My muse for this season, Mother Earth, has many names and faces. But one thing is beyond question: she is beautiful. Breathtakingly, mind–blowingly beautiful. ‘A beautiful, warm, living object’ is how Apollo– program astronaut James B Irwin described her, claiming that seeing the earth from above ‘will change any man’. Over 2000 years earlier, the ancient Greeks considered her a robust, ‘broad– bosomed’ beauty and called her Gaia, a poetical form of ‘gē’ meaning ‘earth’. (You may recognize the root ‘ge’ from words like geology and geography). On Greek vases, we see a full-figured Gaia rise from the earth, representing everything that lives. She is loving and fearsome at the same time, just like mothers have appeared to their children since the beginning of humanity. She is the creative/destructive energy of life itself. The message is clear: you don’t wanna mess with this’big momma’!

The ancient Greeks were not the first people to see the earth as a living, female being. A vibrant Earth Goddess called Ninhursag was worshipped by the Sumerians (Iraq, around 3000 BC) while in Hinduism, the world’s oldest religion, the earth is represented by stunning, lotus–carrying Divine Mother Prithvi. Yet ancient Greece did seem to be the last place in the Western world where a caring, nurturing Earth Goddess would rule supreme. With the rise of the macho Roman empire, war–mongering Zeus became the new ‘top god’. To show Gaia who was boss, Zeus even had his son Apollo strangle one of Gaia’s children, the serpent Python who was guarding Gaia’s oracle in Delphi. Archaeology matches the myth; during diggings, over 3500 statues of Gaia were found underneath Apollo’s temple in Delphi.

Male gods would rule the following centuries, while humankind plundered Mother Earth’s treasures. But then, all of a sudden, a Gaia revival! Starting in the least expected of all places: outer space. Astronauts, seeing the earth from above and afar for the first time, were struck by the beauty and fragility of the earth, by how much like a ‘living creature’ it seemed. There was even a special term for this major shift in awareness and renewed respect:’the overview effect’. The ancient Earth Goddess Gaia had shown herself in her breathtaking beauty. Not long after that, in 1972, scientist James Lovelock developed the ‘Gaia Theory’ in which he describes the earth as a self–regulating super organism, always working to bring and maintain wholeness and balance. “Gaia is symbiosis as seen from space,” he explained, emphasizing the fact that we cannot afford to see ourselves as separate of this ecosystem called Mother Earth. The results of doing so, we had already learned by then, are disastrous.

And here we are now, still reeling from the effects of a pandemic which, according to some people, was Gaia’s way of slamming on the brakes to prevent us from going over the cliff. A wake–up call from a strict, but loving mother, so to speak. Perhaps the solution lies in realizing that not only are we part of Mother Earth; she is also part of us. In the words of Vietnamese Zen master Thich Nhat Hanh: “Don’t think that Mother Earth is outside of you. Looking deeply, you can find Mother Earth within you, just as your biological mother who gave birth to you is also within you. The water in our flesh, our bones; Mother Earth is in each of our cells.” Perhaps we simply need to worship her, the way the ancient Greeks did. Because one thing is certain: Mother Earth was there at the beginning, and she’ll be there at the end.