(10 am – promoted by ek hornbeck)
I drive home from having been with the Earth Mother for any length of time and feel clarity about our artificial environment. The longer I’ve been with her, the more profound the clarity is. I stare straight in the face of “progress” as phone lines, gas stations, and eventually the hazy horizon over the city appears.
I can’t help the feeling of wrongness I feel, though I can see some progress is useful, schools are for example. Still, I can’t help the feeling of wrongness. This isn’t meant to be a judgment of the wrongness of civilization, but by the time I describe this feeling; it probably will be.
Crossposted at Native American Netroots
I feel freedom when in the loving arms of the Earth Mother, and I try unsuccessfully to hang on to it. I see trees in wooden floors,
rocks in buildings, and I think of how steel is made that constructs buildings.
A generally hard, strong, durable, malleable alloy of iron and carbon, usually containing between 0.2 and 1.5 percent carbon, often with other constituents such as manganese, chromium, nickel, molybdenum, copper, tungsten, cobalt, or silicon, depending on the desired alloy properties, and widely used as a structural material.
When it strikes me again that all these things are from the Earth Mother, I catch myself thinking, “What for?”
I believe she promised to take care of us and support life, but it’s up to us to be respectful of her. I’m not going to list all of the ways I think we as a human race have been disrespectful and destructive, but here are some words from Chief Arvol Looking Horse.
Look around you. Our Mother Earth is very ill from these violations, and we are on the brink of destroying the possibility of a healthy and nurturing survival for generations to come, our children’s children.
Our ancestors have been trying to protect our Sacred Site called the Sacred Black Hills in South Dakota, “Heart of Everything That Is,” from continued violations. Our ancestors never saw a satellite view of this site, but now that those pictures are available, we see that it is in the shape of a heart and, when fast-forwarded, it looks like a heart pumping.
The Dine have been protecting Big Mountain, calling it the liver, and we are suffering and going to suffer more from the extraction of the coal from there and the poison processes used in doing so.
The Aborigines have warned of the contaminating effects of global warming on the Coral Reefs, which they see as Mother Earth’s blood purifier.
The Indigenous people of the rainforest relay that the rainforest are the lungs of the planet and need protection.
I think the decisions to use her flesh should be made with the eyes of the heart, for it is only by using her
flesh that we can continue the artificial environment, or quite frankly, the fake environment. Not much else to say, except that after I’ve returned to her loving arms; I dread leaving.
Because I know the feeling of wrongness and confinement will start feeling normal, so I get back to her as soon as I can.
And when I leave it starts all over again; back to the artificial environment and back again.
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I think I understand what you’re saying, but if not, I apologize.
There are too many people now to live anywhere but the artificial environment.
The problem is overpopulation, not the cities. I think since there are so many of us, it is environmentally better for humans to congregate and live in dense urban areas — artificial or not — then to continue our sprawl across the planet.
Cities have been part of human existence for a long time. They are part of the human experience too.
Thank you.
freak out I ever had on LSD was about this. I looked at the ground, the strange artificially pruned trees, the litter, the strip malls, the billboards and asked why why bury nature. Western culture especially thinks that man is in a battle with nature we seek to conquer it, thats our definition of progress. We call it development and are spreading it across the world. Although cities are better then sprawl, why do they have to be so sterile, so inorganic?
Cities are paeans to our hubris, they shut out nature. Portland OR where I live has a wild park(?),strip, that is a corridor to the coast. Elk and other wild life have a way to come from the coast through the city into the undeveloped areas. We also love our trees here, but it is a constant battle with the developers, who see not the necessity of living with nature but only more space to maximize their profits. Business trumps all else. Humans forget that we are a part of nature and can create environments that are harmonious with the planet, systems that use nature rather then conquer it and call it progress and necessary.
A day is set aside as a day of rest, and instead it seems to be …
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