Landing

I recently read a collection of essays in a book titled "Coming to Land in a Troubled World". The first essay, "Landing" by Kathleen Dean Moore, was so poignant I want to share an excerpt here:

" I had been away for many days, sitting behind glass walls in one airport waiting room after another, cold and fidgety in a black plastic chair, uneasy under the grim eyes of security guards. With all the other lonely, tired, anxious people, I stood in lines with my identification in my hand. Then we were grinding through clouds thirty-five thousand feet above the earth. The noise was overwhelming and so was the silence of strangers crowded side by side, wincing when their elbows touched. I was startled when the flight attendant announced we would be landing.
"What did she say?" I asked the man next to me.
"We'll be landing soon, that's what she said." Seatback in an upright position. tray table locked, I seized on those words. Land is a noun, a solid, a place you come home to. Land is a set of relationships, ecosystems, hydrological cycles, ocean currents, neighborhoods and nitrogen cycles, and the energy that flows among them. But land is also a verb, an action that people sometimes take: To land is to come into contact again with the actual earth, a place that welcomes you, nourishes you, protects you, lifts you with relief. Suddenly I wanted to land more than anything else in the world.
We have been away for many centuries, we people of the western industrialized nations. We have built a culture on the mistaken assumption that human beings are independent of one another and of the places and systems of the earth. And so the mass of us lead lives of quiet separation, cutting ourselves off from the ecological and cultural communities that sustain us. The mass of us live apart from our parents and their memories, from our children and their grown-up hopes, from the sources of our food and energy and water, from our neighbors, from the wind and rain. Behind locked gates and Thermopane windows, in front of computer screens and air conditioning units, we might as well be suspended in the sky, for all the contact we have with the actual earth. The separation hurts: Isolated, uneasy, we crave something we can never buy and grieve for a loss we can't name.
....Caught up in the moment, we act as if today were somehow disconnected from tomorrow, as if we floated in a holy present, untethered from what has come before us, unaffected by and certainly not responsible for what will happen next.
Surely, I say to myself, no one believes it's possible to sever the connection between past, present, and future. But how else could people who love their children act in ways that diminish or destroy the world in which their children will live? How else could voters allow industry to endlessly mine the land and the lakes and the seas, liquidating the earth's assets, extinguishing species forever, holding this great going-out-of-business sale, and forget that it is our children who will be left standing in the empty store?
....We know what it means to land, the final approach, the drop, the bump, the shuddering surge before the noisy slowing. After the longest time, the doors open and the air of home rushes in, carrying a sudden sense of safety and the prospect of joining again the people and places we love. We can taste on the wind the life that we are capable of living, learn again the happiness that comes from caring for people and caring for places, and accept the challenge of reconciliation, bringing together again what has been apart for a very long time."

Love Wins