Our Homes

as billionaires leave earth’s orbit, i find myself thinking about our home - our planet - and the resiliency she embodies. i think of how just 30 years after its delimitation as an “exclusion zone,” chernobyl has become a forest, teeming with flora and fauna unseen in any other area in that part of the world. i think of how quickly mother earth cleared her skies when we were bound to the indoors. i think of the mycelium sending nutrients between a forest’s trees when one has become starved for sunlight, or water, or rich soil. i think of the literal aeons of cellular expansion, of evolutionary cooperation, of the brilliantly designed, mysterious, inexplicable intelligence that have led us to this very moment. 

i think of our other homes - our bodies - and the fact that these forms are also an emanation of this mysterious intelligence. though our minds and sense perceptions can only perceive so much on their own, we have developed technologies and methodologies that have made the imperceptible perceptible - we have learned how leg muscles allow for our bodies to work against gravity, nonstop, when sending blood back to the heart; we can send a text message through space to a friend in 1 second; we can listen to the bioacoustics of a plant and its frequency. and this says nothing of wisdom that does not take the material, scientific form that western philosophies, policies and approaches valorize.

in fact, western anthropocentrism feeds us the notion that we are the most significant entities on this planet, that without us, earth would be an uninteresting mess. since-disproven darwinian evolution theory has fed us a false narrative that competition is the essence of evolution - it turns out that war and scarcity are not actually the nature of the natural world. it is cooperation and intelligent, focused communication, and of course, a certain level of competition, that allow for ecosystems, communities, species, families, bodies to thrive and evolve (no shade to darwin, he was doin’ his best, and he expressed clearly the limitations of his theory - google ‘epigenetics’ to learn more about how cooperation in evolution manifests in our own bodies.) just like the neuro-chemical or electrical communication that happen in our brains and bodies, nature is communicating around us all the time, in ways far less complicated and far more efficient than our limited means for interfacing with the world, each other, ourselves. 

so, we don’t understand everything. we think that we domesticated wheat, when really wheat, now one of the most abundant organisms on earth, domesticated us. we laugh at the idea that perhaps these metals were also at the perfect point in their evolution to have homo sapiens arrive as an agent for their transmuting into a new form. 

billionaires take to the stars to… what? find a new home? find resources we can extract and burn and use to maintain a world where cash is valued over air, soil, a heartbeat? i think of Octavia Butler here, Earthseed, the Destiny… she did not envision a world where taking to the stars was spearheaded by the .01%, by the mastheads of consumer-capitalist degradation and destruction masquerading as ‘smart investors.’ i think of musk offering $100,000,000 to someone, anyone, who can design a technology that does what trees have done since aeons before we began recording history, let alone the amount of C02 in our atmosphere… before ‘we’ even existed.

why do we refuse to witness and name the astonishing, bewildering genius that runs through the rivers of our veins and our planet? why do we assume our own omnipotence? why can we not see in mother earth the perfect, inexplicable union of unorganized chaos and focused, intentional manifestation? is that not fucking incredible? why do we run away, at full speed, refusing to acknowledge that, like our precious mother planet, we are screaming for our own attention, care, and stewardship?