There is landscape—the metaphysical relationship between our inner and outer place in the manifested world. There is the Earth—the physical manifestation of our groundedness in this world. But what is land?
When I hear people in environmental circles talk about land, I often get the impression that what they really want to talk about is the “Spirit of the Place.” They refer to “The Land” like a metaphysical entity embodied in a forest or a meadow that they go out onto that is separate from the urban environment. Certainly, in many cultures, the land does encompass the Spirit, but for the people I’m referring to, I can intuitively feel their hesitation to acknowledge it. So, in their elusiveness, their land is turned into a semi-mystical concept that is also stripped from its political reality.
But land cannot escape human politics. Not because land is inherently political, but because humans have not learned to not be political. Within the concept of land is both stewardship and governance (i.e. a series of decisions about how we manage community, resources, and the idea of place itself). If we interpret governance as control rather than administrative care, then the land we live on will also become the primary object of control.
Since humans first began to dwell within fixed boundaries, land has been a source of conflict. Embedded in land and politics is the paradox of our deepest collective human trauma—the illusory separation between our spiritual essence and our physical manifestation. As those in the New Age community would say, we are spiritual beings having a human experience. At first, it seems as if there is a duality in this truth (i.e., we are both spiritual beings and human beings), but the two parts cannot be separated. We can only be humans as spiritual beings. The cognitive separation of the two parts is what creates our reluctance to find peace in this world.
While those skeptical of spiritual concepts would like to believe that our discomfort comes from spirituality, it is actually our discomfort with being human that disturbs us. Instead of taking our spiritual nature and applying it to our time here, as a collective, we have been self-sabotaging our way back to a state of non-human spirituality by destroying ourselves or others.
But we have the choice to treat our sojourn here on Earth as a prison that we constantly want to escape from or see it as a mission of spiritual mastery. Our embodiment is the coming together of Heaven and Earth, yin and yang, mind and body, physical and immaterial, to complete the wholeness of the Spirit. We didn’t fall from Heaven onto Earth and we aren’t falling further into Hell. We’ve only been floating all along in placelessness, getting ready to “land” on Earth with the Heaven that remains within us on our journey here.
“The Land” is the home we are finally returning to for the first time here in physical form. How we take care of our existence is how much we value our land. As someone once told me in the words of the Buddhisagar (Ocean of Wisdom), “the pure land is right here.” It isn’t found in the past. It isn’t found after death. It isn’t a heavenly world out-there or a patch of the Earth we desperately need to preserve. It is exactly right here.