Jan. 9
The raven flew across the meadow going east, overtaking me as I walked east, myself, towards the house. I laughed when I could suddenly see that I was flying, I was the raven flying, though I never left my own body, I was still the one walking. I saw the long chain of life going down the deep deep well of time to the one-celled mud dwellers who first came to life under our sun. When the raven flies, we fly. We are of the sun, we are born of this planet - its life, its consciousness, its expression of being.
So what does it mean that we are destroying our planet's ability to keep us alive? We are not destroying its life, we have seen that life has always found a way past meteor strikes, ice ages, volcanoes. But humanity? We are definitely destroying the planet's ability to keep humans alive.
"In the year 7510
If God's a coming, He oughta make it by then
Maybe He'll look around Himself and say
Guess it's time for the judgment day
In the year 8510
God is gonna shake His mighty head
He'll either say I'm pleased where man has been
Or tear it down, and start again
In the year 9595
I'm kinda wonderin' if man is gonna be alive
He's taken everything this old earth can give
And he ain't put back nothing" *
Only the dates are optimistic in this song, released in 1969, 53 years ago. Now it is a question of humanity being here in 2095, and we will take half of the world's currently living species with us when we go. The earth will go on; worms, cockroaches and lichens will survive, but not the planet's ability to see itself, to appreciate the splendor, the mathematics, the beauty. If we are indeed the only intelligent life in the universe, we owe it to the world to preserve our planet and continue to be its witness and the universe's witness of its miraculous existence.
I feel helpless in the face of the tsunami of destruction humanity has caused. The pursuit of wealth, blindly continuing to pollute, exploit and destroy, to put more money in the coffers of the few, the elite, is trampling the world underfoot. How different might things be if we instead pursued the preservation of our planet, promotion of health and succour for our own species, not trampling the poor, and destroying the world that feeds us.
We are Tea Leoni's character standing on the beach, in the movie Deep Impact, and the tidal wave of the last day is approaching. **
Perhaps the raven will survive and life will still fly, feel the sun on its wings, but there will be no consciousness any more, seeing the whole picture of the miracle and appreciating, comprehending it. There will be no god, the soul of the universe, born of humanity's vision, love and joy, only the universe, moving on through time, unseen and not knowing itself, because humans, with their intelligence and their eyes that see beauty will be gone.
I don't know what to do. I am one small, small voice. We are lost and broken. How will we ever find our way home and heal?
Mumma Yaga is sad today.
* Zager and Evans, In the Year 2525, 1969
** Deep Impact, 1998
Comments
Post a Comment