Everything alive today has one common ancestor. All plants, all animals, all microbes, share a great great great (going back 3 billion years) grandparent. All things everywhere are my distant cousins. Is this what is meant by Mother Earth?
Read about Last universal common ancestor (LUCA).
I’m going back to this, to edit it and add more, because this thought has been so compelling to me. The thought that we are all literally connected through common ancestry is perhaps even more powerful to me than the idea of God as creator, and it has a scientific foundation. If everything started as one cell that continued to divide, and we all came from that, then maybe we share one Spirit. We are all pieces of the whole. One piece’s suffering causes the whole to suffer. One member’s joy, the same. Life is all connected.