For The Love Of Dear Earth

My new year-long eco-activism project - join me?

My vigil spot where I’ll be saying the prayers

In the year running up to COP26, I sat in silence for an hour each day at the top of my local town. It was a way to express some of my grief about the climate and ecological crisis, and although I didn’t always feel great about going out to sit when it was driving rain, snow, baking hot, or when I was ill, and although I was delighted to finally complete the year, overall it felt like exactly the right thing to do.

Over the past months I have felt pregnant with a new project. I wanted it to involve being outside again in all weathers, and I wanted it to be public, so I could be witnessed. It needed to involve a commitment - to be enough of a sacrifice that it would stretch me and demonstrate to others that I was stretched. I wanted to look at dear Earth through a sacred window. It started to take shape from the ether.

Slowly, a plan emerged…

What am I doing?

From tomorrow, Friday the 1st of September, every day for a year, I will read a prayer to the Earth - both in an online space at 8am UK time, and in my local town Great Malvern.

I will follow each prayer with ten minutes of held silence so those joining me can contemplate or pray in their own way.

Why am I doing it?

I’m hoping that saying prayers to the Earth twice a day will remind me to look after her in the little ways I can.

I’m hoping it will remind me to enjoy her surprises, her beauty and her abundance.

I’m also hoping that my prayers will be witnessed by others, and that this might nudge them towards connecting with the Earth a little more deeply themselves.

I’ve put together a little booklet of prayers with poems and texts from different traditions, and I’ll mostly use these.

How can you help?

I’m hoping you might feel inspired to help me / help dear Earth.

You could share this information page with interested friends, or sign up to my separate Substack mailing list for occasional updates, below.

Maybe you’ll occasionally join me for the prayers online at 8am UK time. If you’re in a different time zone, you might even be willing to run a prayer group at your own morning time so others can join you.

Maybe you’ll come and join me in person in Great Malvern sometime this year. Maybe you’ll say prayers in a public place near you.

Or maybe you’ll send me something really precious - your blessings for the project. I’ll quilt them all together and wear them like a cloak when I go to say the prayers. If you would like me to, I’ll say them on your behalf.

Thank you for reading. Below is a quote that has been a guiding light for this project, and one of the lovely prayers I will be reading, by the lovely Scott Chaskey.

Bowing from here,
Satya <3

“Few will have the greatness to bend history itself, but each of us can work to change a small portion of events. It is from numberless diverse acts of courage and belief that human history is shaped. Each time a man stands up for an ideal, or acts to improve the lot of others, or strikes out against injustice, he sends forth a tiny ripple of hope, and crossing each other from a million different centers of energy and daring those ripples build a current which can sweep down the mightiest walls of oppression and resistance.” ~ Robert F. Kennedy

Small Prayer

Thank you for the apples like berries
that color the trees and the sky.
I want to leap and talk
and then sleep in the air
where your fruits ripen and dance.
Mother of earth, this is my prayer!
Oh yes — at night
when we turn from father light
please cover my cloud bed
with your phosphorescence.
Thank you for your apples.

~ Scott Chaskey