When we begin a Planet Dance Class, we take a good moment to check in with our own selves.  Hotels have check in times, doctors have check in times, but we humans love to forget to take stock of ourselves, how we are doing, or what we are feeling.  Since we live in our bodies full time, it can seem like checking in is redundant.  The problem is that we are so distracted by things outside of ourselves we can literally detach.  Checking in then, is a way to live more consciously.  I often begin a check in by asking participants to imagine their blood, moving through their veins in the same way water moves through rivers and creeks.  It is remarkable how similar those images are, when considered with a similar scale of size.  Recently, Cindy, our Co-director, pointed out to me that our blood is blue until it travels outside our body and hits oxygen.  

Our bodies literally hold watersheds similar in architecture to the earth’s.  The likenesses don’t stop there…approximately 71% of the earth is water.  Our bodies are 50-70% water.  Our bodies have mountains and canyons, and expressions of fauna we call body hair.  We have entire eco-systems for each of our organs that work together to form the ecosystem that is our body. We have bazillions of tiny critters living on our skin, just like the bazillions of tiny critters that live in our soils. Over and over the similarities strike me.  I’ll be peeling bark from a dead tree limb, and think about how I pulled a scab off my knee that morning.  Or I’ll be working my way through matted plant vines and think about my dreadlocks.  This is an important relationship to consider, one that informs how we show up on the planet.

A clear tenet of the Motherline is that when we tend our own bodies, we are healing the earth body, and when we heal the earth body we are most certainly healing our own bodies.  We are little whole planets, we humans, and our orbits include children, family, friends and community.  What a beautiful thing!  To move toward health and away from disease on earth, we can tend our own bodies and those we encounter! To care about the earth is to care about ourselves, and to care about ourselves is to care about the earth.  We forget, because it is a planet, that indeed it breathes and is alive.  Gaia’s lungs may be the trees, and ours may be internal organs, but we both need cleaner air to be healthier.  We both need less toxics in our waterways.  We both need cleaner soils.  We both need less exploitation!  The earth’s resources need to be more thoughtfully cared for, and our brains and labor need to work less for building other people’s wealth and more for tending our own true wealth- time, space and healthy shelter and food.

I think it is no small thing to make this connection- that tending our body gardens resonates outward and becomes tending our earth garden, and vice versa.  For me, it is an incredibly beautiful reality- because nothing is as important as health.  That means in a busy world filled with distractions from depth and meaning, we can still prioritize with some ease- knowing we have nothing without the most basic, functioning, healthy earth and body systems.  Clear priorities help us focus in an overwhelming landscape.