Balance with the Earth

When you think of health, think of balance. Balancing our health means reducing stress, eating right, being active enough to stay in shape, and enjoying our lives while we live them, taking time to be with family and friends.
In the same way we need to balance our relationship with the Earth. How do we do this? We pay attention to that relationship. We stay in contact with the Earth and listen to what is needed. Our bodies are the Earth, so if we are putting junk into our bodies we get unhealthy from it. If we are putting trash on the Earth, dumping toxic waste, then we are polluting the Earth. What goes in to ourselves and on to the Earth are the same body. It is the same Earthbody.
Excuse me if I sound elementary, but so many people have not made this connection. That the Earth and our bodies are one body. On a spiritual level, we are connected with the Earth as well as the Sky. Spirit lives everything not just what is above us. When we connect with the Earth we connect more deeply with ourselves.
Often I think about the plastic waste island circling out in the Pacific Ocean. How that island is clogging up our ocean. If we think of the elements, earth, air, fire and water as aspects of our own being, literal parts of our body and essential to the functioning of our selves, then the waters of the Earth are our own waters. Emotions in dreams and in psychology represent emotions. So what does it mean to have this plastic island out there?
For me this island of plastic represents our inauthentic emotional response to the Earth. We are not really feeling what is going on. There is some sort of plastic, canned response system that is not working here in response to our Mother Ocean, to our grief. In african spiritual traditions, the oceans are the mother ocean, mammy water, Yemanja. She takes our grief and takes the dead and does not return them. So if floating out there in the middle is a big island of plastic, just think of this for a moment. What part of ourselves is frozen, plastic in our response to the decimation of the Oceans, of the Earth and the world? It is just a thought.