Earth is Speaking. Will You Listen?

The graphic above is one I created about six years ago while contemplating the arrogance, the plain stupidity, of the corporate mindset. How can such people be blind to the irreparable damage caused by their arrogant, greed driven actions? It is this kind of behaviour that will make the image above a reality.

Each morning, weather permitting, sometime between the hours of six and nine I take my morning coffee and sit on the cement slab that passes for a patio in my back yard. The presumptive purpose for this action is to capture a few moments of peace and solitude before the rest of the family rises and the daily activity begins. It is intended to be a brief interlude of freedom from the crass material world of humanity, a moment to commune with nature. I have continued to do this in spite of believing it to be an exercise in futility.

Since my dwelling is less than a mile from a main thoroughfare in the midst of a small but rapidly growing city, the decibel level produced by the ceaseless, ant-like activity of the concrete hive seems to increase daily. Since the neighborhood is an older one, from before the mindless sprawl began, it seems quite a bit more rural than it is. The homes, even though they are duplexes, are spaced a modest distance apart rather than following the new trend of being so close that one needs to turn sideways to walk between. There are a few trees in some yards and, if the house is fortuitously positioned, one can even catch a glimpse of the Sandia mountains on the other side of Albuquerque across the Rio Grande.

Unfortunately, the illusion of rural living ends there. A walk of less than five minutes brings one to the edge of an asphalt river clogged with schools of cacophonous steel fish of every size, color and description. They vomit a continuous torrent of poisonous excreta as they rush and threaten each other with metal-ripping, bone-crushing mass and momentum. Each seems to be utterly consumed by a mission, as salmon fighting the current knowing that reaching their destination is a matter of life and death.

Sitting on a rickety lawn chair, on my humble concrete slab, I must struggle to isolate the forlorn chirping of a few birds in search a full feeder or the frustrated sigh of the mourning, morning breeze trying in vain to replace the noxious fumes with a breath of fresh air.

I was beginning to think I must be insane since I was doing the same thing repeatedly and hoping for a different result. Well, EUREKA, today that hope was realized! Instead of the usual frustration and dismay at the continued rapid destruction of the world around me, I was presented with something utterly unexpected.

A memory of another morning, distant in time but as vivid as it was unbidden, flooded into my consciousness with a clarity and understanding far greater than I had experienced at the time of the original incident.

Let me take you there.

It was perhaps forty years ago, maybe more, in the last hours before dawn as I walked across a frozen Candlewood Lake in New Milford, Connecticut. My feet swooshed through almost two feet of fresh powder snow, which continued to fall, thick and soft, filling the troughs created by my passage. My breath plumed into the clean, frigid air as large snowflakes touched my face with their cold, moist kisses.

The falling snow whispered sweetly of peace and tranquility, telling me of the world as it had once been, and would one day be again. Except for the gentle sigh of snow caressing the surface of the lake as it fell, I was surrounded by complete silence. Except for the radiance of an incredibly full moon breaking sporadically through the clouds, I was surrounded by primal darkness.

As far as my feeble human senses could reach, the world had been restored to its rightful state. A simple act of nature, a moderate New England snowstorm, had utterly stopped and silenced all the trivial, manic human commotion that usually never ends. For that brief time, in that one place, Earth commanded the respect that it truly deserves at all times.

In that moment, Earth spoke to me and I understood.

"Respect me," said Earth. "Respect me and I will provide for you. If you fail to do so, if you harm and abuse me, I will stop you."

There was no threat in the tone of that voice. There was only the quiet, implacable certainty of a completely neutral, emotionless, immeasurable power. This power does not judge. It does not punish. It does not reward. It simply is.

I have come to understand what "primitive" peoples experience in their relationship with nature. I can grasp the concept of the Native American who could "hear" what Earth had to say.

Some of us cling to dogmatic religious cults. We use them as a crutch, an excuse for ignoring evil that is being done all around us. We simply shrug our shoulders and leave it to god.

If we would only spend half the reverence, the devotion, on LIFE, on EARTH, that we waste on imagined, fantastical deities of our own creation, we would make a quantum leap in awareness, take a huge step toward freedom from our prison of greed and ego.

Some of us worship a material master. We believe that wealth and power to subject others will elevate us to some special place of superiority. We actually imagine that oppression and domination of "lesser" individuals will raise us to godlike status with the power of life and death to be wielded indiscriminately and without conscience.

In both personae, we seem to think that we can consume our Earth with reckless abandon and, somehow, everything will be just fine. There will be no consequences. Either our celestial master will save us from ourselves through divine intervention or our material master will enable us to buy our way out of the fate we have created for ourselves.

Wrong.

FLASH! Late breaking bulletin.

Gaia has announced that further abuse and neglect will no longer be tolerated. If we continue to rape and mindlessly exploit our world we WILL be stopped. We may pray most fervently to our mythical god. We may throw mountains of wealth at a desperate, last-ditch techno-fix. All will be for naught.

Gaia will take, has in fact taken, the poison, filth and destruction we have wrought and will use it against us. Soon we will be no more. No amount of pleading prayer will be heard. No amount of desperate bribery will be accepted.

I think it would be good to find a quiet place, assuming you can, to sit and contemplate what we have done, what we have allowed to be done and what we are NOT doing. Although this is unlikely to affect the outcome of our failure as a species, it may help us to reconcile our fate, to accept it with a degree of grace that might have saved us had we found it sooner.

This much is certain; as we slide into oblivion we must admit the blame is ours alone.

Gaia hypothesis - an ecological hypothesis that proposes that living and nonliving parts of the earth are viewed as a complex interacting system that can be thought of as a single organism

http://www.universetoday.com/2008/04/30/gaia-hypothesis-could-earth-really-be-a-single-organism/

http://www.pantheon.org/articles/g/gaia.html