The energy of the Earth

This article first appeared in our Earth Day 2025 issue of My Green Pod Magazine, published 22 April. Click here to subscribe to our digital edition and get each issue delivered straight to your inbox

To make good sense of Earth Day, I’d like to approach it not by dark statistics of what we humans have done to Earth, but instead listen to what the Earth has to offer us on a personal level, and what we can learn from her.

What does the Earth mean to each of us personally? To some it may mean bright green grass, to others it may mean growing vegetables, to others it may suggest the ravishing beauty of trees.

But perhaps it may also be a source of strength, a teacher – even a transformer. 

Touching power

Something new and quite strange happened to me lately. I have a small garden, and one day I just knelt down and touched the earth. I was drawn to it, and suddenly noticed an energy, a sort of tingle, coming into my fingers.

I looked down to see if there was a small thistle or something that had touched me. Not so. I stood still, and suddenly felt my whole self come alive, as if energised.

When I even think about this feeling, as I do now in writing it down, I feel this same sense of… Potential. Perhaps that’s the right word – as if the earth has power.

And of course, it does. Huge power. After all, it grows all our food. It makes compost all day, all night.

Flowers & garbage

My teacher Thich Nhat Hanh is not normally known as a gardener, but he has written an extraordinary chapter called ‘Transforming Our Compost’: ‘When we look deeply at a flower[…] we can see that the flower is on her way to becoming compost. If we don’t notice this, we will be shocked when the flower begins to decompose. When we look deeply at the compost, we see that it is also on its way to becoming flowers, and we realise that flowers and compost ‘inter-are’. They need each other.’

He goes on to say how, when we look deeply into ourselves, we see both flowers and garbage. And that each of us has anger, hatred, depression, racial discrimination and many other kinds of garbage in us, but there is no need for us to be afraid.

‘We can learn to transform all these emotions into love and understanding. This is the work of meditation’, he writes.

His chapter then shows how we can ‘water’ seeds of joy, happiness and peace, using mindfulness to help them grow stronger.

You have probably experienced this; if you stand in front of a tree, breathe steadily and absorb its beauty and strength for five minutes, it makes you stronger.

Likewise, you will not be ‘watering’ seeds within you like fear and pain, and this becomes your internal healing power.

He talks about walking meditation – walking slowly enough that you are actually massaging the earth with each footstep. I love that.

This kind of mindfulness is an extraordinary asset. It lets us become aware of what is happening in the present moment, and it is a vital agent for our transformation and growth.