Touching the True Nature of the Earth
Touching the True Nature
of the Earth
Happy Farm Manager Mick McEvoy shares
about his living practice of nonduality
with the Earth and “others.”
Happy Farm photo
by Sara Wilhelmsson
I still remember the moment I discovered Thầy’s
book Love Letter to the Earth. It has become a north
star for me and our Happy Farm project. I have absorbed every page into the marrow of my bones. I
have no shame in sharing that I “consumed” the
book and it has helped me fill a spiritual vacuum.
I fell in love with Love Letter to the Earth as Thầy
shared that of course you have permission to take
your spiritual practice outdoors into the natural
world. I heard him profess that the forest was as
reverential as any meditation hall or house of worship. As someone who has an allergy to some of
the ritualistic and devotional aspects of spiritual
practice, I found Thầy’s words a deep teaching of
nonduality, beautifully expressed in his encouraging words to practice walking as if we are “kissing
the Earth with our feet.”
My allergy to the devotional and ritualistic in
spiritual practice has everything to do with childhood and teenage years. I still remember my first
retreat in Plum Village, France when the community in Upper Hamlet practiced “touching the
earth.” I physically could not bring myself to bow
down and kneel. As I observed one hundred or so
humans moving, kneeling, bowing all in unison,
I thought to myself “not again.” Irish Catholic! It
took some time for me to be offered a deep introduction to the practice of touching the earth and
what exactly I was being invited to participate in.
I remember a deeply moving Dharma talk from
Sister True Dedication that focussed solely on this
practice. Wow.
“I aspire to practice to love Mother Earth,
Father Sun…”1 Now when I have the good fortune
to practice touching the earth I become deeply
energised. Goosebumps! I think of Thầy inviting
me to touch the Earth to “Bodhisattva Gaia, Great
Mother Earth” and to Father Sun, “Buddha of infinite light and life.” Such skilfulness to include
Earth and Sun in this practice. With the utmost
respect, I think of Thầy as a “Badassatva.” I am not
being invited to bow to deities I see as fictional but
to that blazing orb of fire that makes all life possible. Real life. I can see it and I can feel it. Earth
and Sun. This is my devotion and ritual, in direct
contrast to the spirituality of my upbringing, where
religious dogma penetrated every aspect of life:
home, education, society, and politics.
I grew up in Northern Ireland in a segregated
community divided by sectarianism. We were
divided by an imagined reality. My society was
deeply dualistic. In his book Sapiens, Yuval Noah
Harari argues that the intricacies of our modern
societies are all built on imagined realities: “There
are no gods in the universe, no nations, no money,
no human rights, no laws, and no justice outside
the common imagination of human beings.”2 With
that way of thinking we humans can create societies of paradise or societies of immense suffering.
“… for human beings to love one another
with the radiant insight of nonduality and
interbeing in order to help us transcend
all kinds of discrimination, fear, jealousy,
resentment, hatred, and despair …”1
Growing up in Northern Ireland we experienced war. Daily reports of murder. Bombs and
guns. Flags flew to mark territory. Our schools
were segregated based on religion. The Catholic
and Protestant communities lived separately,
divided into specific areas of our villages, towns,
and cities. Streets for them and streets for us. This
deep duality meant that as a society we had a very
limited chance to meet “the other.”
Our lived reality was rooted in real suffering.
There was entrenched discrimination born from
colonialism of Britain in Ireland. A combination of
political, religious, and social differences plus the
threat of inter-communal tensions and violence
led to widespread self-segregation of the two
communities. Catholics and Protestants led largely
separate lives in a situation some have dubbed
“self-imposed apartheid.” Every aspect of life was
full of human-created dualism.
The result? Fear, jealousy, resentment, hatred,
despair. Some 3,720 people were killed as a result
of the conflict. Approximately 47,541 people were
injured. There were 36,923 shootings and 16,209
bombings.3
When asked what the insight of nonduality and
transforming the delusion of separateness means
in my personal practice, I can respond that peace
is possible, and social justice is possible. Today we
have peace. We work for it every day. Removing
the delusion of separateness is possible whilst
retaining the beauty of individual cultures and traditions. Yet divisions remain. I have a daily practice
of contemplating and internally accepting that
the horrors that unfolded in my country for over
thirty years actually took place. I look deeply and
see that this violence and injustice stretched back
hundreds of years to the beginning of the coloniI aspire to bear witness to
the violence, the hatred,
and the discrimination we
humans enact on each
other and on the natural
world …
sation of Ireland. I adore Thầy’s words “man is not
our enemy.”4 I have been gifted great resilience by
Thầy’s teaching that we are here to awaken from
the illusion of our separateness.
I aspire to bear witness to the violence, the
hatred, and the discrimination we humans enact
on each other and on the natural world: between
Belfast and Gaza, Derry and Darfur; every conflict,
every victim, every genocide, every ecocide; all
those killed by other humans acting out of their
fundamentalist beliefs; the Earth extracted, polluted, degraded for our consumption.
I have had the good fortune to have touched
the radiant insight of nonduality and interbeing. I
have awoken from the delusion of our separation.
Then I forget. I other. I discriminate. I aim to remember and wash my eyes to begin to see clearly.
I have begun the perpetual work of removing the
dust from my eyes and the practice of transforming
the delusion of our separateness. It is not a destination I reach so as to never have a discriminatory
mind again. I feel this practice is just like following
my breath and steps. I forget, and then I hope to
remember and come back to my breath, my steps.
Each time I hope I strengthen this habit of deeply
living the reality of our interconnectedness whilst
bearing witness to the horrors and tragedy that we
as a human family can enact on each other in our
imagined realities of nationality, religions, genders.
Peace is possible. Social justice is possible. May
we awaken from the illusion of our separateness.
¹ Thích Nhất Hạnh, Love Letter to the Earth (Berkeley:
Parallax Press, 2013), p. 126.
² Yuval Noah Harari, Sapiens–A Brief History of
Humankind (Visalia: Vintage, 2015).
³ Conflict Archive on the Internet, 2007, “Fact Sheet on the
conflict in and about Northern Ireland,” CAIN. https://cain.
ulster.ac.uk/victims/docs/group/htr/day_of_reflection/
htr_0607c.pdf
⁴ Thích Nhất Hạnh, 1965, “Recommendation,” Plum Village.
https://plumvillage.org/articles/recommendation
For more information on the Happy Farm, visit
thehappyfarm.org.
Mick McEvoy, True Pure Earth (pronouns he/him), an
Irish native, lives, works, and studies in the community
of Plum Village, France. Mick brings over twenty
years of experience working with people, plants, and
mindfulness practice to his management of the Happy
Farm and the Plum Village rewilding projects. The
farm welcomes hundreds of retreatants annually and
combines mindfulness-based approaches with seasonal
organic food production and land stewardship rooted in
deep ecology.