“After I moved here, I was looking around for places to get connected, and when I got to Stillwaters, I felt like I had found my ‘tribe.’ ”

People sometimes compare Stillwaters to a church community, because we have become, for some, their Earth community.

Stillwaters is the place where many of us have a chance to connect with like-minded folks, make new friends who care about Earth, and experience the joy of close community.

Stillwaters is also a place where people find hope, or at least an antidote for despair. It is easy to lose hope when we see the limitations of our larger human community to understand the needs of Earth and to behave accordingly. In fact, one can give into the self-fulfilling assessment of humans as tragic and beyond the ability to change! But that gets us nowhere.

We believe in hope as a virtue, and that it is a core part of being human.

Sometimes hope gets a bad rap — that to be hopeful for the planet is to be naive or stupid. And sometimes people equate hope with the “rose-colored glasses” presumption that someone somewhere will somehow someday fix all the environmental problems with some new technology.  Neither of those sit well with us.

We join together around our hope for Earth and all its inhabitants. Although not all of us are science-oriented, we certainly are all close to Earth and understand the role of humans as one part of the giant ecological system of our planet home.

Humans do not “run” the planet or the universe (although we seem to have the power to “ruin” the planet). We are minute, microscopic pieces in the cosmological time of the universe. We humans are capable of understanding, studying and learning from the universe, which makes us unique. But humans are still one species on a small planet that is “a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam” (Carl Sagan) when viewed from spacecraft traveling out in the universe.

The universe, as we know, is not finished; it is forever evolving and expanding, so it is constantly changing. One could say it is always on the verge of collapsing, or one could say it is always on the verge of rebirth. But it is changing. This is worth learning. We see it even in the life of every natural part of Earth — constantly changing and yet, always constant and in balance. This can give us hope.

We have learned over the centuries that we owe our existence on Earth to our Sun, and the fact that Earth is just the right distance from the Sun to support vegetative life. Now we are learning that we can change that delicate balance between too warm and too cold. We hope we have learned enough about climate change to moderate our participation in it and to survive it.

“Even after all this time, the Sun never says to Earth, ‘You Owe Me’. Look what happens with a love like that; it lights up the whole world!” — Hafiz, a Sufi poet.

So what would it be like if we all loved Earth like that, if we quit saying to Earth, “You owe me,” as we use up its resources without thinking and take all we want instead of just what we need? What could our human race accomplish? Could we re-think our love for Earth when we talk about the right of all humans and other creatures to exist peacefully? Could we look at our homes and our lands as a gift to us from Earth?  Can we think of them as something precious that is entrusted to us for caretaking, rather than something we have bought and can exploit?

Our Earth is just as generous to us as our Sun, but we abuse them both mightily. Our faith is that our love of Earth will teach us to learn to love like the Sun!

­­Stillwaters is host-ing a new Sustainability Discussion Group, “I Go to Nature — Readings from Favorite Authors,” this month. If you are interested, register at (360) 297-1226.

— Contact Naomi Maasberg at naomi@stillwatersenvironmentalcenter.org.