BOOK REVIEW: Leah Rampy’s “Earth and Soul”

Writer and retreat leader Leah Rampy pulls no punches in her new volume from Bold Story Press, “Earth and Soul: Reconnecting Amid Climate Chaos.” The earth as we know it is in a dire predicament, from which there is no easy return or solution. We are living in “edge times,” on the threshold of climate chaos and mass extinction of biodiversity and will remain there while we await a slow slipping over the edge — unless we are willing reconnect our personal lives and our spiritual selves to the world around us.   

This is not a story devoid of hope. I doubt I would have kept reading if it were. If we’re willing to face the scientific facts of the situation, see more completely the fullness and wisdom of the world around us, and embrace the spiritual angst we are feeling, there is still the possibility of pulling ourselves back from the brink. “Earth and Soul” is a soul journey (the author’s and ultimately our own) that still has inherent in it the hope of something better beyond the grief that comes with such danger and loss. In the book’s concluding chapter she writes:

Because we will never know the outcomes beyond our lifetime, we can choose to live in a story that is grounded in the real and that still offers greater possibility. Living with hope is a choice. When we choose hope, we embrace what is already unfolding and discern if and how we are called to respond. Without any illusion that the path will be easy, we choose to live more fully into our soul’s mission and offer our gifts to the world guided by the Earth’s wisdom.

Writing while standing near the intersection of spirituality, ecology and story, the author offers us a chance to journey in the direction of recovery and sanity, a map of sorts for those willing to live deeply connected to the Earth from the depth of their own souls. For the climate crisis is, she reminds us, a spiritual one. “Without attending to our own continued transformation, we cannot hope to align with the living world to create a tapestry of a beautiful future,” she writes in the book’s introduction.

The eleven short chapters in this 200-page paperback edition made for easy, slow and digestible daily reading for a few weeks. While I could have read it much quickly (it’s not a dense slog through theory and environmental science), I soon discovered that this was a book better taken in a little at a time, a reminder to myself that this kind of change (our own and the environment’s) takes time and trust, a belief that the seeming impossible is, in fact, possible. Drawing from Jesuit theologian Walter’s Burghardt’s reminder that contemplation is a, “long, loving look at the real,” this book is a call to ponder the predicament as a precursor to individual and spiritual change and action.

What is necessary for such change to begin, Rampy reminds us, is personal transformation, a movement from long-held social beliefs that the Earth and its non-human creatures are only here for our sustenance, use and often abuse, to a state of recognition that we are better off living in communion with our plant and animal “kith and kin.”

“When we declare the land inanimate,” she writes, “we ravage our souls. If we deny the vibrantly alive Earth, the breathing beings from which we evolved, the plants with all their gifts — if all those lives can be deemed resources to be pillaged, destroyed, discarded, and annihilated to satisfy our wants — then so too can people who stand in the way of achieving the ends we seek.”

“Earth and Soul” is an invitation to think, live, contemplate and act differently, as if those human actions might just make a difference, which surely they can. This book, Rampy writes, serves as “one invitation to a great turning, a return to our truest selves and a transformation of our relationship with the Earth.”

To instigate such changes, we must begin now, while we are still on the threshold, but Rampy is quick to point out that this is the work of generations, not years or decades. She relates the story of a wise prophet giving feedback to a group of volunteers who had taken some positive steps. “I think this is very good,” the prophet says. “There will likely be excellent results from this in about six hundred years.”

And that’s the point of the book, I think. There are no easy and quick answers. There are only next steps that must be taken, once we have done the hard work of reconnecting our souls to the world around us. She writes: “We will need to practice simply discerning the next step, and then the next step, and then the next, trusting the wisdom we are given without knowing the future or the results of our efforts.”