Earth Day - Remembering Her
The Patriarchal Story That Separated Us
The Great Forgetting They mapped straight lines across the wild body of the earth, diminished seasonal intimacy with clocks and quotas, named the sun "resource," the body "sin," and the womb a burden to be managed. We were taught to stand above the land, rather than within it— to conquer what once cradled us. But the wind remembers. The root remembers. The monarch on her perilous migration home remembers. And somewhere beneath the layers of inherited forgetting, we remember too. That we are not separate. That our hearts are songlines— and that our singular life is a part of a greater constellation. Our grief for the earth is a grief for ourselves, for the famine of the feminine. And maybe just maybe our return is not a revolution, but a remembering of the quiet, receptive, intuitive wisdom that still moves through every single one of us.
We live within a story—often invisible, yet powerful—that tells us who we are in relation to the world. One of the deepest threads in that story is patriarchy. Not simply the rule of men, but the dominance of certain values: control over intuition, knowledge over mystery, reason over feeling, the mind over the body, and human over nature.
These days, I find myself questioning how much our belief in separation from the Earth (and others) is tied to colonialism—a force that systematically devalued Indigenous wisdom, branding it inferior and obsolete.
Colonialism and patriarchy are deeply entangled forces—each amplifying the other in ways that have profoundly shaped how many societies relate to land, power, the body, and identity.
When colonial powers spread across the globe, they didn’t only bring weapons and borders—they brought worldviews. Central to these worldviews was a patriarchal structure that privileged control, hierarchy, and domination over interdependence, relationship, and reverence for life. However, a strict division between humans and nature didn’t exist in many Indigenous cultures.
The Earth was not a “resource,” but a relative.
Colonial systems disrupted these relational ways of being. They imposed rigid gender roles, often silencing or displacing women and gender-diverse people who held important ecological, spiritual, or leadership roles in their communities. These systems elevated a particular kind of man—often white, landowning, and European—as the default authority over society and nature alike.
As these systems took root, they turned the living world into property, the feminine into something to be controlled, and the mysterious into something to be explained or eradicated. Land, women, and Indigenous peoples were all treated as entities to be conquered. The language of colonialism—discovery, taming, conquering, civilizing—mirrored the same mindset that seeks to control the wild, whether in forests or in feeling.
So colonialism didn’t just spread patriarchy—it enforced it, often violently, erasing more reciprocal and earth-centered ways of living that had existed for thousands of years. This dual legacy of separation—from each other and from the land—still lingers in many of our institutions, economies, and most importantly, our personal beliefs.
As a result of centuries of conditioning that elevated masculine-coded values (like linear progress, mastery, and rationality) while diminishing the feminine-coded qualities (like receptivity, interconnectedness, and cyclical wisdom), we are left with a lopsided world that has forgotten its natural balance. And we feel this directly within our bodymind too.
Patriarchy is not just a social structure—it’s an ecological, psychosomatic, and spiritual one. It teaches us to see ourselves as outside or above the living world, to distrust the wild both within and without. The cost of this has not only been the degradation of the planet, but also a deep, often quiet grief: a forgetting of our own belonging.
Importantly, this is not about blaming men. It’s about naming a system that all of us—regardless of gender—have internalized. Many men, too, suffer under the pressure to remain disconnected from emotion, intuition, and the living web of life.
To untangle ourselves from these systems, we can begin by remembering that this isn't the only story. Other ways of being still live in our bodies, in Indigenous knowledge, in ancestral memory, and in the quiet language of nature itself. The work of healing—personal, cultural, and ecological—is a return to relationship, to deep listening, and to the wild intelligence that patriarchy and colonialism tried to forget.
“All water has a perfect memory and is forever trying to get back to where it was.” Toni Morrison
The invitation now is to re-story ourselves. To remember that we are nature. That the cycles of our breath and bodies echo the tides and seasons. That listening—to the land, to the body, to each other—is an act of restoration.
We don’t need to invent a new way of being—we need only return to the one quietly waiting beneath the flawed system we’ve unknowingly accepted, where the story of wholeness, reciprocity, non-linear growth, long-sightedness, interdependence, and home still lives.
Happy Earth Day!
A Curated List of Nature Meditations from Sez
Why We Believe We are Separate, Missionaries in the Peruvian Jungle Story - Part 3 of W(hole)ness
The Open Field of Limiting Beliefs - Listen Here
Healing Anxiety and Disconnect Through Nature - Listen Here
How to Become a Tree - Listen Here
Sez, thank you for this offering. Your words resonate like wind through old trees—familiar, stirring, and full of remembrance.
As I sat with your reflection, I felt a thread stretching across time, taut with the weight of history. What I’ve uncovered in my own journey—from Arminius to the great kings and conquistadors—is the same deeply rooted belief you speak to: a myth of superiority, dressed in armor and scripture, cloaked in entitlement. It moves like a plague—contagious, persistent, generational. And like a plague, it doesn’t just destroy—it disconnects. From the land. From the body. From each other.
The systems we live in didn’t just arise—they were cultivated, ritualized, and enforced.
That story—of separation, of dominion—was handed down like an heirloom, dressed in the language of progress. And in that inheritance, we learned to call the Earth a resource, the body a problem, and anyone who didn’t fit the mold disposable.
Reading your words, I see clearly how this epidemic of hierarchy and conquest wasn’t an accident—it was intentional.
And yet, I also feel the pulse of something older, quieter, and far more enduring: the memory that never fully left.
The root remembers. The body remembers. The grief we carry for the Earth is, as you said, a grief for ourselves.
When you wrote that maybe our return is not a revolution, but a remembering—that landed deeply.
Because I don’t believe we need to invent a new way of being either. The wisdom is still there, under the concrete, beneath the silence, in the rustle of leaves and the rhythm of our breath.
We are not separate. And every time we listen—really listen—we re-story ourselves into belonging again.
Thank you for writing with such clarity and care. It’s a balm, and a mirror. May we continue to unlearn the forgetting together.
With respect and resonance,
Jay
Thank you Sez and, as a privileged, white man, I'm grateful for your comment that this is not about blaming men. I can't undo the reality that I am a privileged, white man, though I can all too easily slip into shame about the way such men have behaved and still behave. And I choose instead to do my best to show up and to care.
You use the phrase rewilding, and I recently came across the idea of renaturing which I find helpful in the sense that I am nature, and can do my best to renature myself along the lines you are discussing here...
Blessings
John