely a struggle, against what my mother did to me - including her implicit, refusal to be my lover. I have no desire for another mother.

I do not doubt that the earth is the source of my being. But it did not birth me in pain and sorrow to resent me as a mother, It birthed me in ecstatic pleasure to enjoy me as a lover. And the earth is not just a single being, a single lover. It is a myriad of wild, beings, an orgy of creatures enjoying, playing with, loving each other. The earth .does not seek to domesticate me for it is as a wild animal that I can best love and enjoy the. world. It does not repress me or make me conform to rules, for only free beings can freely share. The earth does not treat me as a mother would; rather, it woos me to join in the passionate embrace of the wild ones, tenderly calling me to be free.

But all around me the horrid shrieks of civilization try to drown the wild earth's love song. Civilization would destroy the orgy. It is not productive; it does not work. And it moves us to lay down our tools and dance and feast and sing and make love instead. So civilization separates us from the wild earth and the wildness within ourselves and our mothers are one of the weapons in its arsenal.

I want to be free of the chains of civilization. I want to be a wild, free being, making love with all that lives. And as long as civilization exists it will strive to keep me from this and will threaten the ecstatic orgy that is the earth. So when I fight for the wild, earth against civilization, I am fighting for myself, for the freeing of my own wildness, for the realization of my own repressed desires. I would never fight to save a mother, but a mad orgy of ecstatic lovers is truly worth fighting for. The pleasure they would share with me inspires my own wildness to break free. The wild earth is not our mother; it is an orgy of ecstatic lovers of which we can by part when we throw off the chains of domestication and break free.