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Prolific Writer
Join Date: Mar 2007
Location: Tucson, Az, USA
Gender: Male
Posts: 394
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You Are Raping The Earth
This is something wrote on vacation, I've thought about expanding it into a longer piece about technology, environmentalism, and theology. I hope you enjoy it, it's a true story.
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Tuesday, May 29, sometime around 11pm, sitting at the edge of the 12th hole green of the Ocean course of Kona Country Club, Kailua-Kona, Hawaii.
You Are Raping The Earth
Those words hang indelible, intrepid, in my mind. Cast eternal in moonlight and white sand. I sit there next to the heaving, breathing, reaching ocean my legs dangling of the fake manicured grass of the cancerous golf course my eyes and ears, my heart and soul turned outward to the sea – to the mother. My back is turned to the lighted, plastic, corrupted oil slick of civilization which clings like a rash to the soft green face of natural perfection. The Big Island of Hawaii.
We have it all wrong, you know? The fine, polished, mechanized, digitized, and quantified creations of our scientists and industries are not perfection. They are sterile. Crudely fabricated skeletons of arbitrary molecules. No heart. No breath. The roiling self-sustaining chaos of the sea, the salty breathing afterbirth of creation, the beating heart and lifeblood of mother earth – nature is perfection. We, and our works, are an aberration.
The Sea speaks to me. The moonlit sky is my tender confidant. The Hieros Gamos of nature holds me fast in its bosom. The place where earth meets sea – where the mother breathes and whispers. Ultimately, as Carl Sagan said, we are all “star-stuff”, yet here on this planet we are all of the sea. All life and all death, all organic materials on this planet were birthed in the sea. The womb and tomb of all existence. The Earth-Heart.
Indeed, we have it all backwards. We are arrogant and spoiled children mistreating and exploiting our mother. Scarring her, molesting her for sport and power. Plato’s “perfection” should have stayed unrealized. It occurs to me that the myth of Pandora’s Box is a fitting description of technology, and its impact on humanity. A theodicy on the source of evil, but one which also carries the noble truth of harmony and natural balance. For while it is commonly known that when Pandora opened that box she let escape all the evils of the world, the other thing which the box let free is more rarely mentioned. Hope. Before evil, there was no hope.
As I stood to leave a fierce and fingerlike white wave exploded against the black lava rocks of the shore. I tasted seawater on my lip. It rolled softly under my tongue and a keening, sublime peace filled my heart. I turned to walk away and felt the facetious grass of the golf course law low like a bowing slave under my foot and I saw the moonlight reflected as a mirror from the smooth white sand of the bunker. It was whim, a wild rebellious retreat to my younger incarnation, I’m sad that there was no paint handy. Yet, I felt so oddly righteous as I used the handle of a rake to carve those words into the porcelain whiteness of the sand trap. And I felt serenely triumphant as I walked away, my bare feet caressing the bruised skin of mother earth.
Those simple words (manmade abstractions, simulacrums of reality and crude, blunt objects of communication) faced heaven, a message to ourselves and our manufactured sky-father that there was a small part of human conscience which would ever speak for our mother, and for us. Spirituality is where ever you happen to find it, whatever voice speaks to you but to no one else. For me, that bright moonlit night, it was a commiseration with the earth, and a realization that the sky holds no answers. So many times in life I have repeated the primate mistake of mankind. I have sat empty, imploring the mute heavens for a sign. Ignorant of the voice of the earth which is carried on every breeze, on every wave, which is written in verdant cursive on the face of every leaf, chiseled by time into the heart of every stone, and which is coded – hardwired and innate – within every living heart. Never again shall I look skyward, for what is born only of the earth.
Aloha
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“Every book has an intrinsic impossibility, which its writer discovers as soon as his first excitement dwindles.” ~ Annie Dillard
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