Lughnasa Recovery Moon
The most ancientrail of all is becoming native to this place.
But, why must we become native to mother Earth? Aren’t we native simply because we are thrown onto the planet’s surface at birth? Yes and no. Yes, in that we are an organism designed to live in this gravity, breathe this concentration of oxygen, use plant matter and other animals as food. No, in that those of us thrown into a complex industrial/technology culture are native not to the planet itself, but to adaptations made over centuries by economies and governments. This includes the U.S., Europe, most of Asia, the Middle East and Latin America, as well as residents of urban areas on every continent.
In the U.S.A. we are native to electricity as Kate and I learned just this Monday. Our typical life ground to a halt along with 4600 others when the power went out. We are native to a night lit not by fire, but by bulbs. We are native to warm houses in winter, cool ones in summer. Our hunting and gathering takes place at King Sooper, Safeway, Lunds, Byerlys. We are native to antibiotics, surgery, dental care.
When we climb the additional 3,600 feet in altitude from Denver to our home on Black Mountain Drive, we sit comfortably in a moving chair powered by the ancient remains of dinosaurs and forests. We are native to telephones, computers, text messages. We are native to machines and carpenters and plumbers. We are, in short, native to almost anything but this planet where we live.
You could reasonably ask whether this matters. Our future lies in the stars anyhow, doesn’t it? Maybe so. Especially if we render the earth uninhabitable for humans. Which, with climate changing drivers still dominant in our world economies, we’re working hard to accomplish.
I believe it matters. Why? The short answer is that becoming native to this planet, again, is our best hope for throttling back those climate change drivers. We can escape to the stars while having a beautiful homeworld as our base of exploration.
The longer answer has to do with the nature of our humanity. Technological and industrial estrangement from the rhythms of the natural world is almost a canard, a cliche. We expect tomatoes in winter. We expect access to any part of the planet within hours. Even the colors of our sunrises and sunsets often have chemical pollutants to thank for their vibrancy.
We need to awaken ourselves to the essential, everyday miracles: photosynthetic conversion of sunlight into food, the transpiration of that same process, oxygen, being a gas we need to survive. And this consciousness that we have. How about that. Or the intricate and interdependent web of living things. The changing of seasons in the temperate zones. Water’s strange characteristics.
In the next post I’ll suggest one way of becoming native to this place.
