Earth Matters – March 2025
At last, the longer days and brighter evenings of March are with us. We can get outside more and dust off the cobwebs that have kept us grounded for the past few months.
There’s nothing better to entice us to enjoy the outdoors more than the welcoming chorus of birdsong from the many varied species visiting our gardens and parks now. There are blackbirds, thrushes, robins, wrens, great tits, and finches along with the abundance of crows who along with the others are busy building nests for their new families. This month, especially, it’s good to keep our eyes and ears open and to be alert to the myriads of amazing factors the natural world offers.
Many trees and shrubs are sprouting buds while various flowers add welcome colour to our gardens. My tulips and begonias are blooming and my pink camelia already has a profusion of colour in my front garden which always attracts the admiration of passersby.
Butterflies, moths plus other invertebrates and amphibians are now venturing out of hibernation. We should keep an eye out for hedgehogs at this time too and provide suitable food plus water (not milk!) for them.
Our farmers are busy sowing various seeds in the hope of plentiful crops later on. This reminds me that we should all try, if possible, to grow some of our own food produce. In this way, instead of always taking away from the earth’s resources by purchasing all our food in stores, etc., we can give back some reserves to nature.
I want to raise awareness this month about the interconnectedness of all life and things on our planet. Pope Francis states in Laudato Si (83) that ‘All creatures are moving forward with us and through us to a common point of arrival which is God’.
And again (LS 84) states that ‘Each creature has its own purpose. The entire material universe speaks of God’s love, his boundless affection for us. Soil, water, mountains; everything is, as it were, a caress of God’.
LS (85) the Canadian Bishops rightly pointed out that ‘no creature is excluded from the manifestation of God which is the multitude of created things present in the universe’.
The great theologian Teilhard de Chardin wrote extensively about the interconnectedness of everything in the Universe.
All life is sacred. It should evoke wonder and awe in us. How perfect is the rosebud, the baby’s toenails, the dog’s sense of direction. The beat of our hearts in necessary to the continued beat of the universe. Even the humble crow teaches us a lesson demonstrating a bond with humanity and many species. Tradition tells us they start building their nests on 1st March. From their natural instinct prompting them to build nests, we learn the importance of ritual and routine in our lives too. It gives a rhythm to our ordinary everyday lives in the midst of an ever-changing world, where we have a need for constancy and sameness. Once again, mother nature is our instructor and we are reminded that we too are also part and parcel of nature, a fact that we often overlook. There is a universal rhythm with whose beat ALL of life is in tune.
The metaphor for the picture of The Great Chain of Being that the progress of human understanding over time has arrived at is the Tree of Life.
“Every creature has descended from a common ancestor, growing from the acorn of its beginning into a great oak of relationships, and we humans are one small twig at the end of one branch.” (Messenger, Sacred Heart Publication)
“The world is charged with the grandeur of god, and for all this, nature is never spent; there lies the dearest freshness deep down things”. (Gerard Manley Hopkins)
Happy Springtime, Your Earth Friend, Anne
