Mother Earth has been through changes far greater than those we are creating.
At one point, her entire surface was a blanket of glowing magma. She was as near to a perfect to sphere as she has ever been, shining with the heat of her birth.
Sometime after, another celestial body collided with hers. When this happened, our Moon was birthed from her side.
In the days of early Earth, Moon, then only a couple hundred miles away, would pull with great tidal force a mile high wave of magma that would wash over her surface continually, rising and crashing down cyclically in each place throughout her 5 hour day.
Each precise moment of Mother Earth’s life is an entirely unique display of the rarest and most surprising forms of beauty. If we heat the planet so much that the ocean currents cease and that anerobic bacteria once more cover her waters, changing the color of her skies and altering the composition of her breath and life, beauty will still follow – beauty on a purple-skied Earth worthy of weeping over.
Lifeforms impossible to imagine will make a home of our changed Mother, who is always above all else offering herself as home to all. Like the great biodiversity that has made a home in her scar of Chernobyl, innumerable beings will sing undiscovered harmonies from the rearranged notes of a yet unborn scale. The pressed gold of her heart will still hold close the warm elemental breath that she draws and exhales through all life.
What We Now are Losing
What we lose in the changes we are causing are the specific perfections that have made this time and place home.
Oak trees. Foxes. Blue whales. Apples. Owls. Corn. Rabbits. Bears. Songbirds. The Eno River. Tomatoes. Honey. Squirrels. Manatees. Dogs. Horses. Deer.
Human culture. Languages. Rituals. Songs. Stories. Relationships. Memories. Crafts. Dwellings. Awe. Our human descendants.
Each form we share this time and place with is the perfected jewel of the moments that came before it. Beauty has found countless ways to inhabit this moment so richly and so fully, and with such commitment as to let itself become forms that would be utterly heartbreaking to surrender back to the formless possible. In fact, all we know about beauty comes from the specific forms of this time and place. All we know about wonder, gratitude, and love comes from making this time and place our home and its forms, our companions.
What we will lose when Mother Earth changes are all the specific impossibly luminous and musical expressions of life through the prism of this moment that are our companions. What we will lose are all of our friends.
Climbing Out From Under the Engine of Destruction
What we are trading all our friends away for is a barren grey engine of mass unhappiness that we just don’t seem to be able to climb out from under.
Under this engine are all of us, our warm bodies carved from the radiant cliffs of pure time. Our ears are the shape of bird song, river run, coyote cry, human laughter. Our hands are the shape for planting seeds, holding children, playing music, and building shelters, our throats are for singing into being our ancestors and ourselves, the compacted clay beneath our houses is full of minerals that are just waiting to grow life again and feed trees towering hundreds of feet above us and roots that drip life to all the beings who gather near to them.
The Great Figuring Out of all life we share home with never ceases and, most miraculously of all, it will never give up on us. It will try to welcome us back until the very moment we either give ourselves to its love or perish along with the fox and the oaks as humans, leaving forever the last human forms back to Mother Earth’s long dreaming.
Here under the sputtering engine of this dying civilization, I feel the brush of your hand reaching for the sunlight. I feel the hairs in the seashell of your ear stretching outwards to listen for a friend. I have this sorrowful and sweet laughter somewhere in my belly that knows the weight of the engine above us is only so weighty because of the magic of the human ability to imagine. The power that lets us trap ourselves in a demonic ritual of ceaseless conversion of human and earth communities into dead economic growth is the same power that gives weight to the songs we sing, the words we speak, the earthen shelters we build.
In this moment, it is only our own gifts that give weight and substance to the labyrinthine fictions trapping us in a daily clicked and overnight-shipped spiral towards the death of all of our beloveds, all of our cohabitants of this place and time. The mazes of polarization and opinions are lonely wisps distracting us from the simplicity of life’s original and eternal calling: to give ourselves completely to the beautiful co-creation of home.
It is time to call back our power: the power to banish the machines of misery and to turn the transformative magic of our attention to the new seeds that are waiting to be born. It is time to take up the simple arts that tune us the true. In a time of so much digital noise, the plain acts of relationship to the soil, to the water, to the land and to each other is a beacon that will not cease to shine, a spring that will not cease to flow, and a mother that will not cease to open her arms to us. We have only to decide to take up the gift our life and carry it tenderly into the open field of reunion.
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