To Earth the Mother of All

One of the things that David Abram and Graham Harvey (he of Animism) stress is that there is a difference between speaking about earth and speaking to earth. This subject is also considered in a book that I have just started called The Song of the Earth by Michel Haar. This tome is challenging as it's about Heidegger, so it uses terms that I find hard to fully absorb. All that said, I like the basic simplicity of this: of speaking TO rather than about.

This is taken from a Homeric hymn:

I will sing of well-founded Earth, mother of all, eldest of all beings. She feeds all creatures that are in the world, all that go upon the goodly land, and all that are in the paths of the seas, and all that fly: all these are fed of her store.

[...]

Hail, Mother of the gods, wife of starry Heaven; freely bestow upon me for this my song substance that cheers the heart! And now I will remember you and another song also.

John Sallis wrote the introduction to the Haar book, and this is taken from the introduction:

One would like to ask—but hardly can—what it could mean today to sing to the earth. Or to compose a song to the earth, of the earth. In a song of the earth will one sing the truth about the earth? What would such truthfulness—remaining faithful (treu) to the earth—now require?...[W]ould a song of the earth not also resound from the earth, doubling the of, even recasting the song one would sing, recasting it as a response to an unheard song of the earth? Then one would have recognized that a song of the earth always contains, when one sings, a certain earth of the song, the corporeity of its sounding from one's voice. The earthiness (das Erdige) of the song.

And here's a quote from Heidegger himself:

We have ears because we can listen attentively, and thanks to this we may hear the song of the Earth, its trembling and quivering that remains undisturbed by the huge tumult that man has, for the time being, organized on its exhausted surface.

This takes us to the more important direction: we can listen.

But we don't want to listen to the world, the earth, the trees, and the birds. We want to listen to ourselves.